Text: When my mom was a kid she says she and the neighbor kids would play a lot of Star Wars. They would use finger guns and run around and chase after each other and shout. “I mean, it wasn’t very sophisticated.” She said there were probably at max 5 or 6 kids. I asked if they would pretend to be storm troopers and her memory of it was that they all wanted to be all the heroes, and so nobody was really the storm troopers. It wasn’t like a show and picking roles, it was kinda just climbing the fences and being weirdos. “What I remember most is kind of like running up on the dirt hill and leaping off of it. you know, kind of making noises and throwing your finger guns in the air. You know, I mean, it was just very… ridiculous and innocuous and probably look stupid as could be.” My mom was always resistant because she wanted to be Luke, but since she was a girl everyone wanted her to be Leia. 

Context: My mom is 49, white, and when this story was taking place lived in North Idaho (she moved to Washington when she was 9). I asked if when they played they would reenact the movie? Her response was that they had only seen it once, not the 82,000 times we can today, so someone would go “I think this happens, then someone else goes, no, it was this way, and no one really knows because you’ve only seen it once.” 

Analysis: In this childhood memory we see the folk taking back canonized culture. They had probably only seen the film one but that didn’t really matter. They took this commercial media and made it their own, creating a game that was inspired by the original media but took off on its own from there. They are active consumers in the decoding of this media, as Stuart Hall would say, even if they didn’t know it. My mother even used it to start negotiating identity, not wanting to be boxed into playing the princess because she was the only girl, something she has mentioned multiple times. The Frankfurt school was worried about cultural hegemony, and while there is a point to be made that this might be an example of a way that mass media can be used to influence children at a young age I would argue this is actually people at a young age taking media and turning it into something of their own. Creating their own personal variations of something they love even when they only saw the movie once.