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Star Wars Fun Fact
Surprising and little known Star Wars tidbits, usually related to today’s Force Feature.Did you know? Mark Hamill will be 64 when Star Wars: Episode VII comes out, which is just one year older than Sir Alec Guinness was when the original Star Wars debuted in 1977. The symmetry is almost too delicious to bear.
Life on “Tweet”-ooine
A featured dispatch from the Star Wars Twitterverse!Once I was high on deathsticks and imagined there was a little man inside R2-D2.
— Ordinary Star Wars (@OrdinarySW) August 24, 2014
Star Wars Swag Bag
So many fun, quirky, and awesome ways to bring Star Wars into your daily life!Star Wars Trailer Hitch Covers – click the pic for details!
Trivia Time!
Test your knowledge of the Star Wars universe!Yesterday’s answer: General Madine
Today’s question: Who took out a scout walker pilot with a single well-placed blaster shot?
Force Feature:
Exploring the many worlds of Star Wars, in the imagination and in real life!The guys on the Star Wars Minute Podcast, Alex Robinson and Pete the Retailer, often say that people get mad at them when they spend time talking about the toys of Star Wars.
Now, here’s the thing. I find that kind of crazy. Why? Because if you grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy, as I did, then the chances are very good that toys are an integral part of your overall Star Wars experience. My sons have seen all the movies, and they say they love them (though I can’t bear to let my 6-year-old see a couple key parts of Revenge of the Sith yet). They don’t care so much about toys in general, let alone Star Wars toys. But they’ve grown up in a totally different world!
If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, and you loved Star Wars, you had the toys. And if you didn’t have the Death Star Battle Station or the Millennium Falcon or the AT-AT, you knew someone who did, and you were a little bit jealous of them even as they let you play with theirs. I had the Falcon and the Walker, but never got the Death Star as a kid, and for Valentine’s Day one year, my wife found one on eBay and got it for me. Now that’s true love, right?
I pretty much stopped when Kenner stopped in 1985, which would have made me 14 turning 15 that year. I was already in high school, and by then, everything was in the boxes and the carrying cases and in the closet, not out on display. Back then, we had no sense that these were going to become “collectible.” There wasn’t really such a thing back then. I mean, there was, but nothing as huge as it is today, where multiple reality TV shows document people’s various hoarding and collecting activity. I knew that certain comic books were worth a lot of money, but not my action figures and vehicles and playsets.
But why didn’t those toys get thrown away, given away, or otherwise be consigned to the dustbins of time? Why did they get held onto, to the point where people who wanted them as they got older started creating that secondary market for them, creating the collectible value for the toys?
I just read a bit of the history of RebelScum.com, one of the pre-eminent sites focused on Star Wars toys. It was started by Philip Wise back in 1996, which puts it 13 years after Return of the Jedi, 5 years into the Expanded Universe novels (which were coming out in a trickle, not the flood of the Prequel Trilogy years). In other words, it took that long for the vintage collecting bug to bite the generation of people who grew up on the Original Trilogy. Long enough to move out, get through college, land their first jobs, and start to get nostalgic about their childhoods.
My stuff was in storage, and I was thrilled, thrilled! when I got my first apartment, and was able to bring the toys out of storage and back into my own living space. They stayed in the closet, because I didn’t have friends with that same interest. But it mattered enough for me to keep them, and it mattered enough to make some people I knew buy the newer Hasbro figures by the case, and others spend hundreds if not thousands for some vintage rarities.
Why? Because the toys were the experience. And that’s why it blows me away to hear that people complained to the Star Wars Minute guys about toy talk. Because if you grew up on it, how do you separate yourself from it? When we didn’t have the movies to watch on demand, or the video games to play at will, we had the toys. That was our Expanded Universe, and we were inventing it ourselves.
So for me, that’s why the vintage toys will always be relevant, and why it makes me happy to stroll down the toy aisle at Toys ‘R Us and see what’s out now. You know that phrase, “It’s just like being a kid again”? That’s when and where I feel it.