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This Date in Star Wars History
Hey, I’ll bet you know Adam Savage best as one half of hosting duo on the fantabulous MythBusters show. But did you know that he worked for ILM building ships and miniature sets for Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones? Talk about someone doing well for himself after exiting the Star Wars machine. Happy birthday, Adam!
Life on “Tweet”-ooine
Relationship Status: Waiting for Star Wars Episode VII
— Darth Vader (@DepressedDarth) July 12, 2014
Star Wars Swag Bag
Imperial Logo t-shirt – click the pic!
Trivia Time!
Yesterday’s answer: C-3PO
Today’s question: Whose last word in Star Wars was, “What?”
Force Feature: RebelScum.com
I read an interview with Dustin Roberts, Content Manager of the TheForce.Net, about how he was collecting everything under the sun related to Star Wars, but as he realized the scope of what was possible – that people have barns full of stuff – he decided to narrow his focus. Now, he has a spectacular (and manageable!) collection of R2D2 memorabilia.
It’s that kind of thinking that led me over to RebelScum.com, which is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, sources for Star Wars collecting news. As a side note, it turns out that one of the guys who runs TheForce.Net, Philip Wise, also owns Official Pix, which is a Lucasfilm licensee and gets to print official photos and autographs from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. Not too shabby.
RebelScum also runs a set of forums, and though the numbers aren’t as big as the Jedi Council’s we talked about yesterday, the numbers are still pretty darned impressive: more than 28,000 members, 300,000 threads and 5 million posts. Toys are a big part of this, as you might imagine, but there’s sooo much more to the collecting universe. Posters, toothbrushes, the drink glasses you could get from Burger King (I’ve got those stashed around here somewhere). Check out some of the answers from a thread that asked members what the weirdest item is in their Star Wars collection. A lot of this is either unlicensed, or available only in foreign countries:
- Ceramic R2D2 candle holder
- Landspeeder soap dish
- Bootleg Brazilian Darth Maul squeak toy
- Bag of Yoda’s Own Tea Blend from Denmark
- George Lucas’s old car registrations
- Pages of Carrie Fisher’s teenage diary
- Jabba the Hutt carving in lemon quartz
- Star Wars pancake cutters
- Slave Leia blow-up doll (said they were going to post pics but didn’t – I know there are a lot of custom bootlegs out there, but I’m seriously doubting the truth of this one!)
- Star Wars green army men
- A 45 rpm single of the Danish band “Los Valentinos” covering the “Star War’s Theme” [sic]
Somewhere, I think my mother has still saved the head of R2D2 from a giant store display of Star Wars shampoo and bath products that was bigger than a life-sized R2. One of my weirder things is that I have a copy of Volume 2, issue 1 (the final issue) of Report From the Star Wars Generation, a fan magazine that on this cover featured a shrine to Princess Leia. You know, the kind where if you saw it in a movie, it would be when the cops broke into a suspect’s house, and found the shrine, and realized that the suspect was more dangerous than they had imagined or suspected? Like that, and one of the blurbs on the cover posed the question, “Is Luke Skywalker Jesus?” (Answer: No, Obi-wan is, based on a discussion of a book put out in the 1970s about the religious implications of Star Wars.)
And did you know there ARE life-sized official Star Wars collectibles? I didn’t until a couple of months ago, when I found out that you could get a life-sized Han Solo frozen in carbonite for thousands upon thousands of dollars. A company called Sideshow Collectibles puts out both 1:1 scale busts, smaller 1:1 scale pieces like Yoda or Salacious Crumb, and bigger ones like Boba Fett and Darth Vader. Those things are amazing.
But like Steve Sansweet, owner of the largest Star Wars collection of all at Rancho obi-Wan says, “The best Star Wars collection isn’t the one with the biggest or most expensive items, but the one holding a special meaning to the collector.”
What do you like to collect from Star Wars? Let us know in the comments!