The Star Wars movies, books, comics, and radio dramas were some of the most wonderful things to me in my childhood to mid teen years, and I feel no shame in how much of a role they played in my life. I count the EU novels to be one of the big reasons I developed a love for reading--and by extension--writing.
Anyway, when I was a kid, my brothers and I had a ton of Star Wars toys. I mean a TON of them, from different manufacturing runs and decades from before I was even born. We never had a lot of random toys lying around everywhere like you might imagine a
spoiled kid might have had, but we scrimped and saved allowances for each action figure and begged Santa for the more expensive vehicle sets (my poor, poor mother). Because of this, each acquisition was precious and well played with. (Unfortunately, that also means we no longer have any boxes for the collector items, more about that later.)
When my three brothers and I grew up, other things took priority over continuing our Star Wars collection: a sofa to sit on, a $50 TV from the D.I., a kitchen table, those sorts of things. We got married, got jobs, went to college, etc. Unfortunately none of us really had room for our old Star Wars collection in our little apartments, and my mom eventually boxed everything up and stuck them in the garage.
Until now.
I've always been a geek (the kind that gets bullied at school because they can't bring themselves to hide it) and as I grew up, I never lost my love for fantasy and scifi. I've recently begun to embrace that aspect of my life once more and my new collection of superhero action figures and comics has slowly been growing as I rewatch the old Star Trek TNG/Voyager/DS9 episodes and write fantasy novels.
My mind has naturally turned once more to the boxes of Star Wars toys at my mother's house.
So, a couple weeks ago, I stopped by and broke open the boxes for the first time in years (while screaming like a girl at the spiderwebs).
It was like Christmas times twenty. I didn't even
remember some of the stuff I found before I actually pulled them out! My HUGE X-wing fighter, the MASSIVE Millennium Falcon, our SWEET AT-AT walker, not to mention the
hundreds of action figures. We have playsets, SW micro-machines, full-size lightsabers, puzzles, and half a dozen smaller vehicles like the A-wing, Luke's landspeeder, a special edition snowspeeder based off a Ralph McQuarrie painting, and much more.
Perhaps most valuable are the dozen or so
original Kenner toys from the '80s, including such figures as telescoping lightsaber Darth Vader (x2), RoTJ Obi-wan, Imperial Star Destroyer Controller, AT-AT Pilot, Walrus Face, Weequay (x2), and a many more I can't recall at the moment. We even have a super rare RoTJ Anakin Skywalker that would be worth BIG (and I mean MEGA) bucks if we only had the box he came in. This is super painful, because he'd be worth more than a lot of used cars if we had never opened him up (not that I'd ever sell him anyway, nostalgia and all that).
But I wasn't prepared for the wave of comfy nostalgia brought on by my pride and joy: a set of 1998 12" fully-poseable dolls with real cloth costumes and armor. There's Luke, Han, Darth Vader, Obi-wan, and Luke with Hoth gear. Man, we had so much fun with those (I used to swap Darth Vader's clothes to Luke and pretend he'd turned to the Dark Side like in the graphic novels). They just don't make toys like that any more.
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I'll add some better
pictures later. |
Each one belongs to a different brother, with the two Lukes belonging to me, but for now, they're all residing at my house with the rest of the Star Wars stuff (minus the toys from the Prequels, they went back in the boxes and are now sleeping with the spiders, as is fitting. Seriously, screw them). My dearest wish is to continue adding more of the 1998 12" dolls to that collection, since Amazon has a ton of characters I never knew belonged to that particular toy line. There's even a Boba Fett, which I think I might faint when I can finally afford to buy (peeps love that bounty hunter, so he's kind of expensive).
I dedicated a whole corner of my writing office to the display shelves that reach almost to the ceiling and stare at the collection for perhaps longer than is strictly necessary. I don't know why it took me so long to reclaim everything from my mom's house, but I'm really glad I finally did. I'm sure at some point my brothers will also come to their senses and start stripping their personally-owned toys from the collection (as is their right), but until then, I just gotta work on building my own collection to fill in the eventual gaps.
So yeah, I have a geeky collection once again, and life is good.
UPDATE: I have just purchased two new 12" figures: Luke Skywalker in black Jedi gear, and Emperor Palpatine from RoTJ.
This 12" Han Solo figure is the quintessential smuggler as we know him from Episode 4: A New Hope. It's the clothing every kid wanted to dress up in, and every girl swooned over. (Those tight pants and low-slung belt? Yeah, sexy). Something about the outfit fits perfectly with Han's swagger when he boasts that the Millennium Falcon was the one "who made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" to a skeptical Obi-wan and confused Luke. (Most likely because parsecs are a unit of distance, not speed. However, this isn't actually a mistake on Han's or the scriptwriters' part, seeing as the Kessel Run is a well-traveled smuggler's path that runs through an asteroid field edged by a cluster of black holes. The closer one pilots their ship to the black holes to avoid losing time dodging among the asteroids, the more space and time are warped, thereby shaving distance from the route. This makes Han's boast not only correct, but an impressively dangerous accomplishment.)
