iBlag

Blog for Bourne

This weekend I watched one of my childhood idols crumble. A friend and I, our decision making process obviously impaired by the stuffy air of her basement, chose to watch “The Return of the Jedi.” Bad idea; never revisit childhood memories expecting the same experience, and “The Empire Strikes Back” is a superior film anyway.

I fondly watched Anthony Daniels (C3PO) pantomime his way through Jabba the Hutt’s dank pad soaking in small details I had missed when I’d watched the same scene at age ten: principally the apparent absence of lighting apparatus, and a green hookah.

Things went downhill when Mark Hamill (Luke) walked in to become conveniently captured. For my Ten-year-old mind, Luke Skywalker had always been a golden god. Anybody who cut people in half with a light saber was worth idolizing. But I had never really given Mark Hamill a good long look before, conveniently distracted by his glowing death-beam. Mark Hamill seems incredibly ugly on screen.

I can’t speak for his private life, and there may be a more rational explanation for his appearance than divine punishment, but the bottom line is that I can barely look at him ture the original trio of Star Wars movies. The fact that these movies, outside of a few B-movies and hundreds of gimmicky TV appearances as “himself,” are the only way that Mark Hamill has been immortalized in cinema makes his image even more tarnished.

But there are more portrayals of Hamill: posters, action figures, and other memorabilia meant to be encased in glass an imprisoned in a moldy basement. I couldn’t actually ask a real fan to show to show me evidence of Mark Hamill’s sex appeal for the simple reason that I didn’t have eight hours to sit trough some sanctimonious sermon. Opting for a slightly saner atmosphere, I journeyed over to Newbury Comics.

After a brief love affair with a pair of Wolverine gloves, I stumbled through a forest of comic racks to the wall reserved for action figures. Before I go any further, I would like to say that it is entirely possible to create an attractive action figure: Harrison Ford’s (Han Solo’s) doppelganger is nearly as attractive as the actor himself. But, my hopes were crushed to find that a plastic representation of Mark Hamill was uglier that the original. I hopelessly picked through the comic racks, trying to lift my spirits, before exiting, dejected, one of my childhood idols now completely shattered.

The lesson? In a nutshell: don’t revisit a positive childhood memory expecting the same experience you had nearly a decade ago. People change, tastes differ, little boys develop a more discriminating eye when examining their male peers. Most importantly, Mark Hamill may have been reduced in status, but Harrison Ford, People Magazine’s sexiest man alive in 1998, at age 56, is still on a high pedestal.