Striking Gold – Vintage Star Wars toys
Remember those vintage Star Wars action figures I mentioned on the Local Trouble Star Wars Podcast from 17th November?
Well, I thought I’d upload one of the pictures I managed to get in before I had to return them all. As I mentioned on the podcast, my fiancée’s dad hoarded Kenner/Palitoy Star Wars action figures in the mid-late 80s ‘Dark Times’ when retailers were practically giving them away.
He’d also look at ads in the newspaper and go to pick up collections from homes where many of the grown up/university-bound sons and daughters were blissfully unaware that their parents were selling their collections off.
This has resulted in boxes full of figures, some in very good condition, which have been sitting in the loft for 20 years, since his own sons grew up and didn’t want to play with them any more. After many years of wishing, I finally got my hands on the the other day.
The one picture I took here is only the tip of the iceberg. There were maybe 50-80 action figures, with many duplicates. A very rare Yak-Face sat alongside a near-mint Return of the Jedi R2-D2 (with a lightsabre in his dome) and a very well played with limp Death Star Droid.
There’s also the promise of many vintage vehicles still in storage, so that’s something I’m looking forward to for another time.
Read Along Books
I also mentioned some of the great vintage Star Wars read along Star Wars storybooks. I remembered a very informative post on StarWars.com where Marc Newbold gave a run down of the various ‘read along’ books that were released from 1977 up to the Ewok movies in the mid-80s. You can take a look at Marc’s post on the Star Wars read along books here. I managed to find all three from the original trilogy, as well as ‘Droid World’ and ‘Planet of the Hoojibs’ – not to mention near-mint editions for ‘Star Trek II’, ‘Star Trek III’ and ‘Gremlins’.
Star Wars Castle Party
Whilst I’ve got your attention, I thought a quick snap of another vintage collection – from fellow One Sensational Shot Editor-Beyond-Belief Melvin Cowznofski. Why the characters are having some sort of castle party, one can’t be sure. Perhaps this is inspired by Ralph McQuarrie’s concept for Vader’s Castle?
Further Adventures
As if all of this excitement wasn’t enough for one weekend, I was also able to introduce my 6-year-old niece to Star Wars through both the action figures and the storybooks.
She eagerly played with many of the other toys found in storage which, as you can imagine, truly spanned the past three decades of pop-culture franchises – some long forgotten. So we capped things off by putting Wild Wild West era Will Smith into intensive care in the Playmobil hospital.
That’s a scene I never thought I’d be playing out in 2016.