May the 4th has unofficially become “Star Wars Day” for millions of fans around the world (“May the Fourth Be With You”). People celebrate this somewhat low key holiday by posting Star Wars pictures on Facebook each May the 4th. I decided to do something a bit different this year and add to my Star Wars collection.
(Oh, who am I kidding? I would have been perfectly content to do that on May the 3rd or May the 5th. But not the 6th. That day is “Revenge of the Sixth”.)
On May 4th I found myself in not particularly unfamiliar territory — the Star Wars section of my local Vintage Stock. If I have one complaint with the store it’s that I’ve mostly picked over what I plan on buying and the vintage Star Wars toys (understandably) don’t seem to turn over too often. The store is planning a Memorial Day sale; I need to be sure to hit the other local locations that weekend as well.
In the vintage figure section, I found these three figures on the left: the A-Wing Pilot, Death Squad Commander, the the Death Star Droid. Ignore the big blue guy (“Mas Amadda”) on the right. He’s from the new movies; I only bought him because he was $1.99.
I also found two of these TIE Fighters:
I ran across two slightly different ones and I couldn’t remember which one I had, so I bought them both. Turns out, I didn’t have either one! The Darth Vader TIE Fighters on the ends are essentially identical except the one on the left is slightly larger. The one in the middle is “battle damaged,” something that became popular when Lucas and Kenner discovered that buy damaging their ships a bit they could damage their fans’ bank accounts a whole lot. At first glance I thought that the battle damage had been done by the previous owner, but a closer look revealed damage details in the dark areas.
I had a pretty good May the 4th! I wish I could say I am looking forward to adding to my Star Wars collection next May the 4th, and while I will probably do that, chances are strong that I will be adding to it before then too.