Just as I was getting all happy and comfortable with my new “dispassionate critical voice,” Angry Robot goes and praises me for my personal writing style. And GrapeJuicePlus, too! Aw heck, I’d better write something embarassing and revealing…
This is so sad that Debbie Harry is being replaced by Star Wars at the top of my blog. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan. I actually managed to miss Episode Two; are we of a certain age allowed to do that? But I let Susie drag me to the new one and I was pleasantly surprised and entertained, so long as I didn’t expect basic film stuff like acting, plot and dialogue.
Me being me, I had to sit there in the front row and go all metacritic, and so a couple of things jumped out for me (which basically means that I wasn’t really paying attention to the movie). Here’s a dumb one: in George Lucas’s conception of the city of the future (or “Long Ago,” yes, I know), there are no plants. No parks. No ballfields. No nothing. Just city blocks and traffic. There is not a smidgen of greenery on the planet where the government governs (but is presided over by some kind of self-appointed meritocratic Joint Chiefs Of Staff, what? We’d never let that happen here, right?).
Here’s another thing. What sets the original Star Wars apart from the rest of the series is the sly humor, which is pretty much absent from the other five. (Important exception: Harrison Ford.) And music, which is otherwise overwhelmingly serious, provides the best comic relief in the film. Why do these films have to so darn ponderous?
And remember, it’s the Fun of the Star Wars universe that captured you in the first place. Let’s pretend we’re back in 1977, we’re 10 years old and we’re all seeing Star Wars for the first time. What’s the scene where a little family drama with spaceships went blasting into hyperspace and took over your intellect? You got it: The Cantina. It’s there that we meet the charismatic Han Solo, we first glimpse the personal threat posed to Luke Skywalker by The Empire, we meet all manner of weird aliens, and the adventure is really ON! This is a thrilling, funny, scary rollercoaster of a scene and arguably one that George Lucas never again got close to in his career. (Please don’t argue with me about it. I don’t care.)
And your favorite part of The Cantina was the band, of course, a bunch of strange creatures playing happy weird swingin’ tunes. It’s the best joke in the whole six movies when Han Solo shoots…whatever that was… and the band resumes playing as if nothing happened.
In the Summer Of ’77, Star Wars and disco mania took hold over America’s youth, and Meco provided the perfect combination. Each time we sat in the back seat, we hoped and prayed that Meco’s “Star Wars Disco” would come on the radio. The most highly anticipated part of the song, of course, was The Cantina Band segment, leading to a whole lot of gleeful car dancing and spastic behavior. For those of us lucky enough to own the 45 (to bring to classroom parties, natch), everyone knew exactly the place visually on the record where the needle needed to go to get to that “good part.”
Here for your edification — and my embarassment — the infamous Star Wars Disco. The Cantina Band comes in at 3:30.
[Soundtrack]
Meco – Star Wars Disco.mp3
Get inside the mind of Meco!
The cantina band’s stock has sunk low in the Lucas universe. The LucasArts folks apparently think so little of music other than John Williams bombast that they’ve banned “other” music from the Star Wars universe. Why can’t we get some intergalactic karaoke love?
Thanks to Angry Robot for the inspiration.
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Yipes! I actually had a copy of that Star Wars disco album when I was a kid. I remember being confused that the album cover art had nothing to do with the movie.