For thousands of fans, the most heartwarming moments of the Thanksgiving holiday weren't those spent with family and friends, but watching the 90-second first trailer for Star Wars VII - The Force Awakens. 9 out of 10 geeks agree that it hit all the right notes; it felt modern, but still, as my colleague Steve Kandell put it, stirred the hearts of an impatient legion:
the teaser is a dog whistle in more subtle ways: the orange of the desert, the dirt and rust on an X-wing, and more crucially, the howl of the TIE fighters and the swelling of the John Williams score, which apparently can raise goose bumps by merely typing a reference to it. The final moment of the trailer is not an image, but the distinctive hum of a lightsaber.
Though the familiar sounds no-doubt stirred something inside us all, one particular aural pleasure was missing from the otherwise impressive preview. I'm talking about an indispensible part of the Star Wars culture, with which every person who has seen the movies is familiar. I'm talking about something explosive, something full of life, something that really sticks with you.
I'm talking about jizz.
You know, jizz! What's jizz, you ask? Well, the answer is that even if you don't know what jizz is, you're probably well-acquainted with it and almost certainly already love it.
So what is jizz? According to Wookiepedia, the Star Wars wiki, "Jizz was an upbeat, swinging genre of music, most notably performed by Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes and the Max Rebo Band." It's the music played in the famous cantina scene in Episode IV, and in Jabba's court in Episode VI.
This is jizz:
This is also jizz:
No? Maybe it will ring a bell if you let it seep into your ears while watching this GIF?
Yes, that's right, you've almost certainly always cherished John Williams' jizz, without even realizing it!
Jizz is an integral part of most everyone's Star Wars experience. And yet despite the fact that jizz is everywhere, not much is known about jizz.
Indeed, the first reference to jizz comes in the novelization of Return of the Jedi, which describes Max Rebo's band at work:
"Although Max Rebo had been leading his band through a variation on a popular jizz-wailer standard, Sy Snootles slyly batted her long eyelashes and began belting out improvised lyrics that would have been officially banned by the Empire."
The most comprehensive look at jizz culture comes in the 1995 expanded universe story collection Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, the back cover of which teases "In a far off corner of the universe, on the small desert planet of Tatooine, there is a dark, nic-i-tain-filled cantina where you can down your favorite intoxicant while listening to the best jizz riffs in the universe. "
In the few direct references to jizz in the book, the musical styling is slipped into the prose with little fanfare:
"My Fizzz— you symphonic ridgebrows would call it a Dorenian Beshniquel, but this is jizz—slips into a thin case in less time than it takes to roll an Imperial inspector and check his pockets for credit vouchers."
That's jizz in a nutshell— it comes at you fast.
What else do we know about jizz? Well, the two most notable jizz instruments are the slitherhorn and the trusty jizz-box. In the 1997 novel Planet of Twilight, C3P0 (That's right! Ole 3P0 is no stranger to the classic jizz standards) auditions to play jizz at a cantina called 'Wookie's Codpiece' on Nim Drovis. The assistant manager is less than impressed with the droid's jizz skills:
"You sound like a festerin' jizz-box. I got a festerin' jizz-box right over there in that corner," the manager tells 3PO.
That's about the extent of what's been written down about the music. And that's why its so important, as the hype for the new Star Wars builds to a pulsing climax over the next year, that we demand J.J. Abrams continue to dredge up moments of nostalgia from the folds of our adolescent brains by assuring that the new film is chock full of crowd-pleasing jizz.