Lapti Nek

I don't remember when I first heard about Star Wars.  Probably when I was seven, when Return of the Jedi came out.  That was just the big thing that summer, by which I mean the big toy line.  Everything back then was just one long advertisement for toys - Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, Star Wars.  You had your sugary breakfast cereals that I ate way too many of, like C3POs.  I don't remember what C3POs tasted like.  Usually the cereals were just a knockoff of an existing cereal with the processed grains formed into some shape that was supposed to be vaguely evocative of the branding.  For Mr. T Cereal it was Cap'n Crunch formed roughly into the shape of serif Ts.  Sometimes tiny hard marshmallows would be thrown in, the shapes even more abstract than the grains.

Anyway, I remember the toys, mostly, because I spent more time with them than I did with the film.  I saw it once, in the theater, and then I guess not for years and years and years when it showed up on cable.  In '83 hardly anybody had cable, mind, so you had to wait for the network broadcast, about eight years or so after the original theatrical run.  I think that's what strikes me most about those times, how easily things were forgotten, how much relied on just memories.

My memories of Return of the Jedi are overlaid with all the crap that has happened since, though.  It's different from a film I saw once and nobody else remembers - I guess a good example would be something like Unico, which exerted a powerful hold on the memories of everyone who saw it even when they couldn't remember its name.  All of the things I "know" but learned since intrude on my memories, so retrieving that time is particularly difficult and uncertain.

I remember I liked the first bit better than the second.  Even though I was the market Lucas was going for with the Ewoks, they seemed a little babyish for me.  That was my big fear as a child, of anything that seemed "babyish".  I desperately wanted to be grown up.

So I liked the first half a lot better.  In retrospect it's hard for me to view it as sympathetically.  Why Lucas decided to cap off his trilogy with an alien retelling of "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" isn't something I much understand.  And then there was the sandworm (it wasn't called a sandworm, again, later events superimpose and I find myself struck by just how much Lucas was ripping off Dune with Tattooine) which yes I did at the time think of as a giant man-eating vagina with teeth, I'm sorry if that's a cliche Freudian reading of it but I was seven.  I was fascinated by it, the torture and slow death.  I was fascinated by all the weird and strange creatures, Jabba, huge and slimy, the Rancor...

I didn't give a shit about Boba Fett.  Didn't see what was supposed to be the big deal with him, what was supposed to be "cool" about him.  Was interested in the knockoff Cantina band playing disco.  I don't know if I knew about the original Cantina band at this point or not.  Certainly it was one of the more memorable bits of the original movie.  Certainly the film didn't stand on its character development.

I did research the other day the history of the Star Wars disco song, Lapti Nek.  It's an interesting history.  It was written by John Williams' son, who went on to join Toto.  Blatant nepotism.  I don't remember disco, wasn't really around for disco, so the fact that disco was deader than... well, disco was as dead as disco, but that didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember any of it.  So there was this cool alien lady singing in a cool alien language.  And when I come back to it, it sounds kind of crap, but I remember it being cool.

So here's the thing about that song - there was an old article in Crawdaddy, well, not that old, Facebook was involved, but it's only shared on Star Wars forums now.  What it looks like happened is that a studio singer by the name of Michele Gruska came in to sing the song, and that was the song that was released as, flopped as, a single.  That's not the version that was used in the movie, though.  The version in the movie was sung by the lady who wrote the lyrics, a lady by the name of Annie Arbogast, who is... like, I guess the polite euphemism is that she's less "polished", but I like shit that's less polished in general.  She's not a great singer.  I'll just say that, Gruska was a really good singer and Annie Arbogast wasn't.  Gruska's personal theory, as expressed to Crawdaddy, about why Arbogast's recording was used... well, she suggested that Arbogast and George Lucas may possibly have had an intimate relationship at the time.  Fuck if I know how to evaluate that statement.  I probably shouldn't even repeat what she said, but you know, nobody's going to be reading this anyway, right?

Later Joseph Williams recorded a version with himself on vocals, and it's by far the worst.  For some reason he decided that the best way to sell the song was to do it in a medley with the Ewok "Yub-Nub" song.  It is absolute bottom-scraping cheese, and that's the last anyone heard of it, because when Lucas got a chance to revisit his work out went Lapti Nek and in went, predicably, an even fucking worse song.

Anyway, I'll stop there and just say that I think Lapti Nek is a jam, particularly the version with Michele Gruska on vocals.  I have a 12" of it I picked up at a completely unrelated convention where someone was selling it presumably on the grounds that Star Wars fans will buy any old crap.  Joke's on them, though - I'm not a Star Wars fan, and I only buy very specific crap.