Of Cabbages and Kings: fans

There's this store in our local mall that's like my entire childhood wrapped into a room-- Minus the being beat up on the playground, the noisy tan corduroys and the harvest colors, of course.

In this mecca of retro media, Star Wars figures wield the Force....

The Heat Miser and Snow Miser strut their stuff...

The Superfriends chat in stilted overly-obvious discussions...

And The Tick struggles to break through nigh-invulnerable packaging.

Anything and everything you can imagine from cartoons and campy films over the years, and this store seems to have it.

The place calls to my inner-nerd every time I venture there. And my inner-nerd actually gets out quite a bit.

I mean, okay, I still have some of my old comic books. And my collection of Johnny Depp-related action figures seems to be overtaking the surface of one filing cabinet...

I think fondly of the original Star Wars, I met b-movie actor Bruce Campbell once (that's a whole other story), and I seem to have developed an inexplicable crush on Dr. Who.

So while my inner dork does pretty much run the joint, I realized, it still might not be enough.

"What?" you're wondering. "How can it not be enough?-- There's the Dr. Who thing." Well, see... This is what happened.

As I was strolling around this collectibles store, the cashier was having an in-depth discussion with two friends who'd stopped by. It was lengthy, passionate and loud. And the conversation seemed to run like this:

Cashier: Well, Episode One largely sucked because it needed a further integration of Darth Maul...

Friends: Mummmm... yeah.

Cashier: That character needed to be pulled more thoroughly throughout that trilogy for it to be worthy of the build up. And so the only scenes that didn't suck were the battle at 15:07 minutes into the film between Darth Maul and Zaphod Beeblebrox where he used the Klingon nunchucks, and then the part at 47:12 where the Ferengi brought in the AT-AT and...

Okay, okay, I know Darth Maul never did fight Zaphod Beeblebrox. (Zaphod would have totally lost his head in that sort of fight. Well, at least ONE of his heads...) And I know the Ferengi and Klingons have nothing to do with Star Wars... And...

Suffice it to say, I'm aware. Remember: dork here.

But on and on this dissection went, with scene after scene bucketed into "sucked," and "didn't suck" with a sort of detailed examination worthy of a doctoral thesis.

And I didn't understand half of it.

I mean, I watched Star Wars Episode One once. Mostly what I got out of it was that, apparently, when you're a Queen faced with a choice between a rather dishy Ewan MacGregor and an annoying kid half your age for your love interest, you choose the annoying kid.

And that's when they lost me.

Anything, beyond that, and I can't say I remember it. I remember something vaguely about a Jamaican lizard-rabbit. And drag-racing, space-style. But that's about it.

So, I think I'm going to have to work on my general nerdishness. None of this halvsies stuff for me. I mean, I was the one who hadn't realized that "Darth" was a title and wasn't just the guy's first name...