Vintage Star Wars, Kenner Figures: Impressing the Creative Psyche
Imagine a time when you first learned what a star was. When you didn’t know what a war was.
It could've been one summer or fall day, in 1977, when I had my own image from Star Wars, with Leia, Luke, and I do believe, Threepio, courtesy of a cereal box. You can literally say the images are iconic. I am this little boy, looking at everyone, dressed like no one I'd seen, with some vague intimation of mystic energy, nowhere found in my mundane life. I didn't know anything else about the story of this man and woman, or this robot (I only recall the humans, clearly, there could've been Chewie, too). I felt awe. They were alien to my experience. I think they scared me just a bit. They hinted at a Force beyond my frame of reference. Their clothes weren't like anything I knew, until I'd seen a proper bathrobe, maybe. Some of my earliest sexual memory is me trying to understand the discomforting entertwining of the male and female figures.
The icons of Star Wars did have the intended effect. As their images gradually made their way to me, I recognized
'Star Wars' as pop culture mythology. I didn't yet even know what a war was. You might not have thought, lately, how something with the word 'war' was part of childhood fantasy. I think toy soldiers have been part of childhoods almost as long as the concept of a soldier.
That's one thing that made these adventurers a bit different: they fought in a 'war' in the 'stars' somewhere beyond our night sky, but they were individuals- not uniformed soliders.
You didn't have to know the story- and I may well have gone to the drive-in with my family to see it, but I can't nail that down specifically. Space ships like no other, light-saber fights, the music: all you needed to make up your own pretend adventures.
To me, the one glimpse I got of Darth Vader's tie fighter a couple of years later- at the house of a kid I got to visit, once or twice- left me with vague impressions of flying through outer space with disco music and flashing lights, aboard individual ship. Frightful Darth Vader became a cyborg figure jamming out in the darkness.
Now, if you didn't know, there were four mass-produced figures from Star Wars in 1977, who first made it to the stores. R2-D2, Leia Organa, Chewbaca and Luke were the first limited run. George Lucas recognized he'd created something iconic, too, so he didn't release many images beforehand for toy modeling. Until his movie was distributed by 20th Century Fox in May, 1977 (I want to say, May 23rd?),
there was next-to-know awareness of what any character looked like, aside from the original movie trailers, weeks before. The amazing ships, from the Death Star to the sand speeder to the Millenium Falcon, fill out the iconography of an America in love with its machines. (I'm willing to bet the Falcon is where most of us learned what a Millenium even is, playing with the catchy phrase until we eventually understood its words. It's still such an evocative name, a beautiful piece of myth-making.)
C3PO- who I thought of early on as "see Pee Pee-oh" before I got his name straight- probably left the strongest impression. Soon, the store trash cans would remind me of Artoo, and Chewie's roar was part of my nebulous mockery of a pop song. I didn't know what was happening, but Star Wars and its theme music was becoming part of the pop-drenched fabric of my existence. To this day, I know part of the demand to re-make the world in the Star Wars image is the way corridors and elevator shafts- and trash cans- all invited children to play pretend Star Wars in their minds. It's not just the movies themselves, but the miasma of memory they evoke now in the minds of adults- the safer, egocentric world of childhood.
Though they were swamped by the demand, small toy company Kenner- working from two basic molds- produced a dozen figures, all woefully under-produced for the Christmas 1977 season. Only the first movie to routinely be viewed fifteen or more times at the cinema could've hoped to inspire such a materialistic fervor, that mail-order promises for figures yet to be produced for months could be considered a present! (I'm sure something like it exists in the pop culture history of supply-and-demand, but here's what might be my own broad over-statement of the sort that has built summation of the Star Wars phenomenon.) Luke was the first to spawn a variant figure, in his X-Wing Fighter uniform.
I was acutely aware as a child that TV offered middle-class kid desires, and we were not in any position to fill them. So, most of American toy and cinema culture, for me, is made of memories of what I pretended- of what I could make of it. The time-lost element for so many fans are the stories they each tried to make up, in vague imitation of the scenes they knew. Many kids had their very own stories generated on lost afternoons, borrowing from the iconography creatively. That's another secret to long-standing fondness for toys.
The most valuable of the vintage toys, to the best of my knowledge today, is the Jawa figures with vinyl capes.
It's those play sets that really captivated my imagination. They were way out of price range to ever be mine, but a play set in any toy line is the potential crown jewel. You can really vividly bond with the scenes! That said, anywhere you could find sand is a potential Tattooine. The slate pits behind my home (when we moved to the country in 1983) often evoked Luke's homeworld, despite their lack of sand.
When the movies incorporated more of the natural world, they opened the possibilities of recreation in play. But any stand of trees could easily become the setting for sweeping into the Death Star amid perilous laser fire.
You might recall a few years in the late 80s and early 90s where Star Wars seemed likely to fade, as another set of childhood memories. The culture that continuously reached into the past for safer times had not yet embraced the worldwide phenomenon again. It was possible to grow up without any Star Wars figures or clothing. It was part of a natural cycle of disposability. But this was something so many Boomer adults had embraced too, a teen movie date destination. Before the 1996 movie prequel had become a buzz, the resurrection of Star Wars had begun.
Everything captivating about the cinematography and storyline of the Star Wars franchise is, by a startling consensus, embodied in the prequel movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The tragic sacrifices and the crushing power of the monolithic Empire elevate the original effort. It's the perfect adult bookend to the childlike wonder of A New Hope. It would've really fit into the downbeat aura of the 1970s, despite being a more advanced piece of cinema than anything visually possible then. It's Empire Strikes Back with no punches pulled, bleak, but heart-filled in its set up (without ruining the internal story) of the famous movie that began it all. It's so funny that the acting and storyline of Star Wars generally rated it three stars out of four, if that, until the children of Star Wars took over as its critics, who will forever be amazed by the common bond it spawned.
I finally got some of the comic books of which I daydreamed as a boy, my seventh Christmas. A few of them carried advertisements- often, with appallingly off-model illustrated representations, particularly in the case of Star Wars, for reasons cited above. The toys alone, I understand, practically financed George Lucas' efforts to make Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. This one really held my attention though: anything I could fantasize about having, for a movie franchise I knew best by the storybook record narrations of The Empire Strikes Back and world-expansions like The Planet of the Hoojibs.
(I remember it being a 7 and a half inch 45 rpm, but clearly the record was played at 33 1/3.) I loved to look at that illustrated double-page spread and imagine playing with all those toys. I did wonder about some of the obscure figures, though: I'd wonder if they were just made up to sell toys.
There was only one way I really experienced these toys, and that's the commercials I saw.
It could've been one summer or fall day, in 1977, when I had my own image from Star Wars, with Leia, Luke, and I do believe, Threepio, courtesy of a cereal box. You can literally say the images are iconic. I am this little boy, looking at everyone, dressed like no one I'd seen, with some vague intimation of mystic energy, nowhere found in my mundane life. I didn't know anything else about the story of this man and woman, or this robot (I only recall the humans, clearly, there could've been Chewie, too). I felt awe. They were alien to my experience. I think they scared me just a bit. They hinted at a Force beyond my frame of reference. Their clothes weren't like anything I knew, until I'd seen a proper bathrobe, maybe. Some of my earliest sexual memory is me trying to understand the discomforting entertwining of the male and female figures.
The icons of Star Wars did have the intended effect. As their images gradually made their way to me, I recognized
'Star Wars' as pop culture mythology. I didn't yet even know what a war was. You might not have thought, lately, how something with the word 'war' was part of childhood fantasy. I think toy soldiers have been part of childhoods almost as long as the concept of a soldier.
That's one thing that made these adventurers a bit different: they fought in a 'war' in the 'stars' somewhere beyond our night sky, but they were individuals- not uniformed soliders.
To me, the one glimpse I got of Darth Vader's tie fighter a couple of years later- at the house of a kid I got to visit, once or twice- left me with vague impressions of flying through outer space with disco music and flashing lights, aboard individual ship. Frightful Darth Vader became a cyborg figure jamming out in the darkness.
Now, if you didn't know, there were four mass-produced figures from Star Wars in 1977, who first made it to the stores. R2-D2, Leia Organa, Chewbaca and Luke were the first limited run. George Lucas recognized he'd created something iconic, too, so he didn't release many images beforehand for toy modeling. Until his movie was distributed by 20th Century Fox in May, 1977 (I want to say, May 23rd?),
there was next-to-know awareness of what any character looked like, aside from the original movie trailers, weeks before. The amazing ships, from the Death Star to the sand speeder to the Millenium Falcon, fill out the iconography of an America in love with its machines. (I'm willing to bet the Falcon is where most of us learned what a Millenium even is, playing with the catchy phrase until we eventually understood its words. It's still such an evocative name, a beautiful piece of myth-making.)
I was acutely aware as a child that TV offered middle-class kid desires, and we were not in any position to fill them. So, most of American toy and cinema culture, for me, is made of memories of what I pretended- of what I could make of it. The time-lost element for so many fans are the stories they each tried to make up, in vague imitation of the scenes they knew. Many kids had their very own stories generated on lost afternoons, borrowing from the iconography creatively. That's another secret to long-standing fondness for toys.
The most valuable of the vintage toys, to the best of my knowledge today, is the Jawa figures with vinyl capes.
You might recall a few years in the late 80s and early 90s where Star Wars seemed likely to fade, as another set of childhood memories. The culture that continuously reached into the past for safer times had not yet embraced the worldwide phenomenon again. It was possible to grow up without any Star Wars figures or clothing. It was part of a natural cycle of disposability. But this was something so many Boomer adults had embraced too, a teen movie date destination. Before the 1996 movie prequel had become a buzz, the resurrection of Star Wars had begun.
Everything captivating about the cinematography and storyline of the Star Wars franchise is, by a startling consensus, embodied in the prequel movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The tragic sacrifices and the crushing power of the monolithic Empire elevate the original effort. It's the perfect adult bookend to the childlike wonder of A New Hope. It would've really fit into the downbeat aura of the 1970s, despite being a more advanced piece of cinema than anything visually possible then. It's Empire Strikes Back with no punches pulled, bleak, but heart-filled in its set up (without ruining the internal story) of the famous movie that began it all. It's so funny that the acting and storyline of Star Wars generally rated it three stars out of four, if that, until the children of Star Wars took over as its critics, who will forever be amazed by the common bond it spawned.
I finally got some of the comic books of which I daydreamed as a boy, my seventh Christmas. A few of them carried advertisements- often, with appallingly off-model illustrated representations, particularly in the case of Star Wars, for reasons cited above. The toys alone, I understand, practically financed George Lucas' efforts to make Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. This one really held my attention though: anything I could fantasize about having, for a movie franchise I knew best by the storybook record narrations of The Empire Strikes Back and world-expansions like The Planet of the Hoojibs.
(I remember it being a 7 and a half inch 45 rpm, but clearly the record was played at 33 1/3.) I loved to look at that illustrated double-page spread and imagine playing with all those toys. I did wonder about some of the obscure figures, though: I'd wonder if they were just made up to sell toys.
There was only one way I really experienced these toys, and that's the commercials I saw.
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