There’s one very special moment in modern Star Wars that is unlike anything in any previous entry in the franchise before. It’s a moment that redefines one of the most iconic fictional sci-fi weapons ever and changes the way we look at the basic world-building of the Star Wars galaxy. It is one of the purest, and original moments in recent memory in Star Wars, yet it’s extremely familiar and nostalgic. This near-perfect scene also has minimal visual effects and instead relies on the performances of the actors and the emotions being conveyed.
I am, of course, talking about the part in the very first episode of Skeleton Crew — “This Could Be a Real Adventure” — in which Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) busts out a DIY, bladeless, perhaps cardboard lightsaber hilt and pretend to have a laser sword duel with Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), who is just cupping his hands like he’s holding a lightsaber that isn’t even there. On some level, his very brief scene is the best lightsaber duel since The Phantom Menace, because it captures the actual, literal feeling of being a child fighting with a lightsaber toy. Yes, there have been actual lightsaber toys for a long while, but for me, this moment was perfect. And that’s because in 1992 when I was just 11 years old, I built a lightsaber hilt very much like Wim’s.
To be clear, when I was 11, there were zero new lightsaber toys you could buy. In 1992, the last official Star Wars lightsaber toy created by Kenner was a 1985 lightsaber manufactured for the animated series Droids. It wasn’t until 1995 that Kenner’s Power of the Force line would introduce a new electronic lightsaber with lights and sound. But, even when they did, the hilts of those lightsabers were enormous. I wanted a lightsaber that felt like the ones from the movies. Something that seemed like an innocuous piece of metal, but was really a deadly weapon from a more awesome world. And so, because there were no lightsaber toys to be found, I did exactly what Wim did in Skeleton Crew — I made my own lightsaber handle.
In the days before the internet, there were not countless images of lightsabers online because online wasn’t a thing. In 1992, there were also basically just four cinematic lightsaber designs available: Vader’s, Luke’s first lightsaber, Luke’s second lightsaber, and Obi-Wan’s lightsaber, which, based on images in the storybooks and the freeze-frames on VHS tapes, looked a lot like Luke’s second lightsaber anyway.
Because I was 11, I wasn’t fully aware that the original “Skywalker” lightsaber was based on a vintage Graflex flash handle. But, like many fans, I did pick up on the idea that the lightsaber hilts looked like real pieces of machinery, because the props were, for the most part, adapted from real-world objects. This fact is probably why I intuitively knew that in order to construct my own lightsaber hilt, I would need parts that were also substantial; I didn’t want my lightsaber to be fully cardboard. I wanted it to have some heft and menace.
And so, after searching through a shed filled with junk, I discovered a discarded engine piston, which, I thought, made a fairly convincing emitter head for the “top” of my lightsaber. It didn’t matter if it didn’t look exactly like Luke’s in Return of the Jedi; a Jedi was supposed to build their own lightsaber, and the final design didn’t need to be a copy of what was on the screen — it could be a reflection of me, and what parts I had available. At the time, I had recently read the famous comic book series Dark Empire, and there was a lot of discussion in those pages about the relative age of lightsabers, and how fragile some of them were. I decided if my lightsaber ended up looking like a mishmash of various real-world objects, then I was in good company with “real” Jedi.
For the actual handle, I eventually found a broken lawn sprinkler, which, I felt had the right kinds of grooves and was a close match for the grip on Luke and Obi-Wan’s lightsaber. By using some tubing from an abandoned fish tank, I was able to slip my engine piston into this lawn sprinkler, and — presto! I had a lightsaber! The only thing left to do now was to spray paint the whole thing silver and attach a belt clip to the bottom of it.
I still have this lightsaber to this day, and what I love the most about it is the fact that it is small because it was made for a child’s hands. Again, I wasn’t trying to make a lightsaber that was like someone else’s, I was trying to make my own. And because at the time there were no lightsaber toys in stores, what I was creating came not from a consumer sense of fandom, but a pure place, in which owning the object wasn’t as important as experiencing an innocent sense of play. Hasbro didn’t tell me to make my lightsaber the way I did, and because it was just the hilt, I had to imagine the blade and the sounds — just like Wim and Neel did in Skeleton Crew.
Although Star Wars is probably the most famous movie franchise to also create a successful line of toys, it remains interesting to me that, from my point of view, a perfect lightsaber toy has yet to be produced. Yes, the Force FX lightsabers from the 2010s are very good, and several off-brand (non-Lucasfilm) companies make nice lightsabers with removable blades. There are also plenty of DIY YouTube videos out there that will teach you how to do what I did at 11, though with a much more professional result. In short, if you’re interested in making your own lightsaber as an adult, once you start down this path, it has the potential to dominate your destiny.
But, what Skeleton Crew did for me was to remind me of the raw emotion of my early Star Wars fandom. The bespoke lightsaber isn’t just a cute thing that kids do sometimes. It’s an elegant and honest form of a play, from a more civilized time.
