Treadwell, I'm going to comment over here. The Pablo Hidalgo thing got posted to both threads, but this feels more All Things Star Wars than The Mandalorian...
I feel that so hard. From a pretty young age, I knew I wanted to do...
something with my big three fandoms. I was a well-behaved only child, so my parents had no qualms about taking me with them to Star Wars when it came out, even though I was only two (and a half, to be fair). I remember scattered moments from that first screening, and Star Wars has been a part of my life for the entire duration of it as a conscious and aware entity.
The other two are Star Trek and Transformers. The one was a presence even before Star Wars. My parents were first-generation Trekkies in college, were part of the letter-writing campaign... So the reruns were on every Saturday. I didn't
dislike it, but it didn't really click with me until I was a tween. Transformers came along in the middle of that, when I was 9, and was the first of the three where I got frustrated that the owners of the I.P. didn't understand the lore of their own possession. Hasbro has spent a long time dropping the ball on the rich depth others created to market their relabeled Japanese toys -- Larry Hama, especially, for G.I. Joe, but the creators of the cartoons and comics for Transformers came up with something truly epic -- that got utterly flushed when Hasbro gave Michael Bay the nod.
So all three of these were locked in as bone-deep and abiding loves before I was out of middle school. I knew I wanted to do something within them, but no one ever talked it through with me. When I'd express it, I'd either get variations on, "That's nice, kid -- now, what're you gonna do for a
real job?" or well-meaning wrong things (in high school, my step-dad called ILM and asked them to send me an information packet on what I'd need to do to work there -- I appreciate it and admire the heck out of what they do, but, while I love building models, I don't want to do it professionally).
Through and after high school, as the internet dawned, my scope of contacts broadened from "meeting Patrick Stewart once at a local convention" or "writing a letter to 'Jack McKinney' when I discovered 'he' was the writing team of Brian Daley and James Luceno"... to chatting and being friends with the likes of Rick Sternbach, Mike Okuda, David Stipe, Andy Probert, Jeremy Bulloch, Dan Logan, George Roubicek, Jason Fry, Steve Sansweet, Peter David, David Mack, Jeff Veregge, Andy Mangels, Mike Vilardi, and on and on and on... Somewhere in my mid-20s, I stopped short one day after I got off the phone with Rick about something obscure and space-related and realized... that
was his real job! And had been since the '70s! I felt utterly conned and, worse, that I'd missed a window somehow that I hadn't even known was there.
The reason I work on my Star Wars, Star Trek, and Transformers rewrites, the reason I have such bristly opinions on here and elsewhere... *sigh* I've internalized so much about those universes, both the fictional inner universe and the real outer universe that went into making them... Every time I see someone actually working there and getting paid to do what I've wanted to get paid to do since I was in my teens... It's worse when Leland or Pablo or someone on the other properties get something wrong and I have to sit here on the outside, a civilian, and grind my teeth. Back when Beat the Geeks was on, I applied as a contestant specifically so I could challenge the Star Trek Geek for his job after he got a stupidly easy one wrong. I see so many Transformers from the "War for Cybertron," etc., arc that I would buy in an instant if Hasbro had done their homework and was willing to pay for vehicle license rights. Mainly, that all the cars and trucks have wheels, when we saw in the original lore that they didn't. Kup, Hot Rod, Springer, and Wheelie were iffy, but every other Cybertronian ground vehicle we saw -- sentient or not -- was hover/antigrav.
So I utterly get the "that should be me" feeling.
