Raising the Alien Bar: The Star Wars Cantina

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is an admittedly silly little potboiler from Season 2 called Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?

A pair of police officers, investigating reports of a downed UFO, find mysterious footprints leading from the presumed site of the crash to a little roadside diner.

They follow the possibly extra-terrestrial footprints through the snow to the diner, only to find it occupied by a single group, traveling by bus.

No one has seen any unusual visitors, alien or otherwise, but the bus-driver notices the number of people in the diner exceeds his passenger count by one... did an alien in human disguise slip in with the group? And if so, which one is it?

After some tense finger pointing and general hysteria, the cops finally concede they can't determine who the alien is, and since no laws were broken, everyone is free to leave.

It's only after everyone else has gone that a distinguished older gentleman reveals himself to be the crash-landed Martian... he has a third arm hidden under his coat!

That alone would have been a perfectly satisfactory conclusion to this episode... but there's a twist! There are actually TWO aliens hiding in the diner! The waiter working behind the counter removes his hat to reveal a third eye... he's from Venus!

The presence of one alien was an event, special enough to build an entire plot around. But that there might be TWO aliens was such a novel idea, it gave the episode that unforgettable extra punch.

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? stands as a good example of how aliens were typically represented in TV and film, at least in my limited experience as a kid in the 1970s. Whether there was just one individual or a whole race of them, if there was an alien in the movie, undoubtedly the entire plot centered around its very existence. Its presence was a miracle of sorts, a unique anomaly, to be feared, fought, pondered or pursued.

All of which might make you better appreciate the impact that a little film called Star Wars had on me when I first saw it back in 1977... particularly, the cantina scene, in which our heroes wander into a barroom that, unlike the Twilight Zone diner, is wall-to-wall aliens, none of them hiding.

This little Tatooine hole in the wall seemed to contain about 50 movies-worth of monsters all in one scene, and without any particular importance attached to it. In the Star Wars universe, this intergalactic freakshow was the norm!

One of the better remembered aliens, because of his glowing eyes (unfortunately he got dropped for the 1997 Special Edition version...)

Ah, Mos Eisley, where everyday is Halloween...

This off-the-shelf wolfman mask also got 86'd from the cantina in the 1997 Special Edition version...


The entire gorgeous pageant is over in a few minutes, so I had barely started to come down from a delirious monster-kid high before the cantina scene ended and the whole thing was just a memory.

Now in 1977, you couldn't just look-up screen-caps from your favorite film on the Internet. Nor was there any realistic expectation that you would ever own a film, so the prospect of being in control of the presentation, to pause, rewind, replay, a scene to examine it in finer detail was, well, science fiction.

In those days before VHS and DVD, when you bought a ticket to a film, you were paying for admission to an event that you had no hope of replicating later at home (the film blog Scanners recently ran a good article reminiscing on this very subject), so if you wanted to relive the experience of entering that otherworldy watering hole, you either harassed your parents into taking you to another screening of the entire film, or sought out whatever details you could from supplementary sources.

That's how a book like Star Wars: The Making of the Movie (a "Step-Up Book" by Larry Weinberg, 1980) became an invaluable resource.

Star Wars: The Making of the Movie summarizes the film's plot and exposes some of the behind-the-scenes movie-magic that made it possible.

Even though it was clearly aimed at very young readers (so young they needed big words like "oxygen" spelled out for them fo-NET-ik-lee), it was still a popular read with the older kids because it provided a few frozen moments from the fleeting cantina scene.

You even got a good close-up look at the monsterized holographic chess game that we merely get a glimpse of in the film.

But this book wasn't published until 1980, a good three years after the film premiered. A more immediate bromo for cantina-withdrawal was 1978's The Star Wars Storybook, which offered a beautiful full-color two-page spread.

The official Marvel comic-book adaptation provided an artist's rendering of the cantina denizens, including this sensational cover depiction of an all-out brawl that never happens in the actual film.

It also gave fans their first glimpse of this mysterious "Jabba" character, never seen in the original film. This interpretation of Jabba, based on a random background alien (after Lucas was unable to realize the character through more elaborate special effects and cut the scene from the film) was rendered obsolete once Jabba made his big-screen debut in Return of the Jedi.

Topps Star Wars cards were a potential source of imagery, but frustratingly, it wasn't until the fifth "orange" series, 265+ cards into the run, that close-up pics of the cantina creatures started appearing with any regularity. (See the complete set here.)

Kenner action-figures let us get up-close and personal with a select few cantina regulars, and also provided their names (only Greedo is called by name in the film). Aside from Greedo, just three aliens made the cut, with names that would have looked right at home on a B-monster movie marquee: Hammerhead, Walrusman and Snaggletooth.

Oodah poodah, Solo?

Hammerhead was by far the coolest alien in the bar... and who knew he was hiding such great feet under that table?

The ravenous expanded-universe has since fleshed out the details of all the cantina inhabitants, providing back-stories and species-names for every character (and sucking some of the fun and mystery out of them as well). Snaggletooth, for example, has since been decreed a "Snivvian" named "Zutton". I don't know--I kind of like the monsterish and straightforward "Snaggletooth."

The clothing style and color-scheme for most of these figures seems to be a hair off... just a hair.

Amazingly, the iconic Cantina Band was never realized in action-figure form in the original Kenner line-up, but you could purchase a painted representation of them as part of the Creature Cantina playset.

This alternate playset, Cantina Adventure, was sold exclusively at Sears stores, and came with all four of the cantina action figures (including the highly collectible "blue Snaggletooth", an off-model variation that was designed from a vague photo-reference and quickly discontinued.) Some cantina creatures and a droid are depicted on the flat backdrop.

Then in November of 1978, something incredible happened. Call it a Christmas miracle, if you like, but the exciting and elusive world of Star Wars finally came home by way of The Star Wars Holiday Special. While set on the forested Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, the special included a stop-over at every 10-year olds favorite coctail lounge...Finally, I was able to revisit the Mos Eisley cantina from the comfort of my own home, and without paying for a ticket.

Even though this was a poorer, made-for-TV version, (camped up with the addition of comedian Bea Arthur as a bartender, and looking more like it belonged in the universe of Sid & Marty Krofft than that of the big-screen Star Wars), I ate up every second of it.

For more than you ever wanted to know about The Star Wars Holiday Special, check out this fansite.

FUN FACT: Lecturer and author Joseph Campbell, whose book The Hero With A Thousand Faces influenced George Lucas in writing the Star Wars stories, named the cantina scene one of his favorite film moments of all-time. He did this during a series of interviews with Bill Moyers, which was broadcast under the title The Power of Myth, and is available on DVD.

UPDATE 2-16-11: Just happened upon this hilarious cantina-themed embroidery. Find out more about it here.

Strangely Enough! (C.B. Colby, Scholastic Book Services)

Strangely Enough is a collection of unusual tales, "good yarns" and stories of the supernatural, collected by writer C. B. Colby, who, according to the book's preface, used to run them in his newspaper column, "Adventure Today."

Illustrated by David Lockhart (save the unusual alien landscaped cover of the edition pictured here, which is by Harvey Parks), Strangely Enough was originally printed in 1940, but has resurfaced in various editions since (the copy pictured here is copyright 1963), although I somehow managed to miss this title when it turned up as a selection in the Scholastic Book Club in the 1970s, and only recently became aware of it thanks to a recommendation by reader Jeanlass.)

Colby makes no attempt to either validate nor debunk any of the stories here, presenting them without judgment as pieces of entertainment. As he states in the preface:

I think it is better to be like the little old lady who said, "I don't believe in ghosts--but I'm afraid of them!" than never to have enjoyed a bit of spine-tingling at the personal encounter with something for which there seems to be no sensible explanation.

Some of the stories presented here are recognizable from urban legend, while others are alleged to have actually happened. Two of the stories here (one about the ghostly appearance of faces at sea, the other about moving coffins in a Barbados crypt) have reappeared in another collection of supernatural stories, Ghosts-The Eerie Series (1976, Seymour Simon).

Here's a sampling of some of the ninety stories contained in Strangely Enough...

THE WHITE DOVE is a folk tale about a widowed husband whose departed wife returns in the form of a white dove.

THE SUICIDE TREE is not as sinister as it sounds. The author discusses some unusual trees he's seen, including one that seems to be killing itself by splitting its main trunk with one of its own branches.

THE SEABIRD is the name of a mysterious sailing ship that, in 1880, beached itself on the shores of Newport, Rhode Island, without a single passenger found aboard.

THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW tells of a haunted painting of a real Scottish castle, depicted with a single lit window. Purchased in a "dingy little store", the buyer keeps the curiosity in his home for many years before noticing the painted lit window has mysteriously darkened, with no evidence of tampering. After researching the history of the castle, he learns the phenomenon is related to a person who died in that room 500 years ago.

THE LADY ON THE HIGHWAY, one of two variations of the "ghostly hitchhiker" tale to appear in this book, tells of an old woman which mysteriously disappears after having been picked up by a pair of traveling businessmen, who later learn she had died years earlier.

The second hitchhiker tale, LAVENDER, in which the ghostly passenger is lent a coat that is later found lying at the woman's grave.

THE GHOST IN THE GRAVEYARD is the humorous story of a frightening white form seen moving in the graveyard at night, which turns out to be the white head of an otherwise black cow.

NO GRASS ON THE GRAVE tells the story of John Newton, who, upon being falsely convicted of a crime in 1821, correctly prophesied that no grass would grow on his grave.

The HAUNTED SCHOOLHOUSE tells of an 1870 haunting in Newburyport, Massachusetts, by a ghost manifesting itself incrementally over several days, first as a glowing light, then a disembodied hand, then an arm, and finally a schoolboy.

NEW ENGLAND'S DARKEST DAY accounts an unusual dark sky that occurred in the middle of the day in May of 1780.

In LORD DUFFERIN'S STORY, presented as a traditional English story of the supernatural, a British diplomat is haunted my visions of a man dragging a casket on his back. He later encounters the same man operating an elevator, a sight so frightening he refuses to board. The elevator subsequently malfunctions, sending several people to their deaths. Variations of this story, in which the mysterious figure drives a hearse, and utters the foreboding phrase "Room for one more...", has turned up in urban legend, and even as an episode of The Twilight Zone, "Twenty-Two".

FALLING OBJECTS FROM HEAVEN describes unusual instances of walnuts, stones and even bones apparently falling out of the sky.

CIGAR IN THE SKY is one of several accounts of encounters with apparent U.F.O.s, this one in 1882, in the skies over Greenwich, England.

Strangely Enough is out of print as of this writing, but can be had on the second-hand market... strangely enough!... for about the same price as the edition pictured here went for new back in 1963.