I’ve collected lots and lots of things throughout my life — little things like little plastic monsters and big things like full-size arcade cabinets — but all of my collecting roots can all be traced back to my first true love: Star Wars.
I saw Star Wars for the first time in 1977 at the age of four. I’ve always said that the opening scene of Star Wars (in which we see Princess Leia’s ship being chased by an Imperial Star Destroyer) ultimately cost me thousands of dollars in collectables over the years. And if that scene hooked me, the cantina scene, with all its monsters and weirdness, reeled me in.
Lucasfilm and Kenner were caught off guard by the box office success of Star Wars; as a result no official toys or action figures were ready by the Christmas of 1977. That didn’t stop kids like me from clamoring for anything related to Star Wars. The first thing I can remember collecting were Star Wars trading cards included in packages of Wonderbread. Long before I had the toys I had posters and stickers and picture books.
In 1978, the floodgates were opened. Manufacturing ramped up and Star Wars figures began filtering into stores. For the Christmas of 1978, I got… everything. Santa filled my stocking to the top with all the available figures at that time, and I got a Landspeeder, a TIE Fighter, and an X-Wing Fighter to go with them.
And it wasn’t just me — all the kids in my neighborhood had Star Wars toys. The action figures were like currency for kids, traded among friends. Kids gave them as presents at birthday parties. You could usually talk your parents out of one when visiting the store. I got a new figure every time I brought home a good report card.
Three years after Star Wars was released came Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi was released three years after that. Every year from 1978 to 1984 I received Star Wars items for my birthday, for Christmas, and any other time I went to the store and could talk my parents out of a couple of bucks. Along with the toys I also had shirts, hats, school folders, pencils, alarm clocks, toothbrushes, and more. If they could slap the Star Wars logo on it, I wanted one of them.
Of course back then I don’t think we referred to any of this as collecting — in other words, I never asked for anything that I didn’t intend on using or playing with. The thought of buying a new Star Wars item and leaving it unopened in the box was inconceivable. We played the heck out of these things! Wadded up white sheets became the icy planet of Hoth, while the sandbox and rocks off our front porch became the desolate desert of Tatooine.
Before long many of my Star Wars friends began to defect, moving on to G. I. Joe, He-Man, Hot Wheels, Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and whatever else came along. I was the last of the neighborhood loyalists. I turned twelve the summer of ’85 and by then, almost all of us had outgrown our little plastic friends. We began to spend more time riding our bikes and swimming and playing in the creek. We moved on to home computers, playing video games and hanging out at arcades. As my friends left Star Wars behind they got rid of their toys, but for some reason I never did. My sizable Star Wars collection went into boxes and put away in the closet. Some went out in the garage or in the shed. There they stayed for the next decade.
A few years after graduating high school I moved in with Susan, my future wife.
In 1993, two years after graduating high school, I moved in with Susan (my future wife). The two of us lived in a three-bedroom mobile home for a couple of years. In the corner of my computer room I set up some metal shelves and, for the first time in almost ten years, pulled out my old Star Wars toys and put them on display. I loved looking at them and I loved it when people would see them and say, “I remember those!”
I had a Star Wars cake at my wedding.
I loved the feeling so much that when I got my first desk job at the Federal Aviation Administration just a few years later, I took some of my toys to work with me. Some of my co-workers saw my collection and actually added to it! Keep in mind this was ten years after the last Star Wars movie had been released, so most people were “over it” by then. It was not uncommon at that time to find Star Wars toys at thrift stores, antique shops and garage sales. These were the days before eBay, back when old and used toys were often classified as junk rather than family heirlooms.
The same year I began working for the FAA, Kenner began selling Star Wars figures again. This new Power of the Force line of figures got off to a rocky start with overly buff versions of male characters and some questionable facial sculpts (see: “monkey-faced Leia”), but soon levelled out and took off. The difference this time around was that these figures were being scooped up and hoarded by collectors rather than kids.
The combination of new Star Wars figures on shelves and a well-paying job turned out to be a bad combination for me! Every payday I found myself scouring the shelves of Walmart, Target and Toys R Us, looking for any figures I didn’t already have in my collection. This was the point where Star Wars collecting changed for me. Prior to the Power of the Force line, everything I had owned or collected had come from the vintage line — things I had seen or played with as a kid. Suddenly I was buying things not to open and play with, but to display.
I suppose the best thing about that era was that Star Wars toys were literally everywhere, thanks to the Special Editions of the original trilogy films in theaters released in 1997. Where only a few years prior one had to search garage sales and thrift stores for Star Wars items, suddenly you could find Star Wars drink toppers on your drink at Pizza Hut, Star Wars toys in your Taco Bell combo and Star Wars toys inside your kid’s McDonald’s Happy Meal. The ten year drought quickly turned into a flood with Star Wars school supplies back in stores and Star Wars party supplies in local bargain stores.
And I bought one of everything I could get my hands on.
All of this was building toward the release of the first new Star Wars movie in fifteen years. Episode One: The Phantom Menace, released in 1999, reintroduced Star Wars to an entire new generation of kids.
Soon there were so many Star Wars items available on the market that I had to pick and choose just what subset of Star Wars items I was going to collect, as collecting everything became impossible. I collected Star Wars helmets and masks for a while. I have several Star Wars lunch boxes. For a while I focused on the 12″ line of figures. Then I went after Pez dispensers. No matter what microcosm of collecting you were drawn to, the Star Wars marketing machine made sure there was something available for you to purchase.
My son Mason was born in 2001; my daughter Morgan, 2005. Priorities change, and with two kids at home, spending all my spare time and money buying toys for myself didn’t seem quite so important. Eventually we needed the space inside our home for kids instead of toys. By the time the kids began crawling, my Star Wars collection was boxed up into plastic tubs and put into storage. There it remained for half a decade.
In 2011 my family and I purchased a monster of a new house, one we could never outgrow with five bedrooms, three living areas, two home offices, and lots and lots of space — again, more space than we needed, but the house was such a good deal that we bought it anyway. With all the newfound space we ended up with a couple of spare bedrooms, one of which I quickly claimed and declared as the new Star Wars room.
Starting with store-bought shelves and adding custom shelves around them, I filled the room floor-to-ceiling with shelves and filled the shelves with my Star Wars collection. Like the most amazing Christmas ever, I opened up tub after tub and pulled each toy out one out one at a time, finding a spot for each one on a shelf. I probably spent a week arranging and rearranging things, organizing them this way and that.
The whole collection didn’t end up in the Star Wars room. A small bookshelf at the top of the stairs holds my collection of 6″ Black Star Wars figures. A separate bookshelf in the hallway outside the room displays my collection of vintage Star Wars toys still in the original packaging. A few Star Wars helmets and stuffed animals adorn the movie room. For the most part though, everything related to Star Wars ends up in the Star Wars room.
And that’s where they remain today — the figures and the spaceships and the playsets and the stuffed animals and the trading cards and the books and the video games and the boxes of cereal and the DVDs and the VHS tapes and the cassettes and records and everything else that has the Star Wars logo emblazoned on it. Each time a new item enters the room, things get scooched a little closer together to make room.
Recently I added a sheet of peg board to hold all my carded figures. Well, most of them.
Through the internet I’ve been able to both show off my collection as well as meet other collectors. There are some super collectors out there I’ve had the privilege of meeting, guys like Tom Berges from iGrewUpStarWars and Steve Sansweet (author, collector, and proprietor of Rancho Obi-Wan who have actual artifacts from the movies and one-of-a-kind items, things I could never dream of owning. Then again, I own things those guys could never own — those same action figures I had as a kid.
Fun to see. Thanks for sharing.