It all began in the spring of 1988, when my six-year-old son saw some TV commercials and started asking to go to a new adventure film that had just come out. I agreed to take him, but I was in no hurry to deliver on that promise. We had a lot of other things to do, and escorting young children to the movies isn't usually a very interesting experience for the adult. It was early September before we actually went to the theater to see WILLOW.

I was completely unprepared for what happened next. I've seen plenty of movies that I liked, but none of them ever reached out and grabbed me quite the way this one did. WILLOW has an emotional core wrapped in a mythic setting that is unlike anything I've seen in any other film.

Movies are larger than life, and as a general rule I don't identify with the lead characters. They're too beautiful, too strong, just too far removed from reality. But although the action in WILLOW occurs in a fantasy world, the movie cast a little person as the hero, and that brought the character down to life size for me. Beyond that, the movie took great pains to establish the Nelwyns as real people, and Willow as someone whose feelings and problems I could identify with. And the quest wasn't for glory or wealth or romance, and not really even for freedom - it was to save a baby for love's sake. There's almost no situation where I would deliberately risk my own life, but WILLOW presented a scenario where I could agree the sacrifice was justified. In other words, it was the human element in the movie that really got my attention, and the exciting storyline, humor, gorgeous scenery, and marvelous special effects were just icing on the cake.

I was hooked. Fortunately for me, my son was too. When he asked to go to the movie over and over again, I was more than happy to take him. When the movie left the theater we bought the videotape, which now has plenty of mileage on it. We've got the movie so well memorized that it's not really necessary to watch it any more, but sometimes we do it anyway.

And now the story takes a strange turn. WILLOW turned me into a permanent fan of Warwick Davis, the movie's star, but for a long time I didn't hear anything more about him. Then one day in 1994 or 1995 I heard a radio ad for the video release of Leprechaun 2 that mentioned his name. It was the first time I'd heard that he was in a movie other than WILLOW and his Ewok roles, and even though I didn't like horror movies I lost no time in renting the available titles. The Leprechaun movies are famous in an infamous kind of way; the people who love them are apparently outnumbered by the people who hate them, but the strong cult following has resulted in five successful films to date. The low-budget series is pretty far removed from WILLOW, but it has this much in common with George Lucas' magical tale: it's the story of a little guy against the world, with a twist. This time the little guy is powerful. He can do absolutely anything he wants, and gleefully destroys anyone who annoys him. Who doesn't secretly wish for that much control over their life? It was a vicarious power trip, and I loved it.

I first logged onto the internet in 1998, and took full advantage of the opportunity to look for information on my favorite actor and his movies. There wasn't much WILLOW-oriented activity at the time, but Ficky's Leprechaun Page was operating at full steam. I started sending any remotely relevant scraps of information I could find to the webmaster. But right about this time the page's updates became few and far between, and in April 1999 Ficky told me he needed help to keep the page active and asked me to be his assistant.

Until that moment the idea of working on a webpage had never crossed my mind. It sounded pretty scary, but the alternative was to lose the web's only active source of concentrated Leprechaun news. So I agreed, learned HTML from a library book, and spent large amounts of time finding and assembling new information. After some initial stress and strain I even started having fun doing it. But the partnership didn't work out. Ficky didn't have time to review my work, and I didn't have the password to post updates myself.

While I was steaming with frustration over this, Dave 'Taalcon' Tayman started a very active webpage at Willow.Lucasfan.Com that blended his own previous WILLOW page with material taken (with permission) from several inactive pages, along with a significant quantity of new information. I had several WILLOW-related articles that weren't on the web, plus a modest collection of WILLOW merchandise that I could scan. Taal accepted my offer to send him this material, and to my great pleasure my contributions were soon being published on the web. When I ran out of material, I started looking for more and quickly became addicted to the auctions on eBay. Nowadays my collection of WILLOW merchandise is a lot bigger than it used to be.

But I was still unhappy with the Leprechaun situation. After months of inactivity, with the fifth movie of the series in production and no one to report on it, I realized it was time to take control of the situation and start my own webpage. I decided to make it a double page while I was at it. And so Connie's Warwick Davis Fanpage and Leprechaun Center was born in February 2000. I thought about making it a triple page with a comprehensive section devoted to WILLOW, but with Taal's page so active (and my best material already posted on it) there was no point.

Time passed. I expanded my webpage and kept contributing material to Willow.Lucasfan.Com. But then Taal's life got busier and his WILLOW updates became less and less frequent, to the point where I was afraid the page would become completely inactive. I couldn't just stand by and let that happen, so I volunteered to be co-webmaster (yeah, I know I'm pushy). Taal accepted my offer, and I officially joined the webpage staff in August 2000. I was overjoyed when he gave me the password so I could post updates myself - I hadn't expected to have that much power. The theory was that either of us could post any time we wanted to, but in practice I've been doing the updates while Taal helps out with occasional advice. The work keeps me pretty busy; I spent almost a year on major projects adding new sections and expanding the old ones. A less pleasant project came in early 2001, when we unexpectedly lost our server and had to move. Getting a permanent host took several months, and the page was renamed because we couldn't use the old URL. In recent months it's been very exciting reporting the DVD news, and other material keeps turning up too.

So now I'm running two webpages and enjoying it thoroughly, plus serving as caretaker for Ficky's Leprechaun Page (which lost its original server in 2000). All my hobbies involve large quantities of small detail in some fashion, and the webpages are part of this lifestyle. The complex process of doing the research and then organizing and publishing my findings feeds right into my detail-freak nature, and provides countless hours of entertainment. And there are so many other benefits. I've stayed well-informed on subjects that interest me, learned new computer skills, and made new friends. I'm the first to admit that the webpages are frivolous, but the work on them feels more important than my paid job does. It's like I'm performing a public service; there's a demand for this information and somebody has to satisfy it. I'm just utterly amazed that the 'somebody' turned out to be me. I'm even receiving fan mail now. Three years ago I never dreamed that any of this could happen.