Star Wars brain explosion!!!!

I'm sure every geek has heard about Disney purchasing Lucasfilm by now so I'm not going into any details. This excites me in so many ways. Yes, more movies and TV series is good news, but I'm excited to see what the theme parks division has cooking up for us.
I'm a big Disney parks fan, and I loved the new Star Tours ride. I was appalled by the news that Disney is making an Avatar themed land in reaction to the success of Universals Harry Potter land. Why Avatar and why not Star Wars? Well this week's new answers that, and opens the hopes and dreams of there being a Star Wars Land, or better yet a Star Wars Theme Park. I had written about this topic before in a post from the April. Apparently, Disney had a deal with Lucasfilm that the latter could not open up a Star Wars themed park in any country that had a Disney park. I don't know any more than that. I read that little tidbit at the Force.net site where there was a good article about Tom Hodges and his hypothetical painting of a Star Wars Theme park.

This painting is really exciting to dream about, I hope some of it becomes a reality soon, and I hope it in a US park since there is no Disney park in Canada its the closest I got.

ET Thursday is a break this week due to the Halloween overdose of ET I had. It will return soon with some new items. I also plan on creating a new series of posts focusing on Star Wars junk, but just the good junk.

See ya!

Happy 35th Birthday Star Wars

A long time ago... when I couldn't use the potty yet...

It was 35 years ago today that Star Wars was unleashed on us.

If you've never heard of this movie before, here's the trailer.

http://www.starwars.com/watch/rw_swtrailer.html

Star Wars Vintaginess

I was trying to think of something to post other than figures, so I looked through the boxes of stuff I had not put on display yet and found a few interesting things.

First up a bunch of vintage cardbacks (not the new ones, the original ones) saved from when I was a kid. Most are not in great shape but that's OK by me. I'm going to put them in a binder with sleeve protectors to view whenever I please.

Here are some small toy catalogs that were included with the larger Star wars items like the vehicles and play sets. I loved looking though these.

Next up is the 3 story books released by Scholastic. I love how these books have no table of contents but just photos main characters with a small description.

Along the same lines as the previous item, we have some more books. These were the magazines handed out at the movie theaters before the showing of the movie. Notice how the baby Ewok gets a nod as an important character. MMM... nostalgicy.

Here more 1983 nostalgia, an Ewok poster I had hanging on my wall back in the day, its a little worn out.

A 7/11 Return of the Jedi cup from the summer of '83

And finally, an original 1977 7" single from the Millennium album "Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk" featuring MECO playing the disco Star Wars theme and Cantina band song.

Well, that's plenty of stuff for now, there is lots more to post about in the future. Now I'm going to change into my Star Wars shirt and watch the blu rays, yaaaay. Have a great Star Wars day!

Horror Story!!

Yesterday Reis, over at Dork Horde posted the Boba Fett figure on his Vintage Star Wars Thursday series. I had commented that I would leave my Boba Fett horror story that this figure reminded me of.

It was 1985, Star Wars interest was fading, newer, different toys were arriving on the pegs. There were still plenty of Star Wars figures in the stores, people just weren't buying them. Prices at the local toy stores were dropping to rock bottom, $1.99 a figure with an additional 50% off, so a buck a piece. Man if I could take $1000 and go back to that time I would clean off the shelves but that's another tale.
I still liked Star Wars and would still get the toys, in fact my parents knew that I still liked Star Wars enough that one day my mom came home with a small surprise. She had bought me a Squid Head and a Boba Fett action figure. I was excited, but I already had them. She didn't think I had them, but I said I'd keep them in my closet in the package for a keepsake or whatever.

About a year later my best friend and I were playing in my room, looking for toys in my closet and he pulls out the Squid Head and Boba. Hey, Star Wars figures he says, then... get ready for the horror... he rips open the Boba Fett. NNOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I let out a cheesy Darth Vader yell. Even at 10 Years old I knew that he had just wrecked what could have been a valuable item in the future.

Here is the result of that day, I kept it around for some reason, maybe I hoped it would heal itself.

The figure is still fine but the card and bubble are toast.

Here you can see the ridiculous price.

I still feel sick thinking about this moment twenty some years ago.

My friend is now a doctor, maybe I should hit him up for the few hundred buck he ripped out the window that day. But I 'm not bitter about it or anything.

MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU!

OK, I had to say it, sorry. We've finally made it through the week, its Friday, its Star Wars day, what could be better.

To kick off today's posts I'll start with a small collection inspired by my kids. A few months ago my kids were into these small rubber figures called Squinkies. They had Disney ones, Cars, Hot Wheels, Super Heroes, etc. I thought to myself, hey these are pretty neat, if they ever produced Star Wars squinkies I'd buy them. Well lo and behold, they did, except they called them Fighter Pods.
So I bought a few sets at TRU when they were on sale. I tried to get OT figures only but I had to get a few prequel figures just because they were packed in with the others I wanted.

I managed to rescue the figures from the kids while they weren't looking and put them on my shelf.
Here's a few pics, organized by movie.

ET Thursday

HEY HEY! Its ET Thursday again, this time with a Star Wars twist.

Her are 2 squishy foam filled fellows I picked up at the theme parks in Orlando a couple years ago. Yoda looks ready for business, ET looks like he had a few too many and then had his head ran over by a truck.

We are the E E E E E E E EWOKS

Oh man, when I heard on the Saturday morning preview shows that there was going to be an Ewoks cartoon, wow! I was soooo excited. Do you guys remember those Saturday morning preview shows? Every fall, each major network would air a half hour show during primetime one week. This show would outline the upcoming fall schedule of saturday morning cartoons. Man, saturday mornings were cherished back in the day. Now kids have cartoons 24/7, its too bad they couldn't experience the excitement of saturday morning cartoons, it was the best. Anyways, the Ewoks only lasted 2 seasons but I watched every episode.

There was a small toy line that accompanied this cartoon, it consisted of 6 figures and a vehicle or two.

Here are the 4 figures of the Duloks, there were also two Ewoks, Logray and Wicket. I'm still searching for a Wicket, they are really hard to find, harder that the blue Snaggletooth.

Vintage... kinda...

So, I collect Star Wars, as you mat have figured out. I try to keep it to vintage item in an attempt to streamline my collection instead of it being all over the place. But, back in the mid 90's, before the Special Editions and Episode 1, there was not a lot of great Star Wars collectibles to be had in the time period. This is when I completed my vintage figure collection, before the days of Ebay, I scoured the newsgroups looking for people selling figs with no pictures and buying them with no way of knowing if you were getting scammed or not.
Anyway It was also during this time that I bought an awesome set of micro machines consisting of Original Trilogy vehicles. These are kinda vintage now, not from the 70's or 80' but they are old enough now, 1994, and came before all the new trilogy and special edition stuffs.

This set is really really cool. Now don't beat up on me for not opening the set up, I have, in fact opened the box, I just haven't taken out the ships from their tiny plastic coffins. This is mostly due to the fact that I don't really have a great idea on how to display them, and I don't want to loose them. Any ideas people?

Here's some more pics

The Aluminum Falcon

The Snow Walker (this is the correct name for all the kids from the OT era)

The exclusive Executor Super Star Destroyer (this one can destroy super stars, not just regular stars)

Shuttle Tyderium (which I think just looks cool)

And of course the classic Tie Fighter and X-Wing fighter.

As you can see from the picture above, these suckers are small but have great detail for their size.

I'd have to say that among the really crappy Star Wars collectibles that surfaced in the 90's these stick out as the shining star amongst the poop. And for $30 it was a pretty good deal. You can still snag one of these on Ebay for @ $20-$30 although I've seen them listed at around $200, yea right.

Star Wars Craft Time

So, I scored this on Ebay. This was one of my "Holy Grail" items. It was fairly cheap compared to what these are going for, but if you know what these are worth you'll know that these babies can get into $1000's if they are in good shape with a box. So I was happy to get it at the price I paid.

Needless to say, I did not go for the one with a box. This one came with the remote and instructions and all the accessories AND IT STILL WORKS. Popped some batteries in and pulled the remote trigger and.. bzzzz... away it went it goes forwards and backwards, way cool, considering it came out in 1979 or something.

But it looked lonely sitting on the shelf by itself and no box to proudly display beside it. Rather than shell out $600 for a box I decided to make one.

I grabbed as many photos of the box as I could find on various sites and Ebay. I couldn't find any scans though. The Star Wars collecting community is pretty stingy on posting scans of card backs or box scans for fears that bootleggers and scam artist would use them to create pristine versions of the packaging and try to pass it off as genuine. I guess there was a HUGE problem with a few individuals on Ebay that would reproduce card backs and bubbles, then re-card vintage figures and sell them on Ebay for huge sums. To bad for me on this task, but I understand. So the only option was to reproduce one, and reproduce one I did.
I've only gotten to the prototype stage, here is the result of my Photoshop work.

Now I agree its not perfect but I didn't really care, and the original material I found was not that great so I decided not to sweat it, it was only for display so I decided to keep the wrinkles and bends that were in the photos. I think it kinda ads to the recreation.

As a test, I then printed it off and carefully cut it out with a ruler and exact o knife then glued the two ends together after lightly scoring and creasing all the folds.

I think it turned out pretty good. Now I just have to sent it off to the print shop to get it done on large format, higher quality paper since its too big for home printers. I'm in no hurry to do that though.

So, if anyone want to save me some time and has an extra box for the sandcrawler just send it over to me :)!!! ha

So... I guess the Princess got around kinda

I remember this from the movie:

 

And this:

But these must be from a director's cut or something:

Yikes!

Wow, it looks like all these photos were taken on the same day of shooting, she's wearing the same outfit. Seems like she was plotting a grand scheme to get them all to fight over her, hmm... starved for attention I guess. Question is, where was R2?

Well, I think I've found the answer to that question. I've discovered an archived photo from that day on the set of Hoth. If you look closely, you can make out R2, sad and dejected in the background, as the others vie for her highness's attention.

I declare this STAR WARS WEEK!!

Well, whether you realize it or not, this Friday is May 4th, which has been unofficially dubbed Star Wars day by the hordes of us geeks. To celebrate this I will be posting something about Star Wars everyday this week until friday. So stay tuned for some Star Wars fun.

ET Thursday

"I don't know where your spaceship went, I was just counting my parsecs and when I looked over it was gone!"


ET is never going to let Chewie spaceship-sit again.

This cool little figure is from the same sculpt as the wind up ET but no wind up peg. Almost perfect for Star Wars or other figs to interact with.


It says its from Spain, maybe a bootleg but pretty cool, one of my favorite ETs

3D Funtastic

Its a Star Wars monster rampage!!!

Dig out your red and blue 3D glasses to see what mystery lies within the magic image.

So...

Was this an April Fools thing?

My childhood is hurting...

RIP Ralph McQuarrie

I just found out the news from a fellow blogger's blog that Ralph McQuarrie past away over the weekend.
I really believe there were two major components that made the original Star Wars trilogy amazing.
One was the music.
The other was Ralph McQuarrie's designs.
So many iconic designs throughout the original trilogy, I know as a kid that fueled my imagination and creativity. It was noticeably missing from the prequels.
It is sad to hear that he is gone.