What’s Carbonite?

Handsome has a couple of game systems in the house. For each of them he has some version of a Star Wars game, possibly more than one for each. He’ll be in his room for hours, and all I can hear coming through the door is light saber sounds and R2-D2 squeaks and squawks. His friends come over, and they sit in there playing the games, and I hear them yelling out things like “Look out for the stormtroopers!”, and “Careful, that’s Darth Vader!” he has opinions on who is the coolest in the Star Wars universe ( I think he’s partial to Aniken Skywalker, though he seems to play as Yoda an awful lot too.) Sometimes he asks me to come in the room and play with him, and if he’s not playing Mario Bros. or Mario Karts, then it’s some form of Star Wars game.

It seems to me that he’s very into Star Wars.

So this afternoon we were working on his Pinewood Derby car, and we actually got to the point where we primed it for paint. Now, I was lazy, and in a hurry, so I got him spray paint to use on it. I know it says to use ‘outdoors or in a well-ventilated space’, but it’s early March in New England and it was bloody cold outside. I set up some cardboard in the basement and we primed the heck out of it. Then I opened a small window, and he and I, slightly dizzy, went back upstairs and started looking at some very cool pinewood derby car photos on the internet.

There was a car that looked like a Model-T Ford. There as one that looked like a skateboard. One that looked like a pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on wheels. One that looked like a Hershey’s Chocolate bar, partially unwrapped and with a bite taken out of it. There were some truly amazing Pinewood car photos, and then I saw a very cool one. Looking like a bronze flattened off rectangle, there were fingertips and a screaming face, also bronze, protruding slightly from the surface of the top of the car.

“That’s awesome,” I said, “Han Solo in the carbonite!”

Handsome looked at me with one eyebrow raised.

“What’s carbonite?”

“Carbonite, you know, when the bounty hunters captured Han and were transporting him back to Jabba…”

I trailed off as I saw that not only was Handsome’s eyebrow not going down, his other eye was squinting up as well, indicating that I was making absolutely no sense to him whatsoever.

“Remember? When Han was captured, and they dropped him in the pit, and then the carbonite went all Fssshhht! Remember? No?”

His look was unchanging.

And then it hit me.

He’s never seen all the movies! And by all, I mean the first three! Oh my God!

Well, Star Wars marathon at my house this weekend! Original three movies only! I don’t have a lot against the newer three movies, I actually liked parts of them a lot, but I don’t want to take a chance on Handsome having to call 911 because I thrust a fork into my own eye when Jar Jar Binks strolled across the screen!

Talk to you later!