The wife and I went on a crazy, gluttonous, Lenin-validating consumer spree with our wedding gift cards this weekend, sacking the Target and leaving nothing but debris and bruised stockboys in our wake. As we began to struggle a bit to find space for our existing wedding gifts in the manse, I was wary of the prospect of going out and buying three more metric tons of crap, but once you’ve walked down the video game aisle* and realized you could actually afford to grab a few of those rascals you begin to rev your engine in spite of yourself. Ten minutes later, you have a cart full of DVDs, complete seasons of TV shows you’ve never heard of just because there were forty bucks left on the card.

Whatever else it does to you, spending serious time in a Target store right now really drives home the point that, now that you mention it, yes, I think there may be a Star Wars movie coming out sometime soon. Everything in that humble shoppe has Darth Vader on it somewhere. And isn’t that interesting, by the way? Not Yoda. Not Obi-Wan. Not droids or wookkies or Jar Damn Jar. M&Ms and Pepsi and Doritos and Playtex and Depends Undergarments and all of the 1400 companies hitching their wagons to this merchandising moonrocket have chosen the movie’s genocidal nightmare factory as their mascot.

“Choose the Dark Side!” the dark chocolate M&Ms shout from the candy aisle. Well, I think every time, that’s a slogan maybe not as well thought out as I would have liked. Culturally speaking. Their candy is reminding me of bone-chilling evil, and that’s their actual marketing angle. “Evil is wicked cool, kids! Look at the cute candy guy in the stormtrooper helmet.” I’ve often suspected companies of wanting to turn me to the dark side, but I’ve never had one come out and ask before.

The electronics aisles presented us with a whole different kind of temptation: the Revenge of the Sith game for the Playstation. Because listen: I could sit here pick apart these cheerfully cynical marketing campaigns all day long. I’m honing a good twenty-minute rant on what kind of screwed up mind it takes to intentionally make a movie too dark for children, take every opportunity to say that parents should not take their kids to see it, and then choke the rivers with walls and walls of tie-in toys. I have given these slick tricks a lot of thought, and that is because they work on me very, very well. Those f***ing M&Ms are delicious. All of my action figures have been in storage for a year, and I cannot walk past the new ones with picking one up and holding it for a long time. There is so much shilling going on that I can’t tell if Lucas is using candy to sell his movie or Mars is using the Sith to sell their candy, but both strategies are working on my sorry reptile brain just fine.

(Though I am weak, there are some lines I cannot cross. I’m sorry, but what kind of whacked-out fetish do you have to put in the spotlight on the day you order your dog the Slave Leia pet costume? Use that money to see a specialist, my friend.)

So I had quite the inner struggle when I saw the game within my grasp. My chief incentive to buy it was also the best reason not to look directly at it. On each shoulder, the little angel and devil were both saying the same thing: play it now, and you see what happens without waiting for the movie to come out.

Though it breaks my heart to say it out loud, I have a lot of memories where Star Wars is concerned. This week, as I fight the dark urge to break down and ruin this movie for myself, the one that comes to mind most often is that Return of the Jedi taught me what a spoiler was.

In 1983, my best friend was a guy named Frankie who lived about three suburban blocks away. When we were seven, of course, an unsupervised journey across this distance might as well have been a jaunt over the Berlin Wall. As a result, Frankie and I were coming into the full bloom of our phone discovery phase. (I say this like it’s normal, but for all I know we were the only ones who did it.) He would call me after school, and we would literally sit there on the phone for hours at a time like nitwits, talking about whatever we happened to be doing, often watching TV silently while holding the phone to our ears, the still-corded receiver creating a barrier for anyone who wanted to go to the fridge.

When you think about it, our parents could be pretty indulgent when they wanted to be. Anything to keep us from bugging them for ten minutes, I guess.

Anyway, Frankie was indulged in many other things; he was one of those kids who had the Millennium Falcon and Castle Greyskull and an AT-AT battalion… and he was one of those kids who would invite you over to play with these things, but then he wouldn’t actually let you touch any of them. So it was a little like a primary school strip club in that regard. In the spring of 1983, the juiciest plum Frankie had to dangle over my head was his membership in the Star Wars Fan Club.

I was hotly jealous of those Fan Club guys, with their fancy patches and their “Bantha Tracks” newsletter.

One afternoon, Frankie and I were engaged in our pre-call-waiting marathon phone sit-in, and I was beside myself with excitement after seeing a Return of the Jedi ad. I was speculating aloud about Darth Vader, when Frankie piped up.

“Vader is really Luke’s father, I hope you know,” Frankie blurted. “And he dies. And Yoda dies, and Jabba the Hutt is fat and they fight.”

And though I said “oh, shoot; darn it” etc. until I was nineteen years old, I do remember hearing Frankie and thinking, “you son of a bitch.” I didn’t even know Yoda was sick. The last time I saw him, he looked so good.

Later, the Scholastic Book Club would release the storybook a month early; I would buy it, swearing not to read it at first and then weakly allowing myself a page a day in a war of attrition with my own impatience. I badly wanted proof that Frankie didn’t know what he was talking about. By the time I got to the theater, I had about six pages left.

As we got older, Frankie would grow up to be widely regarded as the second most popular boy in class, a boy whose eighth grade photo was given the caption “Don’t Touch the Hair” in the yearbook. As roughly the 30th most popular boy in class, I had some trouble fitting Frankie onto my calender after about ‘85-86. I ran into him during a sale at my favorite comic book store the summer before eighth grade, holding (as fate would have it) a thick stack of back issues of Marvel’s “Star Wars” comics. He looked at me like I had caught him masturbating to them.

“Please, do me a favor,” Frankie the star jock entreated me. “Don’t tell any of the guys that you saw me in the comic book store, okay? Please?”

This would have been a good time to teach Frankie the true meaning of the word “spoiler,” but I never mentioned it to anyone. We didn’t really talk to the same people anyway. That was probably the first conversation we’d had in a year.

So, after all those meaningful years of grade school friendship, that is how I always remember Frankie. He was like my internet training wheels, my preparation for Harry Knowles’ being unleashed on the world. Now, every time I start to let impatience get the better of me, I think twice and put the game down.

Besides, if episode I taught me anything, it’s that it’ll be half price in a month anyway.

*Video games were actually the last thing we should have been buying. We probably got fifteen of ‘em for the wedding. I’m going to have to quit my job to have time to find out what my Thank You notes are actually thanking people for.

not pictured: gravitas