VHS: A Star Wars Story
2017 · Mingji Liu
Okay, story time:
When I was growing up, my family owned one of those old VHS players that could record stuff on TV onto a videotape cassette. It was an amazing piece of tech. I used it religiously to record docos, miniseries, movies so I could re-watch them later (with advertisements and all). I tapped some real crackers as a kid — Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Space Jam. Some real gems.
In early 2001, I added my most treasured tapes to my bootleg VHS collection. It was around this time that TV3 in New Zealand aired all three original Star Wars movies over three nights. And I recorded every single one of them onto my videotapes. Hope. Empire. Return. Three of the greatest movies ever made. Period.
I used to always go back and re-watch those three VHS tapes during the summer holidays, or whenever I was bored and felt like Star Wars. I’d grab my copy of A New Hope, slot it into the VHS player, rewind it to the beginning and press play. And then…
Five straight minutes of TV3 news footage of September 11 terrorist attacks. Footage of the ashen war zone of downtown Manhattan. The fleeing, screaming people. Blaring ambulances. Something about flights being grounded at JFK Airport.
Silence. Blackness. And then…
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
STAR
WARS
Episode IV
A NEW HOPE
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil, etc., etc.
That triumphant fanfare. That John Williams orchestral score. Glorious.
You see, our house used to reuse old tapes whenever we wanted to record something and didn’t have any spare. We’d simply pick a videocassette we didn’t watch anymore, rewind it and start rewriting over the magnetic tape with a show or movie that was airing on TV at the time.
Normally, I was the only one that ever bothered to recycle videotapes. But there was this one time when I got home from school and saw my dad was fumbling with the VHS machine, trying to record the afternoon news. This was the day of the September 11 attacks in America. I remember him recording the stunning, shocking news footage. “This is history”, he explained. “We need to have this recorded.”
He must have partly taped over one of my Star Wars tapes.
So whenever I wanted to watch Star Wars, I had to sit through five minutes of 9/11 news footage. And I sat through all of it, of course, lest I miss out on the fucking awesome Star Wars opening crawl.
Star Wars and 9/11. As weird as it sounds, this unholy pairing is not entirely unheard of. Some examples:
- Comedy Central did a skit back in 2009, with stormtroopers in a space cantina reflecting on the destruction of the Death Star à la the anniversary of the Twin Tower attacks.
- There was this delicious parody of the 9/11 truther video Loose Change, talking up the attack on the Death Star as a conspiracy masterminded by Vader, Luke and Leia, who were all secretly working together.
- Around the time that Osama bin Laden was killed, someone wrote up a joke article announcing that “Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says”, with Darth Vader doing the Sith version of President Obama’s announcement of bin Laden’s death.
- Various hipster clickbait articles that have argued that the prequel movies were superior because they reflected the moral ambivalence of post-9/11 global geopolitics. I won’t even bother providing links.
Why have these comparisons between 9/11 and Star Wars been made? Are Star Wars fans a bunch of black-humoured geeks? Do we tend to cope with tragedy by drawing on childhood comforts? The correct hypothesis, I believe, is that Star Wars has become such a cultural monolith, it has seeped into every fucking facet of American and (by extension) Western culture, for better or worse.
I still have those old VHS tapes, sitting at the bottom of a dusty cardboard box in a garage back in New Zealand. Now that I have Netflix and a steady internet connection, I don’t think I’ll be watching Star Wars on those tapes anytime soon.
Postscript
There’s one other semi-related thing I wanted to finish up on.
Like many kids that were alive during the September 11 attacks, my first reaction to the event was realising that there weren’t any after-school cartoons on TV that day. No Pokémon. No Dragon Ball Z. Terrible!
It sounds sociopathic, for sure, but I’ve spoken with so many people around my age who had the exact same experience. Their immediate reaction coming home on that fateful day was essentially ‘Huh? Where did all the cartoons go?’
Maybe it’s a testament to how great after-school cartoons were when we were kids. And maybe it took the goddamn terrorists to remind us how good we had it.