The Vintage Reader

I remember the first time I read Star Wars. I hadn't seen the movie yet; it was the fall of 1977, and the movie had been out since the summer, but my mother either didn't want me to go or just didn't want to go herself, and even my Star Trek-loving best friend had little interest in any science fiction that didn't have swoony Vulcans in it (she was the one with the pointy-ear fetish; I preferred Chekov and Scotty, myself).

So I hadn't seen the movie yet, but I desperately wanted to. My next-door neighbor had the book, and there were full-color photos from the movie in the middle of it so I knew what all the characters looked like. In any event, I had been collecting Wonder Bread's trading cards all summer, and had a sizable collection of them because my grandmother was saving them for me too. IIRC, there were only 12 in the series; I had one of each, but also something like three extra Chewbaccas, two Princess Leias, and about eight Grand Moff Tarkins. They were all beautiful close-ups of the actors, no action shots like real trading cards, and I loved them (and yet somehow lost them; in 1981 I bought an entire set at a science fiction convention, and then lost those too).

Anyway, the book--which I read approximately four at least two times between July September and October, when my mother went to Europe for three weeks* and my grandmother took me, at long last, to see the movie--is really very good. It says on the cover that George Lucas wrote it, but Alan Dean Foster has admitted to writing it (which confirms the long-running fan rumor). I can still read it almost as breathlessly as I did before reading it approximately 20 times and seeing the movie more times than that**.

EXCEPT.

There's a style convention that drives me absolutely. up. the. wall. And it's this:

ARTOO-DETOO and SEE-THREEPIO.

All through the book. And all through Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the sequel (also written by Foster, and full of Luke-and-Leia-before-they-were-related goodness for the shippers--which I so was in 6th grade, when it came out). I wanted to go through with a red pencil and write in R2D2 and C3PO every time they showed up. Not to mention all the talk about "little artoo units." Argggh!

It drove me crazy then, and it drives me crazy now. I am completely nutso about spelling out letters and numbers. I don't think it should be done. I hate "deejay" and "emcee." Even "okay" bothers me to some extent. But Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio are my all-time style pet peeves. I hope that whoever put that in the internal style manual, thus assuring its place in canon (I think; I haven't read a new Star Wars book since the mid-90s), gets to spend eternity listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, because to me, Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio are the visual equivalents of that.

Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

[Edited to clear up late-night posting confusion]

* ...on what she called an "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium"-style tour, and now that I've seen that particular movie, all I can say is OH GOD, I HOPE NOT! But I know my mother well, and I have to assume that she has never actually seen the movie, but believes that any movie starring Suzanne Pleshette is good wholesome family entertainment.

** I say that now, but I can't believe I actually saw it that many times. I seem to remember the twentieth time, sometime in 1981 or '82 when it came back to the theaters before the release of Empire and just sort of hung around for about a year, but I honestly can't believe I saw it in the theater more than 20 times before I was 16. Where did I get the money? Or the time? Or a ride to the theater? I have a feeling this is a part of my personal mythology that I exaggerated in 8th or 9th grade and then forgot that I totally made up.