Real Scarecrow Hours

Sources for album cover inspiration (including a cog and three words I directly copied over) + work titles:

Based on this tweet

Cardi was 7 years old when Star Wars (retroactively titled A New Hope) came out, 10 years old when The Empire Strikes Back came out, and 13 years old when Return of the Jedi came out. As a point of personal comparison, I was 9 going on 10 (and culturally sheltered enough to probably map on to Cardi's 7) when the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition started their theatrical release and I saw them for the first time. And well. Star Wars fundamentally shaped me as a person. I am certain it was worse for him.

I am completely convinced that Mr. Psaltarian and Marika were the ones to take him to see the movie. They were raising him after all - I feel like in a more equal world than 1977 Mr. Psaltarian would have taken him on his own as a father figure/adopted son bonding excursion, but Marika was definitely there because I imagine that the practicality of a mixed race couple raising a white baby is something they grappled with in every decision they made and they wouldn't have wanted Psalty to get harassed for being out in public alone with an apparently unrelated white kid. So while Psaltarian is watching the film and feeling some kind of way about Vietnam (I headcanon that he, like his actor, is a veteran) and Marika is falling asleep with her head on his shoulder, Cardi is sitting there with a bag of popcorn in his lap that he keeps forgetting to eat from because he is spellbound.

From that point onward Star Wars is an essential building block of the Psaltarian household. Cardi is using footwork from his ballet lessons to make even more impressive lightsaber duels with a stick from the yard and laser noises in his mouth. Any time he is forced to sit still for longer than two minutes he mimes turning off a targeting computer and flying an X-Wing in his seat. He overidentifies with Luke from the Start - he doesn't yet know that the Psaltarians are his Aunt and Uncle and that the parallel is that direct, but he knows in his gut that the woman he calls Mom probably isn't and Psalty has been honest with him from the start about not being Dad. He begs and pleads to get permission from Marika to stay up late enough to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special when it airs - something he steadfastly denies having done when he is older and it becomes the beacon of uncoolness it later represented (and for years he quietly celebrates the Christmas season as Life Day because he's a baby Satanist what does he care about Jesus's birthday).

If the original 1977 Star Wars release is the embodiment of his childhood wonder and something that permanently shaped his imagination, then The Empire Strikes Back is something that set him up for the existential questions that encroach on smart kids when they hit the double digits (and I firmly believe that Cardi is a total himbo dumbass and also very smart, he can be both). He knows Psalty is not his father. He doesn't know who his father is. He identifies with Luke - and look which scene is on the pillow in Cardi's bedroom. The "I am your Father" moment I think effected him profoundly. Cardi came away from ESB fantasizing about the moment where something similar might happen to him - what if a big scary monster came to him one day and told him he was his father? Super cute mental image - for a little while Cardi wonders if his biological Dad might be Primo, because of the shared eyes and the fact that Luke's father turned out to be the most terrifying person he knew.

I think ESB also helps Cardi cope with and contextualize his relationship with Mr. Psaltarian - Psalty is his Yoda. That's why Psaltarian always held him to such high standards growing up, "Do or Do Not - there is no try". Putting Psaltarian in that context I think is a bit healing for him - he can't expect the unconditional love of a father from a Jedi Master, that's not what Yoda's there for and it's not what Psalty is there for. Identifying with Luke so strongly and recognizing that he too was placed with a mentor figure probably does nothing to deflate his sense of ego and destiny. Note I don't think any of this is conscious thought, this is things in his mind clicking into place without him doing a lot of introspective legwork - he's only 10 still after all.

By the time he's 13, Return of the Jedi is coming out and Cardi is torn - a part of him worries it might be Uncool to still care this much about Star Wars at his age, but he is also desperate to see where the ending goes. If ten year old Cardi went to see ESB with feral enthusiasm, a more subdued teenager attends ROTJ - seeing the movie by himself this time. I think Return of the Jedi pisses Cardi off. As a huge ROTJ fan myself, I'm sorry, I think Cardi was that kind of obnoxious Gen Xer who sincerely argues about Star Wars like the scene in Clerks (I say was because I think by age 56 and the release of Prequels and Sequels he would have grown out of it a bit).

But for one, he identifies with Luke, and Luke does not get the girl - Han does (the girl even turns out to be his sister! what a ripoff!). Luke has a sobered, emotionally mature personal here and Cardi is seeing it as a cocksure 13 year old who will be yelling at Luke to just fight already. I think he'd come to appreciate the movie and its themes later in life, but as an angsty teen he's not looking for a story about redemption he's looking for a story about revenge. However! I don't think he disliked the Ewoks. I bet he cheered like a goof in the theater each time they succeeded in ambushing the stormtroopers.

Once home media is a thing he is rewatching the VHS tapes every chance he gets, especially Empire. Even when he comes around a bit on Jedi (which still takes him decades), Empire remains his favorite. Whenever he has a sick day, he curls up in a blanket and watches Empire Strikes Back to feel something again. By the 90s, Extended Universe novels are coming out and he's devouring those with a spoon during his breaks in his career as a cardinal. He cries in the theater at the Special Editions, though at this point he STILL isn't wild about ROTJ.

He has mixed feelings on the Prequels. I don't think he hates Episode I like a lot of his cohort - I could see him thinking Jar Jar Binks is actually kinda funny, he's a career bureaucrat himself so he's not lost in the byzantine plot about trade embargoes, and he is absolutely delighted by seeing more Jedi Shit in a way that makes him feel like a kid again. He comes out of Phantom Menace cautiously optimistic and wishing he had a ghoul who was like Darth Maul. He hates Attack of the Clones for the bloat of the romance plot - I keep making him hate my favorite movies in the trilogy but I like AOTC for being the Detective Obi-Wan Show and I don't think he has imprinted enough on young Obi-Wan to get over both the snoozefest of the romance and seeing Anakin slaughter children to avenge his mom. Cardi LOVES Revenge of the Sith. It ties back into the main trilogy in ways that don't feel overly fanservicey and he comes out of the theater for that one trying to convince people he was NOT crying, there was something in his eyes.

I don't think Cardi saw the Clone Wars cartoons but not for lack of interest - he was very busy and I think his attention span was ill suited to following a long series. (it is my dream date to binge watch them with him). So we fast forward to the Sequels. I don't think he's seen Rise of Skywalker and The Last Jedi. He was at this Most Busy Ever when those two came out. He still hasn't seen them to this day. He had fun at The Force Awakens and it's one of the last movies he saw in a theater, but it left him feeling a bit hollow, like something was missing - older more mature Cardi acknowledges that this movie is not for him, it's for younger people.

I think that specifically Frater Imperator has a whole new appreciation for Return of the Jedi. Specifically, I think in his period of grief after Sister's death he comforted himself with a Star Wars marathon. And this time it hit different. This time he Knows who his father is. This time he too has a long lost twin. This time he understands what it is to forgive a deeply flawed old man who saved him at the last minute after a lifetime of being shitty. It...does not cheer him up the way it hoped. But it settles something inside him, the way that ESB originally settled something about being adopted inside him. Empire is still his favorite, but he Gets ROTJ now in a way he never did before.

Side note: the joke of the Audition Tape chapter is that he's constantly getting the lines wrong of all the films he's quoting, and I can imagine one might have a criticism of this wondering how could he be such a huge Star Wars fan and misquote it? To that I say - Cardi often got lyrics wrong on stage, mostly to cover songs (there's a Jesus He Knows me performance in particular that devolves right into Simlish) but occasionally to his own, he forgot to hand the flowers that were actively in his hand to Sister when he saw her in the hospital and in the same episode couldn't remember what he was supposed to announce, and he calls himself the 'main poncho' despite that not being a thing anyone has ever been. Cardi has memory problems. This is canon. Poor Pookie's brain is scrambled.