Ed Andrews: Star Bores
Can we please keep George Lucas' grubby franchise away from snowboarding?
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While trawling the internet this morning, I came across something rather unusual. It was a video by Burton Snowboards showing off their collaboration with Lucasfilm to create a Star Wars™-themed snow park for kids at Sierra-at-Tahoe resort in California.
This Burton Star Wars™ Experience (yes, apparently the ™ is necessary every time you write Star Wars...™) is claimed in the video by Burton Global Resort Director Jeff Boliba as “an introduction to snowboarding” for kids aged three to six and by Sierra-At-Tahoe General Manager John Rice as an “amazing, forward-thinking way to teach young kids and get them excited about snowboarding.”
Perhaps but my cynical nature believes that it's probably more to do with Burton's officially-licensed range of Star Wars™ snowboarding gear that allows you to dress your little grom like R2D2, and probably have them resent you for it in later life.
At first, for a brief second, I actually thought this was kinda cool. You see, I have this weird dream to create the perfect snowboarding mountain wonderland, a tree-lined powder fantasy paradise complete with caves, hidden runs, weird sculptures to jib, buried treasure and lit by flaming torches at night, you know, that sort of thing – kind of like Lord of the Rings meets The Garden if you will.
So when I saw Yoda's Riglet Park complete with mini features like a halfpipe and banked slalom and some amazing chain-sawed sculptures of Wookies, Ewoks and Anakin with a stupid helmet – all made from 'enviromentally-friendly' fallen trees and reclaimed scrap no less – I was briefly hoodwinked into smiling.
But then I remembered one thing... I fucking hate Star Wars™!
It's probably due to the fact that I first saw the ironically-titled A New Hope when I was 14 – and so my brain had developed suitable critical powers to be hardened against George Lucas' merchandise-led brainwashing machine – but I have never been seduced by this thinly-veiled advert for cheap plastic tat.
How anyone can ignore the dodgy script about some quasi-religious power held by some tedious monks, excuse the heaps of politically-suspect characters and not want to punch Luke Skywalker in the face every time he appears on screen is beyond me. Seriously, Darth Vader is Playmobil villain with a permanent cold; Ewoks are just Care Bears from the Middle Ages; Chewbacca is what happens when you drop a Shih Tzu on its head at birth and then raise it on steroids; and don't even get me started on Jar Jar Binks... And if Lucasfilm hadn't cashed in enough, they are now they are re-releasing all the films again in 3D! Adding a third dimension of turd into a galaxy far, far away seems, to me, unnecessary at best.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome that Burton are trying to create new, interesting ways for kids to get into snowboarding, but do you need some nasty film franchise product endorsement to make kids want to give shredding a go? Or is it just maybe a crafty way to sell Star Wars™ merchandise to the parents?
Snowboarding is rife with logos, endorsements and 'on-message' athletes, can't we at least spare the kids from this plastic corporatism for a short while? Shouldn't snowboarding be used as a way to teach kids important things about life - like confidence, perseverance and the value of the natural world - instead of a vehicle to sell toys?
And, finally, doesn't George Lucas have enough money yet?!
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Star Bores (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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