Oh, c'mon! Don't be so surprised that we're actually back. I'm telling ya, this sucker is in full effect now. I've had some email response but I need more, damnit. More! There's a nice mixture of topics coming in the weeks ahead. If you're interested, click here to drop me a line regarding your ideas. If you're not too sure of what to write or need a little inspiration, check out past columns we've unleashed here.

Okay, time to shut up now. It's Chewer time...

The Geek Shall Inherit
By Richard Dickson
Member since 1/21/01
Orlando, FL
Born 12/8/68

I’m 7 years old, and this TV commercial for this movie Star Wars has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.

There’s this big dog and these guys in some cheap-looking white armor and I swear I can see the wires holding that robot up.

But then my dad comes home from the Navy base where he works and tells me about this movie all the sailors can’t stop talking about, with spaceships and lasers and stuff. And so it’s just a matter of time before the Dickson family piles into the station wagon and heads to the drive-in to finally see this stupid movie.

And I can’t thank my father enough.

If being a geek is an addiction, my father was an enabler. Even before convincing me Star Wars might actually be worth my time, he’d leave Godzilla movies on for me when deep down he’d rather be watching something else. Star Trek seemed to be on the TV almost constantly. Comic books would somehow find their way into the grocery bags. G.I. Joe was a fixture every Christmas (and we’re talking the great big camo wearing non-COBRA-fighting old school G.I. Joe). I wasn’t old enough at the time to realize the foundation that was being laid, but I have this sneaking suspicion that my dad was just priming the engine.

After Star Wars, he opened that engine up. He’d work ten hour days five days a week, but if I wanted to go the drive-in to see the Godzilla triple feature on Friday night, he didn’t voice a single objection, and if he happened to doze off in the seat next to me, he slept knowing I was reveling in the HO scale carnage unspooling before my eyes. G.I. Joe gave way to Micronauts, and I think the saddest Christmas in my dad’s life was when I put together all my toys by myself, leaving him without the pretense that let him play with them too. My mother chipped in too, bringing me home a copy of The Hobbit after she saw me watch the Rankin-Bass cartoon in wide-eyed amazement, picking up a set of Star Wars comics for me before someone else bought it, but she was more the Igor to the Dr. Frankenstein of geekery that was my dad.

As a teen growing up in the true halcyon days of geekdom – the early 1980s – my dad was a geek’s best friend. We may not have been there opening night, but first thing Saturday afternoon my dad and I were there for a dizzying run that reads like an IMDB article on 80s cinema. It didn’t matter how bad it looked or how tired he was from the work week, if I wanted to go, that was enough for him. And while for every Raiders of the Lost Ark or Buckaroo Banzai we suffered through a King Solomon’s Mines or My Science Project, it didn’t slow us down. Superman II, Masters of the Universe, Iceman, Gremlins, Ladyhawke, The Goonies, Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, you name it, we saw it. In fact, there was a span of almost ten years where I didn’t see a new Spielberg movie without my dad, and I firmly believe to this day that my negative reaction to Hook was due in large part to it being the first Spielberg film where I didn’t have my dad sitting next to me. The experience somehow felt incomplete.

It says a lot about our relationship that my biggest act of rebellion wasn’t to yell at him or swear at him, but to tear up a pair of passes to a screening of Die Hard we were going to see. I still feel a little guilty whenever I watch it.

And it wasn’t just the movies. Whether it was forking over the fifteen bucks to buy me that complete set of Marvel’s Contest of Champions or displaying the patience of Job as my friends and I tore around our first Trek convention or sneaking the full-sized Alien figure into my room on Christmas morning so that my disappointment at not finding it under the tree gave way to elation when I found it later, he took it all in stride, vicariously enjoying the sort of childhood I don’t think he ever had.

Of course, having parents so in tune with my mania wasn’t always a good thing. I distinctly remember March 31, 1981 as one of the darkest days of my youth. I had misbehaved in some way or another, and while I knew punishment was coming, I had no idea the cruel fate my parents had devised for me. Like Solomon they weighed options, keeping me in suspense as I waited for the axe to fall. Given that much time, they were sure to find something absolutely gut-wrenching, and boy did they. And so it went that I was not allowed to watch the Academy Awards and the special Oscar being given to The Empire Strikes Back. I’m pretty sure I cried myself to sleep that night.

Eventually came graduation and college, and naturally the dynamic changed. Independently mobile, I no longer had to endure the interminable wait from Friday night release to Saturday afternoon matinee. More and more often I’d see a movie with friends first and my dad second. We’d still chatter excitedly about upcoming movies, with him always keeping an eye out for something that I might be interested in, but that sense of fatherly indispensability was gone – I still wanted him there, but I didn’t need him there.

Now I’m here in Florida and he’s up in North Carolina, and when I talk to him on the phone he talks about seeing this movie or that movie, and I can hear the disappointment when I told him I’ve seen it. He’s taken my teenage nephew to see the prequels and The Lord of the Rings, but he always tells me it’s just not the same. But I’ll always be forever indebted to my dad for never telling me what I liked was stupid or silly, for doing without things I know he wanted so I could have this book or that toy, for encouraging his chubby bespectacled son to fill his eyes and mind and heart with dreams. He’s the reason I still feel like his little boy when the lights go down.