Obsessions - Star Wars Toys - Phase 2

Hello there

Right, it’s 1am and I am sat outside in the garden in the confines of my mosquito net.  That’s as ridiculous a scenario as we need for me to continue telling you about the Star Wars toys obsession.  This is Phase 2, but there is some unfinished business from Phase 1 first of all.

The Darth Vader helmet that suddenly appeared in the shop in Wakefield, they claimed, was a stunt helmet from The Empire Strikes Back.  It definitely wasn’t. I didn’t even repeat that when I eventually sold it many years later, so ridiculous a claim it was. However, it was – what collectors call – a grail piece.  Something I had wanted for many years.  Craved even.

In 1980, after a win on the pools, my family went to Disney World. I’ve told you bits and bobs about that, mainly in relation to the Haunted Mansion, but there was a key event in my collecting development that I haven’t mentioned. In fact, I remain spoilt now, 42 years later about it. This was peak Star Wars time, the absolute eve of the next instalment. There were great Star Wars parts to that trip, not least going to the state premiere in Miami of The Empire Strikes Back, so I got to see that way before it found its way to the UK. The low point, and goodness this really does sound spoilt, I am aware of that, was in a shop at Disney World.  I saw the shop again when I was there a couple of years back, and it’s now a Christmas Shop.  I actually couldn’t bear to go in, not even out of curiosity, lest it spark some weird PTSD episode.  You see, in 1980, I went into that shop and tried on three Star Wars masks;  Chewbacca, a Stormtrooper, and Darth Vader.  I was weirdly very much into masks as a kid (no idea what that was about), and I desperately wanted the Darth Vader one.

It was perhaps apt that this shop was in spitting distance of the Cinderella Castle in Magic Kingdom, because a bizarre parental proviso was put in place about whether the mask fit me or not. I would have wanted to wear it for sure, but was mainly thinking of it as a cool bedroom display piece. It didn’t go over my head.  I can genuinely remember this clear as day, can remember the hard plastic pushing over my ears and me willing it to just fit.  No dice.  Didn’t happen.  The Stormtrooper one was declared “too big” and the Chewbacca one was declared “too rubbish”.  Which was sort of a fair point to be honest. All three masks were Don Post masks, a company that had the license to make the replicas.  They became pretty famous and legendary over the years.  Their masks always looked way better in their publicity materials than in real life.  In real life they kind of squodged down a bit. They eventually managed to make half decent replicas, but those early ones were touch and go.  Except the Darth Vader one which, whilst it admittedly doesn’t photograph well, was amazing “in-hand”. I never got to bring it home though.  I also still hold a grudge at whoever was working in that shop, because they omitted to tell anyone that the mask is in two parts. 

It was like this; 

I had my dad pushing it over my head with only the width of the neck available, when in actual fact you had to take off the top, put the face bit over your face, and then slide the rest of the helmet over it. Yes we all know that now because of the mask removal in Return Of The Jedi, but that was three years off yet.

That's how they made the masks look in advertising. Chewie and Threepio look ace here.  Such a attention to detail (the Death Star is upside down...)

They were more like this in real life though...

Anyway, fast forward to 1992, when I suddenly stopped in my tracks and saw one in the window of a games shop in Wakefield. I was in awe.  I went in and asked them how much it was.  A hundred quid, and then the stupid claim about the stunt helmet.  That was wayyyyy out of my price range by around 95 quid.  I did know it was very rare, and was certain it would be gone from the shop soon.  Every time I went into Wakefield I checked.  I think I was half hoping it would be gone, so the stress would be over and I could get on with regretting not finding a way to buy it for the rest of my life. As it transpired, it was bought for me, for my birthday, by my then girlfriend.  “How did a third year drama student afford a hundred quid?” You may well ask.  Well, it begins with “richp” and ends in “arents”.  Not a chance they would have known that was what it was for on account of hating me, and I very much considered it compensation for me paying for everything all the time, but that’s in danger of sidetracking me again.

I had something in my collection that was officially high-end.  On cost alone.  That was a real collectors piece.  What happened right there, even though I wasn’t the one who parted with the cash, was something that any collector will tell you is a proper shifting moment. It actually changes your view on finances.  I guess it’s something that folk who buy art have to make friends with very early doors, that these objects or things, have to justify their monetary value.  You have to commit to the idea that they are worth that. When I said this was a key moment, I really meant it.  Attitudinally, I was now in a bracket of people who didn’t consider things to be too expensive.  When I was a kid, you could get brand new Star Wars figures for 50p.  The general price point was £1 for the first film, rising to £1.25 and £1.50 for The Empire Strikes Back, peaking at £2 and £2.50 for Return Of The Jedi, before dropping back to a quid when the toy line was in its death throes.  I think the most expensive vehicle was the AT AT walker which was £33 on release. And everywhere was just fields.

So that was the thunderbolt at the end of my student career, just before I hit the big wide world; there was a thing in my collection that wasn’t from childhood or a car boot sale.  And then, as if Hasbro had noticed the lightning strike, they started making Star Wars figures again.  

Begun, this Phase Two has.

Let’s get this very straight.  The first wave of those figures were utterly ridiculous.  I have no idea, to this day, what they were thinking.  There were whispers that it was something to do with He-Man, but even that doesn’t make sense.  The figures had been bulked up.  I mean, stupidly so.  Weirdly so.  As the collection continued to build over years, the later figures started to morph gradually down to proper effigies, but the first load….goodness they were mental. Some of them couldn’t even stand up because they were so top heavy with rippling muscles.

Guess who bought them all though?

At the time, like all cool guys of that age, I was tending bar (working in a pub).  Imagine me with a towel over my shoulder, asking melancholic patrons what their story was, and standing beneath a flickering neon sign. Please imagine me like that, because the reality of me behind the bar at Wetherspoons, rapidly ruining the black trousers from my university graduation suit, and having sly cigs in the women’s toilets, just isn’t the image I want to be remembered by. We also know I was buying loads of toys too, which completes the cool bad boy image.

Luckily Wetherspoons’ head honcho had very deep pockets and it was VERY well paid.  Oh wait hang on… no…that’s literally the exact opposite of what was true. I think I started on £3.70 an hour, which just cleared the cost of one figure.

The new Star Wars toy line was aimed at adults.  Definitely.  I’m sure a handful of kids had them, but it was quite clearly the beginning of toys being marketed to the grown ups that had the original toys in the Seventies, who were now  resplendent with a disposable income.  The addiction may have been dormant for a decade and a half, but it was there.  Ready to be shaken awake.

Now, I had an income, that was true.  It would be a long push to call it disposable though.  Unless you ruled out food, rent and bills as essential purchases.  Which…I’ll be honest…I sort of did.

These figures were new.  There were no scuff marks on them, no patches of plastic visible though the hair where they’d been chewed, none of them were loose-limbed or a bit broke.  This was the second chance that the kids from the Seventies had wanted.  To have Star Wars toys, even ones that may have been sneaking steroids in the factory, and look after them. We all knew by now how revered and rare mint condition figures from the original collections were.  We’d all poured petrol into Snowspeeders to recreate crashes in the back garden.  Okay.  Maybe not “we all”.  It’s an episode of my life that I’m not comfortable going back over.  I can’t explain or justify it with any logic at all.  Like I thought the Snowspeeder was just going to “grow back” the next day.

Lack of logic is a mainstay to this phase of collecting to be fair.  Because each week, I’d work so hard in that pub, taking all the hours they would give me, and volunteering immediately if anyone needed cover.  Loads of people my age were doing stuff like that.  They were all doing it to save up for a house deposit though, or get themselves set up with the new computers that were coming out, or one of the emerging mobile phones, or Spangles/garlic bread.  I was doing it so that I could pick up my wage packet last thing on a Friday night, and then walk down, on Saturday morning, to the Woolworth’s that was opposite the back of the Tally Ho pub in North Finchley, where I’d just lost a week of my life, and spend it all on Star Wars toys. And I’m not messing when I say “it all”. It was the most exhilarated I’d ever felt up to that point, and the most solvent I’d ever felt too.  Felt – not was. It was abject insanity. What a collection of toys though.  For all their daft homoerotic bulging and questionable likenesses, I adored them.  They all had their weapons, they all had their capes.  I have always been able to appreciate the charm of a scuffed up collection, but this level of pristine was really something.

Hasbro kept releasing them, I kept buying them.  They started to make more and more vehicles, I started to get more and more vehicles.  They repackaged some of the earlier figures with accessories that weren’t in the films, big gun contraptions like the power loader in Aliens – I left them on the shelves.  I may have been compulsive in my collecting, but I wasn’t an idiot.

I left the pub and got different day jobs - jobs that I suspect some of my co-workers are still doing but that were always going to be stop-gap for me - and a way to feed my – I’m prepared to admit it now – addiction.  It was actually that.  I craved it, and couldn’t stop it.  The Prequels started to be released and the tie in toys were getting snapped up.  I made myself a little promise that I wasn’t going to go in on that.  Then, a year after The Phantom Menace, when they were all in clearance bins, I grabbed the lot.

I’ve often said that I won’t buy stuff that just has Star Wars printed on it.  I don’t like anything that’s just another thing with branding on it. I want bespoke.  It's not snobbishness, it's an aversion to exploitation. The casual sneering at such a marketing ploy wasn’t so different to what I was doing at this stage though.  I was already buying stuff, admittedly reduced cost clearance stuff, for the sake of it.  It was now officially a problem, and I now officially took control of it.  I knew there were two new movies on the way, with – I presumed – an equally huge load of figures to come with them, and – for the first time – had a vision of the future that worried me.  That was a lot of stuff.  It was a lot of stuff already.  Don’t forget I was still lugging around my collection of the original toys too.

I decided that with Attack Of The Clones, I was going to be strictly selective.  Strictly selective was the start of Phase Three…the third part of the trilogy as of 2022… It led to some extreme decisions.

Which I shall tell you about next time. I think this was just as long as the first one, after I said it would be shorter.  Thank you for reading it.  It’s now gotten well cold out here, so shall pop myself back in the house now.

Hope all is going brilliant for you this week.

Much love as always

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx