Three decades before British actor and comedian Simon Pegg was smacking zombies upside the head with a cricket bat (Shaun of the Dead) or chasing down suspects in a not-so-innocent English village (Hot Fuzz), he was, like many kids of the '70s, completely enthralled by bizarre characters inhabiting a galaxy far, far away.
"I was at my friend Chris's birthday party in 1977," Pegg says. "He'd already seen Star Wars, although at this point I had not. Someone had bought him a set of rub-on transfers of all the characters which I helped him apply to the Death Star diorama that came with them. I clearly remember being fascinated by the character names and not knowing who was who. I wondered why the old man's sword appeared to be on fire. It's the last memory I have before the day my parents finally took me to see the film. I had no idea I was about to take my first step into a larger world."
After seeing the films, Pegg's childhood memories often revolved around his excitement for Star Wars toys. "Christmas was made all the more exciting by the familiar shapes of wrapped action figures," Pegg recalls. "I knew what I was getting, I just didn't know who. The first figure I bought was R2-D2. I clearly remember twisting his shiny metallic dome and hearing him click. It was magical."
"I stopped collecting Star Wars toys until the amazing Master Replicas lightsabers appeared," Pegg adds. "I bought one at a collector's convention and couldn't quite believe how cool it was. I kept thinking if these had been around in the '70s, it would have been almost too exciting to bear -- the sound, the sequential ignition, the authentic detail. When I was seven, I had a plastic tube taped to a torch [flashlight] and I was happy. I'm 37 now and I have six Master Replicas lightsabers. My wife has caught me swinging them without a hint of irony, at least twice."
Pegg's work, though, has more than a hint of the ironic. His first hit film Shaun of the Dead, which he co-wrote with director friend Edgar Wright, and co-starred in with his real-life best friend Nick Frost, is often described as a romantic zombie movie. It struck a chord with audiences looking for a different kind of horror film. Before he landed the iconic role of a dissatisfied appliance salesman and constant pub patron who must battle off the undead in between pints, he was known in England for his Channel 4 sitcom "Spaced." The show's endless barrage of pop culture references (including numerous nods to Star Wars) kept audiences tuned in, and the show gained a cult following as it aired in 1999 and 2001.
"'Spaced' was about a group of people in their 20s at the close of the last millennium," Pegg explains. "My character Tim, was a comic book geek, so inevitably, like myself, was a Star Wars fan. In Episode Six of the second series, the relationship between the six main characters becomes very strained and the group almost breaks apart. At the end of the episode, the audience was left unsure as to whether everything was going to come good. The Empire Strikes Back has one of the greatest low-key cliffhanger endings in cinema history and it only seemed right to reference it in order to communicate how desperate things had got for the 'Spaced' gang."
"The second season of the show came out just after The Phantom Menace, a film which, I'm sorry to say, I found immensely disappointing," Pegg continues. "Needless to say, Tim felt the same way and in the opening episode 'Time' burns his Star Wars stuff on a funeral pyre. The scene recreates exactly the moment when Luke burns the body of his father at the end of Return of the Jedi. I think it reflected the feelings of many fans. For the first time ever, there was a division in a group of people that had always felt very united. Fortunately, I had an outlet for my displeasure. In one scene Tim screams at a little boy for wanting to buy a Jar Jar Binks doll. It summed up the frustration of the older fans whose expectations were so high and the innocence of the small children for whom it was a colorful and exciting film."
Read my full interview with Pegg here:
Simon Pegg: Zombies, Cops and Ewoks?![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
