Uncle Vanir’s Jedi Jamboree

I’ve had the pleasure lately of being the “cool uncle” as far as my 6-year-old nephew is concerned. Ever since about a year ago, his wandering interests have, for the most part, been something I’m either directly interested in, or at least knowledgeable about. At first, it was Star Wars. Ever since I met my wife, my in-laws have tagged me as a nerd, and that meant I would want Star Wars stuff for any present-giving occasion. (While sometimes tiresome, this assumption is usually correct. ) When my nephew turned 5, he started to watch the Clone Wars cartoons (the new CGI ones, not the utterly brilliant Genndy Tartakovsky series from 2003), and he started watching the other movies and getting interested in Everything Star Wars Ever. And so, every time I’d visit, a thousand questions would be waiting for me. At first, it was just things like “hey Uncle Matt, who’s your favorite Jedi”, but he soon figured out I was familiar with most of the names of the vehicles (in the original trilogy, anyway), and he’d describe things he’d seen in the movie and I’d try to decipher what he was talking about and tell him the names.

After awhile, my nephew’s utter devotion to Star Wars faded, and he got really hardcore into Transformers. Only now, he had seen the movie, and had all the new toys. Despite this, I still had a lot of incredibly information in my brain about Transformers that he desperately wanted to get out (which, despite Bumblebee’s inexplicably being a Camaro, is a testament to the faithfulness of Michael Bay’s adaptation of the franchise). Now I found myself in a very strange position, telling a young’un about how things were back in the old days before all your crazy inter-nets ruined the moral fiber of this country. However, unlike my own reaction to such stories in my youth, he thought knowing how Optimus Prime and Megatron used to look and more of the original story were fascinating, so that was what we talked about most of this year. There was a really strange and wonderful period this summer, where he got really into Ghostbusters when the (underrated) videogame came out, and he talked his parents into buying him all the old Real Ghostbusters toys I used to have as a kid. For about a month, it was all Vince Clortho this and Ecto-1 that, and it was neat to be able to dredge that up for someone who wasn’t my age and just learning about it for the first time.

The biggest shock to my system from all this, though, was at Halloween. He really wanted to be Link from the Legend of Zelda series, and his mom made him a really great costume, and he showed it off for us when we visited. So I asked him if he’s a big Zelda fan, and he looked at me funny. Turns out, his only exposure to Link was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I think my mouth may have been open for a full minute before I was able to speak or close it. The last time I have been so shocked about something was back in college when they re-released the original Star Wars trilogy, and an Indian friend of mine who had only been in the country for a couple months went to Taco Bell with me. We got these cups with Darth Vader on them, and he points and says “who’s that guy”. 15 years later, I am still not convinced I have extracted all the taco-pieces from my sinuses resulting from that incident.

It should go without saying that my young nephew soon found himself with the means to play the original Legend of Zelda. (And strategy guides for his parents to consult, so he wouldn’t get too frustrated.) And soon we were cruising through the other characters in the game, talking about all the old games they’d been in. I’ve been hunting up as many as I can, so that he can be in touch with his gaming roots, and know why Link has so many different weapons, and why Zelda goes all ninja sometimes, and why Samus turns into a ball, that Star Fox is a lot cooler than people give him credit for, and that Snake sneaking around inside a box isn’t just randomly hilarious (though it IS still hilarious). My nephew’s reception to such old games has been considerably warmer than I had anticipated. I was expecting something along the lines of “oh my god these graphics make me wanna barf”, but he really seems to be interested in playing them (albeit, for the full attention span of someone who is 6).

I must wonder how many kids are out there like my nephew, who are aware of the existence of certain characters, but who have no idea how long that character has been around or what stories have already been told about it. I am sure one source of such shallow knowledge is comics. I remember reading the Wonder Woman: Judgement In Infinity series as a kid – featuring dozens of super-ladies, a reverse metasausagefest, if you will – and wondering two things. The first, obviously, was why Power Girl’s boobs were bigger than anyone else’s. (It is a question still worth pondering today – for approximately four minutes, depending on one’s level of physical fitness and ability to run through the stats of each creature in D&D 2e’s Monstrous Compendium 2 in one’s head.) The second was who in the hell were all these people? I’d never seen them before. But I could, for the most part, figure out where they were from, what they could do, and that they were nowhere near as important as Wonder Woman. (Except Power Girl, for obvious reasons.) I also very much enjoyed reading the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and the Who’s Who in the DC Universe series when I was young, which allowed me to recognize most characters on sight, and to have the Cliff’s Notes version of their history up to that point. Strangely, as often as they have rebooted comics over the years, I still find this knowledge useful when my more comic-book-nerd friends give me the rundown on what horrors they have unleashed on their poor characters this week (Dick Grayson as Batman? Batman’s bat-stard son as Robin, complete with Ra’s Al Grandpa? Whaaaat?!)

Can you make a shallow-depth ensemble cast from other media? I suppose so. Alan Moore did it by turning characters from literature into superheroes in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, I hear, is better than the movie). But it takes a certain kind of character to work. Adding Anne of Green Gables to Super Smash Bros. Brawl would send the nation into mourning after thousands of children died from their eyes rolling back into their heads so fast that their brains caught fire. (Though, I do imagine her boyfriend Gilbert’s Typhoid Fever Super Smash Attack might prove formidable. Except to Dr. Mario.)

I personally would like to see every last one of the Presidents of the United States in a fighting game, their legacy distilled into a couple of special attacks. Abe Lincoln would emancipate the slaves and they would attack all his opponents. You could attack Ronald Reagan, but nothing would ever stick. Bill Clinton would do something obvious involving his genitals. Warren Harding would return everything to normalcy, and he would win the match while his opponents tried to figure out what in the hell that meant or if it was even a word. Teddy Roosevelt would win – every single match, because he was the Chuck Norris of his day and only a fool would believe otherwise. It would be amazing, and it would teach kids the right way to learn about our way of government: strategy guides.

As for my nephew, I sincerely hope his interests and mine continue to collide. But I’m a little worried, because at the rate he’s blowing through all of my childhood interests, he’s going to hit my early teen years sometime next fall. And that’s a conversation I’m not sure I want to have with his parents.