“May The 4th Be With You”: A long weekend of “HOPE”
My long-awaited Rebel Transport came to my home at the conclusion of the new international Holiday, May 4th. I was ecstatic to put my hands on that new creation from Fantasy Flight Games and without a doubt; it will load my spare time with countless adventures. The sheer joy of the new game X-Wing Miniatures is wonderfully articulated in the picture below. This is literally what its like at my house. And it will get worse—I promise. Over the weekend while playing a game of X-Wing, to celebrate May 4th, the official Star Wars day which happens every year with great fanfare, my one and a half-year old grandson wanted desperately to play the game with me. So I let him roll my dice and he loved it.
For the first time that I can think of the official Star Wars weekend launched a spectacular amount of news over the first weekend of May. First the new cast was announced for the new films—which had their first script read together last week. At midnight the new Rebels television show released their new preview which can be seen below. Guess who was watching it at 12:01 AM in the morning of May 4th? Me! On top of all that even the Cincinnati Reds dedicated a whole weekend against their first place division rivals the Milwaukee Brewers. It was Star Wars weekend at Great American Ballpark in Downtown Cincinnati. My family went on Friday night when after the game there was a spectacular fireworks display to the music of the famed musical conductor John Williams that ignited the sky. From the premium seats in Great American Ballpark it was the best fireworks display I had ever seen. Just a bit behind home plate, most of the people who normally sit in that section had got up and left leaving us nearly alone in the coveted section and completely untouched by other human beings. However most of the 30,000+ crowd stuck around with their children and they loved the show with much emotion. During the entire game Friday night, Star Wars characters were all over the field and the music was piped in through the stadium and it was genuinely inspiring to see the two entertainment franchises coming together like that.
Leading up to that baseball game many of the die-hard Reds fans on talk radio and elsewhere were perplexed as to why the baseball team even attempted to cater to a new “geeky” demographic group. I wanted to tell them, but they lacked the language to understand. Just like they would never understand why I kept checking my UPS tracking number on my Rebel Transport during the game hoping it would arrive for a vicious game of X-Wing the following Saturday. I’m 46 years old and to their minds should be interested in a lot of other things—but I am part of that demographic that the Reds were reaching out to—and among young people there are a lot more like me coming to age.
Two weeks from now Hollywood Studios, Florida has their Star Wars Weekends which are always fun. The first weekend is the popular dance off which I always love displayed in the center stage of that fabulous park. Those weekends are typically so busy that the parking lot spills over into the Epcot Center. The parade is one of the most spectacular displays of Star Wars fandom anywhere in the world. The question from the un-initiated is…………..why?
During the Reds game I had to explain to my daughter how when I was younger I had to make a difficult cultural decision. I was spectacular in sports and every teacher who coached a sport wanted me to be on their team. I was the fastest kid in my school especially during my grade school years. Athletically, I could have done anything I wanted to. But, culturally back then, it was taboo to enjoy Star Wars because that made a person categorically a geek. And I loved Star Wars. I was friends with one of the most popular girls in my school and her younger brother was one of my best friends. Through her I could have had access to the upper echelons of public school popularity. But I hated it and wanted nothing to do with any of that politicking. Instead her brother would come to my house on a Friday night and bring all his Star Wars toys and he, my brother, my brother’s friends and I would play with all those toys until late into the night. I never got sick of it even when I was older and my girl friend was interested in boys and all the kids my age were going to dances and hanging out at football games. She thought I was weird because I had no interest in the life she lived. I had picked Star Wars over sports because the culture dictated that you had to choose.
I thought it astonishing that the Reds actually had a Star Wars weekend because finally after 30 years of human evolution the marketing department for the Cincinnati Reds understood that if they want to survive into the future, that they better find a way to appeal to the “Star Wars Geeks.” The game of baseball with all its traditions is struggling to appeal to younger audiences, so they are getting creative even though in an interview with Brandon Philips on 700 WLW, he clearly didn’t understand.
In a lot of ways the new X-Wing Miniatures game is closely associated with those late night sessions playing Star Wars as a kid, and even as a grown adult I’d still rather do that than hang out in some other venue doing something I’d consider utterly useless. Many people confuse Star Wars and Star Trek as being of the same thing, but they are radically different. Star Wars is not about just exploring new frontiers in space and the interactions of characters with different backgrounds and species types. Star Wars is a deep, and rich mythology that works in ways that religion struggles with and is a creation of our times exploring all the primary concerns of our day. Star Wars for me is a western in that it is primarily concerned with the same type of honorable values. It is also about technological innovation and has its roots in drag racing where a young George Lucas loved cars and carried that love over into the space ships of Star Wars. Many of the beat up ships of the new Star Wars games are like galactic hot rods and have a similar appeal as Hot Wheel cars, only these can be used strategically to beat an opponent in a game of thought. I have never seen anything like the new Rebel Transport created for a simple game. By itself, it is an amazing work of art.
Ultimately the wars of Star Wars are about value and the popularity of those films in all the venues extending beyond the silver screen are essentially about preserving or destroying values. For me, the stories of those values carried far more weight than just athletic prowess in sports, or the ability to kiss a girl at a dance. Watching the Cincinnati Reds embrace those values gave me tremendous hope for the future transcending a human leap of evolution many were not aware of. But I saw it during the Reds post game fireworks display and the many tens of thousands who were at Great American Ballpark to enjoy the relatively private show. With all the news that came out about Star Wars during the May 4th Weekend I understood with renewed vigor why the first film was titled A New Hope. The movie was not just about a galaxy far, far away a long time ago but about our human race in the here and now. For many, myself included, Star Wars is about a new hope. My infant grandson knows it, the people at the Reds game knew it, and the thousands who like me were watching the Rebels preview at 12:01 AM knew it. And I wasn’t the only one waiting for my Rebel Transport to arrive over the weekend. Most fans of Star Wars find in it a hope that is otherwise vacant. Hope is why I picked Star Wars over sports as a kid, and space ships over girls. I’m still that way, only my wife actually plays that stuff with me, which is why we’ve been married so long.
The new Rebel Transport is one of the most dramatic things I have ever looked at for a whole lot of reason—most of them centered on hope. In the films the Rebel Transport was the rebels last hope of punching through imperial blockades and fleeing for freedom to live another day in a fight between tyranny and goodness. The X-Wing Miniatures model is really just a lot of plastic and paint, but it is in the organization of those things into a coherent interactive story about hope that makes it something I was checking its arrival time every hour on the hour over the entire weekend. And now that I have it, all is right with the world. The reason is that it represents to me hope, and that is the core of what the term, “May the 4th be with you” really means.
Rich Hoffman
