Yestertoys
Kenner saves the universe at three bucks a pop.
April 3, 2001
The Time
1978 |
The Toy
Star Wars |
The Company
Kenner
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What Was Cool
Everything! |
What Was Not
When mom threw them away! |
When did the current action figure boom all begin? When did action figures really get good? When did action figures begin to matter?
College kids today would say it was some years ago, back in the 90s, when collectors first began slavering over Todd McFarlane's Spawn and its sweaty hunks of plastic, those perfectly-sculpted, dark and menacing figurines, the perfect match for that hyper-violent and overly-wired decade. Who cared if Techno Spawn: Devastator! was ever in a comic book or not? With his ten-inch long, blood-soaked glaive, he looks cool enough to have eviscerated his way out of a videogame and onto your toyshelf. Style over substance; the 90s in a nutshell.
But a slightly older crowd would argue that it was back in the 1980s that action figures really came into their heyday, when lines like He-Man and G.I. Joe, backed by corporate giants and force-fed to every American child in the nation through the guise of the hour-long commercial disguised as children's cartoon, began the current trend towards interminable boatloads of plastic castaways. They would argue you could follow the wave of this cartoon de jour all the way up to today's pure marketing schlock, Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and the rest of it.
Original series Jawa looking sexy in his hand-stitched cloth overcoat.
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Both groups are wrong. Today's teen-to-adult toy market, with its endless parade of action figures bringing to life every movie, comic book, cartoon, TV show, and videogame character conceivable would never have been possible without a little ole movie from way back in 1977.
Many of you reading this probably don't remember the late 70s. It was a time when music was decidedly feel-good and danced to on roller skates, when an idealistic peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter sat in the White House. It was also a time when a starry-eyed filmmaker with a shoestring budget and a bunch of unknown actors could take a hodgepodge of fairy-tale tropes and throw them up into the stars and thereby change a generation. Perhaps you've heard of this little exercise in applied mythology. It was called Star Wars.
Oh sure there were other toys before Star Wars, but they weren't cool, certainly something you'd still want to be seen with twenty years after the fact.
The legendary 1978 three-pack. No, I did not have this. But what if I did. Oh, what if I did.
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Toys in the 70s sucked. Giant, Barbie-sized G.I. Joes and their equally absurd cloth outfits and patronizingly non-confrontational bright yellow "Adventure Jeeps" would be pretty embarrassing for a grown man to have in his office today. Sure, Micronauts were kind of cool, but be honest, only spoiled rich kids ended up with enough of these diecast metal figurines to make a decent playset, and only the most anally retentive would still have them and their myriad parts in good working condition today. And let's not even get started on Megos -- big floppy cloth Superheroes driving blocky wooden cars that looked like they were made for four-year-olds? Most emphatically, those were not cool.
No, but Star Wars was cool. Star Wars was phenomenally cool. Star Wars was so cool and so important that if I need to waste time explaining it to you you're on the wrong site. Get out of here. Go on. We'll wait.
Part of Star Wars' appeal, of course, was the toys. Kids, being who they are, might have been more prone to forget just who or what that movie they'd just seen was all about had they somehow failed to acquire the little plastic figurines that let them re-enact the battles and create their own in the months and years that followed.
It says collect all twenty. Did you? |
Kenner, who must've said its prayers that year, somehow got the greatest toy license of all time and rode it all the way to the bank throughout the late 70s and early 80s (only to be gobbled up in 1991 by that all-consuming titan, Hasbro -- but that's a story for another day).
At first there were only twelve figures, which soon ballooned to twenty, then 31 with the release of Empire Strikes Back, to well over a hundred by the time Return of the Jedi came around.
Kenner ultimately cranked out (according to one estimate) two hundred and fifty million of the little mothers, enough for pretty much every man, woman, and child in the country, (not counting the twenty million or so idiots stupid enough to choke on Boba Fett's backpack missile and so force Kenner's legal eagles to nix that little feature before it ever came into production; thank you very much, toy-eating morons!).
Not only were these things mass-produced, they were pretty cheap too. Three bucks was no chump change back in 1981, sure, and for comparison's sake, a comic book back then cost about seventy-five cents. But comic books today only cost about two-fifty or three bucks, while toys have multiplied to the point where the typical action figure costs about ten to twelve, while those McFarlanesque monuments to unplayability can run you fifteen to twenty dollars or more. Pity today's kids -- rather than having Luke and Han and Leia square off against a handful of Darth Vaders and Stormtroopers, they can only afford one big TechnoSpawn, sitting alone and forlorn in their living room!
What I'm getting at is that the Star War toys were cheap and plentiful enough that even the financially-challenged could enjoy a sandbox duel on Tatooine and not be disappointed. The quality of the toys is nothing to snicker at either. Sure, some of those early head sculpts looked about as much like Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill as did Mr. Potato-Head, but in time, the likenesses improved, the accessories got better, and the collections burgeoned, spilling out of those Darth Vader-head carrying cases and all over the floor.
You're not the only one!
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Like pyramid schemes and the memory of Jim Varney, Star Wars toys collecting lives on through the web. Here are just a few of the better-known stops on this Intergalactic tour:
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And the add-ons! They just don't make starfighters and Death Stars and a whole range of scenes and accessories for a movie like they did for Star Wars. Arguably, it was only a brief jump for the Star Wars-obsessed eleven year old with every single action figure, spaceship, and playset to make the leap to twenty-year old Star Wars-obsessed fan with every novelization, VHS edition, and Platinum Pewter Boba Fett head insanely arrayed in his room.
Like the endless boundaries of a Galaxy far, far away or the ceaseless bounds of George Lucas' Gungan hubris, the realm of Star Wars toy collecting is vast and complex. I could devote every column in this series to its numerous niches and innumerable crannies -- we could reminisce joyously each week about Han Solo's carbonite slab, the decades-long quest for a Sny Snootles band, the cheap-but-hilarious foreign knockoffs -- but those are tales for another day. Still, you name it, there's a corner of the Star Wars universe out there, and some collector has cornered it; you merely need go out on the web and look for it.
Suffice it to say Kenner, George Lucas, and Star Wars changed the way an entire industry made and marketed toys, and in turn this affected the way almost every kid who's grown up since has wound up playing with toys -- instead of playing with generic items like trains and dolls and toy soldiers they're playing with and bonding with the emblems of multinational media franchises, be they Disney or Nintendo or Mattel.
Certainly no one would argue this was George Lucas's original intent, but whether this trend is a good thing or a bad thing ultimately remains to be seen. Still, I wouldn't have traded my Star Wars people for anything.
-- Kip Merriweather remembers.
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