Watching Skies Is An Ode To 80s Kid Culture
Mark O’Connell’s upcoming book Watching Skies is devoted to memories of his childhood, through examination of the popular movies that came out around that time: Star Wars, ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gremlins and others. In this energetic and insightful memoir-through-cinema, Mark O’Connell flies a gilded X-Wing through a universe of bedroom remakes of Return of the Jedi, close encounters with Christopher Reeve, sticker album swaps, a honeymoon on Amity Island and the trauma of losing an entire Star Wars figure collection. A unique study on how a rich galaxy of movies continue shaping big and vital cinema to this day, Watching Skies is for all Star Wars kids – whatever their era. At this point, there’s no shortage of material out there waxing poetic about growing up in the 1980s. Much of that is the Nostalgia Drug convincing thirty- and forty-somethings that a bunch of cheap plastic figures were the end-all of human existence, but when you think about it, anyone who got to experience that culture WOULD