But what about the toys…
Sometime after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, my parents brought me over to their friend’s house for a gathering. The adults milled about, doing whatever adults did before you grew up yourself and realized the adults at this afternoon gathering just wanted to stay long enough not to feel guilty for leaving early. Anyway. Being a shy, quiet kid, I was minding my own business in the living room. All the other kids were playing outside, freely roaming the streets of Orange County because those were the times. The adults must have felt bad for me because the dad of the house came downstairs with two large plastic cases shaped like heads or busts. My own father led me over to the cases. The Other Dad—the name escapes me and doesn’t matter—opened the cases and revealed his entire collection of Star Wars figures. The classic Kenner figures. Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, all of them! All. Of. Them.
I couldn’t have been more than five years old and I had NO idea what I was looking at. And I mean that literally. As I wrote earlier, my first experience with Star Wars was seeing A New Hope in a drive-in theater with my parents. I was one. I have no memory of that. It wasn’t until I saw that trailer for Return of the Jedi that Star Wars connected with me. That was when I first understood and comprehended what I was watching.
Yet I never forgot seeing those toys. The cases this man had brought down were the very collectible Kenner figure cases. One was the bust of Darth Vader. The other was C-3PO. I can still recall him showing me and my father each figure, giving descriptions I wasn’t understanding. It was mesmerizing to a nerd in development like me. And what remains is this: before I had fallen in love with Star Wars, I had fallen in love with toys. That is both amazing marketing for the movie and a testament to the power of Star Wars toys.
There are many reasons we love Star Wars and we’re in the midst of diving into those moments from within the movies and stories that make up the franchise, but you could absolutely write page after page about the toys themselves.
These days, the toys and collectibles from this galaxy are on another level, and mostly targeted for adults. Oh, sure, they’re in the “toy aisle” and sometimes adult collectors will have to wait patiently behind a parent and their child as they casually dig through figures and LEGO sets. But rest assured, it’s the older generation of collectors buying them. I’m proudly one of them. For us, it’s something that began in the ‘70s and ‘80s and, to our surprise, we didn’t have to stop. Toys stopped being just for kids at some point. Perhaps it was the mid-90s when the Power of the Force figures hit shelves and rekindled fans’ passions for those three and three-quarters inch figures? That’s another book for another time.
Star Wars toys are very much a reason we love Star Wars. In fact, some of your specific “loves” are driven by the toys you had as a child. It’s the genius behind the title of the Netflix series The Toys That Made Us. They absolutely did make us. I love the Y-wing fighter as you’ll read later. I love it because that was the first Star Wars vehicle I owned as a kid. I no longer have the toy. (Sadly, having to trash it after it failed to survive a move nearly thirty-five years after it came into my possession during the Christmas of 1983.) However, the toy is what influenced my love of the fighter in the movies. When I saw it on screen it was like seeing a friend in your new classroom for the school year.
“Yeah! Y-wing is in my class!”
The classic Star Wars figures also helped fuel all of our obsessions with individual characters and those minor faces in the background. Sure, there were the big ones like the aforementioned Han, Luke, Leia, et al. But owning a Bespin Guard or Rancor Keeper figure was something special. It wildly expanded the Star Wars landscape for fans. The bit player or extra that appeared in one scene over Obi-Wan Kenobi’s shoulder, was now in your hands and immortalized forever. If you owned Walrus Man, you wanted to know more about him. By the time he became Ponda Baba, thanks to the 1989 West End Star Wars Miniatures game, he was already a favorite of many. Simply because you remembered the figure as much as his gruesome end in the Mos Eisley cantina.
Star Wars and toys. They go hand in hand…and always will.