I’m an action figure guy. I was seven years old when the original Star Wars came out, so I suppose I was fated to be this way. Okay, maybe not. Most kids of my generation grew out of their plastic addictions and moved on to bigger and better things (like girls, music and beer)….which I most certainly did. I grew up, swung with the ladies, fathered a couple of kids, got a long-term job, and turned 40 last year. And yet…
Well, my love of action figures never quite went away.
It started, as mentioned above, with
Star Wars in 1977. I was given Kenner’s Early Bird Certificate Package as a Christmas present, which worked like this: You got an empty box which contained a voucher for the first four figures (Luke, Chewbacca, R2-D2, and Princess Leia), which would be mailed to you… when Kenner actually made them. You see,
Star Wars had been an unexpected smash hit; so unexpected that toys weren’t available when the film first came out!
So in the spring of 1978, my first four figures arrived in the mail. Around the same time, the same four figures --- plus eight others --- became available at retail. Throughout the rest of the year, an additional eight were released, and I snagged every last one of ‘em. There was a dry spell in 1979, save for one very notable exception: Kenner offered an exclusive mail-away Boba Fett, a character who would make his debut the following year in
The Empire Strikes Back. I still remember the day he arrived in the mail, in that tiny plain white box…
Even though I had every action figure up to that point, I never had many of the vehicles (my friend Jeff had them all, as I recall, including the coveted Millennium Falcon, which I never had, a fact that bums me out to this day). I did have a Snowspeeder, which I was quite enamored of, and the ridiculous Twin Pod Cloud Car, which (at the time) was basically the equivalent of a Barbie Corvette.*
Star Wars characters frequently traveled on large creatures, and I had the Patrol Dewback (the ultra-cool giant lizards ridden by Sandtroopers on Tattooine) and a Taun-Taun (the first version, not the neater second version with the slit in the stomach to shove your frozen Luke into). That’s pretty much it. My friend Jeff Morton had an X-wing, a TIE Fighter, the Jawa Sandcrawler, the above-mentioned Falcon… I think that motherfucker even had the AT-AT. He had EVERYTHING. He also had tons of GI Joes and Micronauts. The kid was rich (at least compared to me). I idolized that guy… but that’s another story for another time.
Kenner also released several “playsets” exclusively through Sears, which were basically cardboard backdrops designed to evoke a certain location in the film(s) with a few related figures included. My grandmother bought everything through the Sears catalogue, so I ended up with several of these playsets, including the Mos Eisley cantina (which is how I ended up with the rare “Blue Snaggletooth” figure, which was never available elsewhere, and which is now quite valuable). I don’t remember if Jeff had the Sears playsets or not… Hmmm, maybe I had an advantage over him after all.
Anyway, despite my relative lack of ships, I had a fairly impressive collection of the figures themselves, and for five or six glorious years, they were an integral part of my life. I remember staging elaborate adventures with them in my room, accompanied by the soundtrack album (which played endlessly on my little record player with the flashing disco lights). I remember dragging them to school in a vinyl drawstring bag to play with during recess (I lost most of the accessories as a result). I took them everywhere. A weekend at Grandma’s? A slumber party at a friend’s house? A camping trip? They came with me. Everywhere.
May 1980.
The Empire Strikes Back had just been released, but I hadn’t seen it yet. I was at the Tualatin K-mart with my mom, and as I headed over to the toy section, I was met with a gigantic bin full of brand new
Empire figures. Okay, maybe it was just a regular-sized bin, but seen through ecstatic 10 year-old eyes, the thing was enormous. It was stuffed, I tell you, STUFFED full of brand new figures: characters I’d never seen or heard of, familiar characters in new outfits. Dear god, I was absolutely spellbound. They were $1.77 each. I had five bucks, which meant two of them were coming home with me.
There was this tall skinny robot called IG-88. He looked pretty cool, and he came with TWO guns (which was a first, I believe). I had to have him, even though I had no idea that he’d be in the movie for a total of about one minute and would do virtually nothing but stand there.
The other figure I chose, meanwhile, would prove to be one of my favorite
Star Wars figures of all time: Luke Skywalker, in Bespin fatigues.
It was the same Luke I knew and loved (he had the exact same head as the Luke figure from the first movie) but now he had a blaster AND a lightsaber (I should note that this lightsaber was a separate accessory; this was significant because earlier figures had their lightsabers built directly into their arms… the blade would “retract” into a slot in the arm, which was admittedly a clever approach), not to mention those cool khaki fatigues. Sold! I opened him as soon as I got to the car. I recall losing the yellow lightsaber briefly and experiencing a mild panic attack, crawling frantically around the back seat until I found it in the cushion folds (hey, we didn’t wear seatbelts back then).
In the months that followed, I started hitting K-mart as often as my mom would take me (and when I had money). I collected every figure released through 1981. A new assortment of
Empire figures came out in 1982, but I only bought a few of them: 4LOM, who I would discover years later was actually called Zuckuss (long story), plus another Luke (this time in his Hoth battle gear), and (I think) a Bespin security guard (the white one with the mustache, I never did see the black variant). But that was it. I guess my interest was beginning to fade.
Girls and music were becoming a huge part of my landscape (plus I’d discovered
The Twilight Zone in reruns, which supplanted
Star Wars as my lifelong obsession), and playing with toys quickly lost its appeal. I was 12 by the time
Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, but I did buy two figures from that film before calling it quits for good (I still remember which two: Biker Scout and Emperor’s Royal Guard, both of which I still maintain are among the finest in the original line). A year or two later, I “loaned” my entire collection to a distant cousin. I never saw them again. I heard through the family grapevine that this cousin had blown them up with firecrackers on the 4th of July, but I didn’t care. It didn’t even bother me that my rare Blue Snaggletooth had been destroyed. I was in high school. Life --- priorities, focus, passions, everything --- had changed.
Life moved forward. I went to college for a while. I got married. I had kids.
In the mid-90’s (in my mid-20’s) I was a big fan of
Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly The Borg. I spotted a Borg action figure at Target one day, and thought it would look cool sitting on a bookshelf. I bought it. The next time I went to Target, I spotted a different Borg figure. I bought that one too. And from there, my OCD went into overdrive (as it has done repeatedly throughout my life) and I found myself collecting
Star Trek: TNG figures (not that whiny punk Wesley Crusher, though; I did have my limits). I think I had 30 or so when I finally lost interest about a year later. I ended up selling the whole lot of them (for a fraction of what I’d paid) to Dr. T’s 3-D House of Collectible Toys (which has long since gone under, sadly).
Fast forward to 1997. Kenner (now Hasbro) started making
Star Wars figures again. My friend Jason and I became instantly obsessed, frequently sojourning out to track them down (
goin’ figgin’, we called it, which has a nice Huckleberry Finn sound to it). I bought every new figure as it was released. I stopped in 1999, when
Episode 1: The Phantom Menace came out. I dunno, maybe turning 30 and getting divorced had something to do with it (or, just as plausibly, I may have been bitter over the fact that
The Phantom Menace was so awful that it temporarily poisoned my love of
Star Wars). I gave my figures to my kids (except for a select few: Boba Fett, a Stormtrooper, a Sandtrooper, and a Carbonite-frozen Han Solo. Those were too cool to give up. In my newly-acquired bachelor pad, they occupied a single shelf, the only evidence that I was a Star Wars nerd at heart.
I got remarried in 2005 and moved into a house, a perk of which was an office, a room all to myself, to decorate as I saw fit! It occurred to me that a battalion of Imperial troops would look really cool among my shelves of DVDs and books. I hit eBay and made it happen. It then occurred to me that, in the interest of fair play, a squadron of X-wing pilots would be appropriate. Check. It then occurred to me that, since the bounty hunters from
The Empire Strikes Back were really cool, I should probably get those too. Check again. Oh, and the Imperial officers, led by Darth Vader, would be a nice compliment to the bounty hunters. Check thrice. Before I knew it, I had allocated three entire shelves to
Star Wars figures. But hey, it was cool. They weren’t in the way, they weren’t out on display in the house (my office was part of the garage), and in all honesty, I’d evolved past giving a shit what anybody thought (I should mention that the figures I was buying at this point were the modern versions, not the originals. For display purposes, the newer figures are much more poseable, plus they just plain look cooler. The old figures are awesome, don’t get me wrong, but they look like quaint toys. Modern action figures are more like highly-detailed little statues).
In 2008, I converted my office into a high-definition mini-theater. Most of the contents of my office remained unchanged, but I found I needed more room for movies (especially since I’d started amassing blu-ray discs and expanding my foreign film collection). The
Star Wars figures were forced into semi-retirement and relocated to a box (actually a double-thick paper grocery bag) in the garage.
Earlier this year we moved into a different house. The bag of
Star Wars figures moved with us, and are currently buried somewhere in our new garage. I’ve actually been meaning to dig them out, with the intent of selling them on eBay. It’s not that I’m too old for them (my current collection of
Twilight Zone figures and bobble heads will attest to that). It’s just that I thought I was pretty much over
Star Wars, at least from an action figure perspective.
Something happened today, however, that’s making me reconsider.
Back up a bit. I should mention that this year, 2010, marks the 30th anniversary of
The Empire Strikes Back (which came out in 1980, smack dab in the middle of my
Star Wars obsession), and to celebrate, Kenner (now Hasbro) has released a collection of
Empire-specific figures with vintage-style packaging. I saw a few of them last week at Fred Meyer, admired them, and moved on. Today, however, was a different story. I was killing time at the Oregon City K-mart during my lunch hour, and I meandered over to the toy section. They had the
Empire figures too, only they had one I hadn’t seen before.
Luke Skywalker, in Bespin fatigues.
The figure was brand new, ultra-articulated, super detailed, authentic facial likeness and everything. But the packaging was identical, more or less, to the packaging I saw that fateful day in May of 1980 when I first encountered the original version of the figure. Standing there on the toy aisle, teetering to and fro on 40 year-old feet, I was overcome with excitement, waves of breathtaking nostalgia washing over me. It was as if 30+ years hadn’t passed at all, and I was still that 10 year-old kid who ate, slept and dreamt
Star Wars.
I bought it. Of course I bought it. It sat on my desk all afternoon, a glimmering plastic porthole into my past, distracting me from my work, crowding out the trappings of adulthood, clearing my landscape to better clarify my memories of hours, days, weeks, months playing with my
Star Wars figures and nothing else. What else did I need then? Coworkers gave me odd looks as they passed. I didn’t care.
And to think I found it at K-mart of all places! Granted, it was the Oregon City store and not Tualatin, but it’s still a pretty nice bookend to a 30-year story. And look, they’re even doing a Boba Fett mail-in promo, just like back then.
This weekend I’m gonna dig through the stacks of boxes in the garage until I find my bag of figures. But I don’t think I’ll be putting them on eBay. There’s a Darth Vader in there, and I foresee a plastic reenactment of a certain battle at Cloud City. I’ve even got the
Empire soundtrack on my iPod…
*My hatred of the Twin Pod Cloud Car has softened considerably over the years. I now appreciate its quaintness and uniqueness (nothing else in the Star Wars universe looks anything like it), and I get a Metropolis/Flash Gordon vibe when I see it soaring through the clouds surrounding Cloud City. Coincidentally, an updated toy version of the vehicle has FINALLY been released, just within the last few months. I’m not sure what took Hasbro so long to redo it, especially since they’ve redone every other damn vehicle several times over.
Left to right: John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Julian "Cannonball" Adderly (alto saxophone), Miles Davis (trumpet), Bill Evans (piano). Not pictured: Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums), Wynton Kelly (piano)
