A brief diversion down Memory Lane

Donovan and I watched Episode II: Attack of the Clones this past Saturday, which means that tomorrow we will dive into The Clone Wars on a weekly basis. However, we're both a bit behind on posting our reviews and reactions to the prequel movies. While I finish up my post on AOTC, I thought I'd go ahead and share some more reminiscences about Star Wars in the 90's.

Before Donovan was born, I had another little buddy who shared both my last name and a deep and abiding love for Star Wars: my brother Cory. He's 13 years younger than me, so when the original trilogy started being re-released in theaters in 1997, I was 22 years old and he was 9, and it's hard to say which one of us was more excited! I can say for sure that one of my fondest memories from that period was an idle Saturday afternoon during which Cory and I went out for "lunch". By which I mean I drove at breakneck speed, and he rode shotgun, as we looped from Pizza Hut to Taco Bell to KFC in three different locations along the highway that paralleled our town. Lucasfilm was doing Star Wars promotions through those fast food chains including little toy giveaways, and we wanted to hit up as many as we could to collect the useless plastic junk. We did actually buy a meal at one of the establishments (I don't exactly remember which one because it definitely doesn't matter) and at the other two we got just drinks or one small side. But mainly we got a bunch of galactic gimcrackery!

By the time The Phantom Menace was imminent, Cory was almost 12, and didn't necessarily need his big brother to enable his Star Wars obsession. I remember coming home to visit at one point and finding that Cory had been dutifully collecting cans of Pepsi subsidiary beverages, because they were being used to promote TPM characters ahead of the release:

Cory didn't have all of them, but he had most. I got the picture above from a Google image search, so I know I'm not the only one who remembers these tie-ins. It is fairly hilarious to me now in retrospect, though. They spread the characters around through assorted brands and flavors, to promote collectability, and that meant they really stretched the definition of "character" to encompass everyone who had a name and a bit of dialogue. Most kids were probably stoked to see Darth Maul on their Mountain Dew or young Obi-Wan Kenobi on their Diet Dr. Pepper, but I imagine there had to be at least one or two who were intrigued by this Ric Olié fellow, wondering if he was going to be the next Han Solo or something, only to find out he was a glorified bus driver whose main purpose is to show baby Anakin a real space cockpit and comment that the kid knows his stuff.

TL;DR: back in my day we didn't have much internet and had to get our spoilers from soda pop!