by John Booth
There was, of course, one more figure in the original Star Wars line: Boba Fett. This new mystery guy who showed up for a few minutes in the “Star Wars Holiday Special,” before the release of The Empire Strikes Back. Some kids ordered him as a bonus figure in the mail, but I got my Boba Fett the old-fashioned way: at Click’s. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found this incredibly cool enigma of a guy who, judging by the illustration on the package, could shoot fireballs from his wrist guns and maybe even fly using his rocket pack. It must have been autumn, because Dad said I could get it, but I’d have to make a choice: Either Boba would stay in storage until my birthday or Christmas, or I could open it up and play with it right away but pay Dad back for it.
I couldn’t wait. When I got home, I scraped together the money from my room and ripped open that Boba Fett package and had that masked bad-ass flying all over the house, up and down the stairs, arms extended Superman-style and unleashing carnage from his flamethrowers. I even roped Dad in for a few minutes, who role-played Han and taunted this new arrival to the house by nicknaming him “Bubble Head.” Boba fried him for that one. This was at least a half hour of pure Kenner-drenaline.
And then I crashed hard from the high and wanted my two bucks back, knowing that Fett would be mine again soon anyway. I put the figure back on the card, placed the bubble over him even though I’d completely torn it off the package and went to Dad, meek and regretful. But there was no going back on the deal. I was sad for a bit, but then probably realized that now I wouldn’t be heading into my birthday already knowing what one of my presents was, and besides, did I mention that I had a brand new Boba Fett?
It’s only been as I’ve been writing this essay that I’ve realized what a milestone and turning point that action figure marked.
When I walked out of Click’s into that sunny afternoon, soon to be two bucks lighter, I had done it.
I had Collected All 21. The next figures would come out with the release of Empire, and 21 became 32 and then 41 and 45 and 48, and the figures went up from $1.75 to $2.50 and then $3.00 and four bucks and change and there were just too many to get.
But for a few months in there, I could look at the back of any Kenner Star Wars action figure package and put a magic-marker X over every one pictured.
It was the last time I could ever say that I had all the Star Wars guys.
Proof of Purchase
Jake came over to spend the night once – I figure this was around 1980 – and my parents were going next door to play Scrabble or cards or something with our neighbors. We went along because, looking back, I guess Mom and Dad just didn’t trust a couple 9-year-old boys alone for a couple hours.
Jake had one of those Kenner “Give-A-Show” projectors: kind of an oversized flashlight with a slot where you slipped filmstrips through frame-by-frame, and he’d brought it along, along with the Empire Strikes Back filmstrips.
They were unintentionally hilarious. The drawings were very cartoony and oversimplified, which makes the fact that they included the torture rack scene even more hysterical. As I remember it, in the picture, Vader’s standing next to Han and saying something like, “The Empire doesn’t like troublemakers.” This had us howling.
A Certain Point of View:
Imaginations in Hyperdrive
One of the best things about being the age I was when Star Wars came out was that the world still seemed like a pretty vast place. Details got foggy if you were talking about somewhere beyond the end of my street or a time further back than about a year and a half. Facts were facts until proven otherwise, and stories were taken at face value.
Star Wars gave birth to galaxies of conjecture.
Rumors flew, for instance, around the whole mystery of the “Episode IV” designation, which, along with stuff like the “Journal of the Whills” reference in the beginning of the Star Wars novel, gave rise to the idea that other Star Wars movies had been made. We’d just never heard of them because we were only little kids, after all. I remember word going around the fledgling geek community that some movie theater in Kansas City was showing all 12 Star Wars movies. (Kansas City? Twelve? Where did we get this stuff?)
No matter. We ate it up and added our own stories to the mix.
Take the time when I was in first or second grade and I met Darth Vader: He came to the Belden Village Mall and set up shop at the center, in front of the O’Neill’s department store and next to the era’s requisite mall fountain. Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, minus the blankets of fake snow and grass, and with a couple Stormtroopers flanking him in place of elves.
For years, I kept the glossy 8-by-10 publicity photo they passed out, which he signed for me in black magic marker. Just to be clear: This wasn’t James Earl Jones or David Prowse. This was DARTH VADER. And that’s how he signed the picture, there at the mall’s center, a short walk from the Hobby Center store where I’d gotten my first Star Wars figure – Vader, of course.
When I got to school and started talking about my meet-and-greet with the Dark Lord, this kid William said he’d seen Darth Vader at a mall, too.
Here’s the deal with William: The kid may have been the only one in our class geekier than me. High, nasal voice, knew how to read words even I couldn’t get (“chameleon” comes to mind). Had, like me, all but memorized the Marvel Star Wars comic adaptation and thus was able to explain things like why Princess Leia didn’t give Chewbacca a medal at the end of the movie. (Because “Few space princesses are that tall.”) Not a bad kid. We used to joke about mixing martinis on the playground. I have no idea why.
So William had his own “met Vader at the mall” story, only his went way beyond my handshake and a Darth Hancock. The mall he’d seen Vader at, William explained, had set up an entire Star Wars funhouse. And not only had he met Vader, but he’d actually ridden with the big guy in a replica of his TIE fighter cockpit. And where the front window was, there was a viewscreen showing the trench battle scenes from the movie, and Vader had menacingly told William to push the firing button, which he did, and that had been the shot that killed Luke’s old pal Biggs. (Knowing Biggs’ whole backstory was a dead giveaway of geekdom in those days, because it wasn’t included in the movie. Only someone who’d read the books and comics would know he was Luke’s best friend.)
I was insanely jealous. Where was this mall? I had to go! Yes, I bought William’s story hook, line and Jawa and probably faithfully spread it around to other Star Wars fans.
William’s tale I now chalk up to good-natured enthusiasm. Kevin’s, though ... Kevin was just kind of a jerk.
This was a few years later. He rode my school bus and lived about a mile away, which was bike-riding distance, but too far to walk. Obnoxious, mean kid. Example: Near the end of my street growing up was a place we called the creek. Really just the meet-up of three roadside drainage ditches forming a pool probably two feet deep after the heaviest of rains, and maybe ten feet across. Summers, it used to breed so many frogs you could catch a dozen tadpoles just by dipping a bucket in the water. Kevin and I went there one day and he stuck a tadpole on the street and stepped on it, slowly, with the toe of his cowboy boot, until it burst. That stuck with me for longer than I wished.
Still, he liked Star Wars, which was something to talk about. (He also liked the Miami Dolphins and wore a teal-and-orange coat in winter.)
Sometime after The Empire Strikes Back came out, Kevin and I were on the bus talking about Star Wars toys, and I wondered why there was no Cloud City playset, with something where you could put a Han figure in and turn a knob to get a Carbonite Frozen Solo out the other side. (I was thinking at the time of those old Star Trek toys and their rotating-door “transporter” features.) So Kevin starts talking about a Cloud City set that he saw that had a Carbonite Freezing Chamber and a Torture Chamber – man, Han just didn’t have a good day on Bespin – that would leave three little pin-dents on the chest of your favorite action figure.
Kevin must have claimed this belonged to a friend
or cousin, because honestly, if he’d said he had it at his house, I’d have gone over and demanded to see it, tadpole murderer or not. (Now that I think about it, I think he had also at some point claimed to have seen a Grand Moff Tarkin action figure. Jerk.)
It wasn’t gullibility. It was a belief in mystery and possibility, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that in these days of endless spoilers and movie countdown websites.
Still, the Star Wars universe has kept expanding, with cartoon spinoffs and novels and comics and such, and remember: Long ago, Lucas was often quoted as saying the movie saga was a nine-chapter triple-trilogy. In fact, one of my friends knows a guy who’s working on the story developments for parts seven, eight and nine.
Also, I’ve got a used Star Wars fun house to sell you.
Proof of Purchase
Mom surprised me and Mike D. with some Empire Strikes Back Presto Magix one afternoon, and we both went bonkers, tearing into the packages with their paper backgrounds and sheets of transfer stickers waiting to be put in place.
Mom grinned and said, “Don’t I even get a ‘decent?’” This threw me for awhile because I thought she was implying we were ungrateful and just hadn’t completed her thought, as in “Don’t I even get a decent thank-you?”
Later I realized that she was talking in our language of the time, which, for Mike and me, included using the word “decent” as an adjective meaning “cool.” Occasionally, we’d even shorten this to “Deese!”
Yes, it sounds unbelievably silly, sure, but then again, consider: wicked, gnarly, radical, sweet…
Bounty Hunting:
A Pack-A-Day Star Wars Habit
Girls go to Jupiter
To get more stupider,
Boys go to Mars
To get more Star Wars cards.
Yes, it’s supposed to end with “candy bars,” but that’s the way my seatmates and I sang it on the school bus in second grade.
I never kept my Star Wars cards in albums. There were always either tossed into a shoebox or, more often, just kept rubber-banded together. And we measured collections not by number or completeness of card sets, but in stack thickness. Saying someone had “200 cards” or even “all the yellow ones” didn’t impress as much as if you said you knew someone with “about this many” Star Wars cards, and you held your fingers about four vertical inches apart.
I had a small bookshelf at home that had two sliding glass doors set into grooves along the front edges. One of these panes became the place for me to put the stickers I got from packs of Star Wars cards: Grand Moff Tarkin, C-3PO, a Tusken Raider. When I bought other kinds of cards, their stickers went there too, which is how a Close Encounters alien made it into the mix. I remember the earlier Star Wars stickers, the ones that were cut-outs of character heads outlined in bright colors, looking bizarre next to some of the later stickers that were rectangular and bordered with edges printed to look like film sprocket holes.
It was always a cool thing when Topps put out a new set of Star Wars cards. The blues, yellows and reds came first, I think, but I remember being particularly stoked by the orange cards when I found them in Finney’s, the closest drugstore to our house.
Finney’s sold all kinds of other cards, too: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mork and Mindy. I can remember being in the store with Rick one day – his parents had driven: Finney’s wasn’t within biking distance – to buy Star Wars cards. We had money for two packs each. Rick somehow convinced me to split my purchase and buy one Star Wars pack and one pack of Kiss – yes, the rock band – cards. Kiss did not appeal to me at all, but it was the 1970s, so I caved in, even though I was embarrassed to be buying them.
Rick was also the source of a big chunk of my early Star Wars card collection. He’d either bought or traded for a three-inch thick stack of green-bordered cards, and I bought them off him for fifty cents. I seem to think I got a Cleveland Browns 7-Up bottle in the deal, too, although that may have cost me another fifty cents. (From a sheer “get-more-Star-Wars-stuff” point of view, the trading cards had serious affordability working in their favor. My allowance wouldn’t support regular trips to the store to buy action figures or toys, but I could almost always scrounge up enough change to buy a pack of cards on a moment’s notice.)
The one Star Wars card that it seems everyone knows about now is the infamous green-bordered C-3PO #207 where he appears to have an extra appendage. A specifically male appendage. And it’s standing proud. I never saw this card as a kid, but I found one decades later at a flea market, in with a small bunch of Star Wars cards on a table full of random junk. It cost me a buck, and it remains my one true flea market jackpot. (When I was in college, I found a statue of a monkey sitting on a pile of books, one labeled “Darwin,” and pondering a human skull. It was $40, so I walked on by. Not five minutes later, I found the same thing literally one aisle over for five bucks. That’s my second favorite flea market find.)
Collecting Star Wars cards was how I first learned the actors’ names, which were printed on some of the publicity-photo kind of cards: Han Solo (Harrison Ford); Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher); Darth Vader (David Prowse). This last one caused a minor stir when I was over at Mike D.’s house and his parents were talking about an interview they’d seen on TV where somebody named James Earl Jones was talking about being Darth Vader, and it confused the hell out of me, because I knew for certain that Darth Vader was David Prowse. Said so on my green-bordered Star Wars cards. And Mike’s parents were baffled because they had clearly heard James Earl Jones speaking specifically about the role. I don’t know if we ever figured out we were both right until much later.
Getting “checklist” cards was a mixed blessing: On the one hand, you felt kind of ripped off because it didn’t have a cool picture on the front, or a puzzle piece or trivia on the back. On the other hand, now you had a way to see which cards you had and which you needed.
Once, I was showing my Star Wars cards to a girl at school I had a crush on. I’m thinking first or second grade. One card showed Han Solo leaning back in the cantina booth, and it was captioned, “Cornered by Greedo!” Maybe I’d only seen the movie once at that point, or maybe I was just overcome by this girl actually talking to me, and I couldn’t concentrate properly with her head of long dark hair so close by. Either way, my explanation of the caption was that Darth Vader, being such a horrible villain, was obviously greedy, earning him the nickname “Greedo.”
Never mind that Han and Vader were never even onscreen together in Star Wars, much less hashing things out in a dingy bar booth.
While I only remember ever buying Star Wars cards in individual packs, by the time The Empire Strikes Back cards came out, they were selling them in three-packs, only they came without the gum.
The first Empire cards were the red-bordered set, and I remember that these were different from the Star Wars cards in that on the back, instead of the printed puzzle pieces, they had paragraphs describing the scene on the front. And there were little “teasers” to the next card, so the series actually told the story pretty much as the movie did.
My friends and I were particularly fascinated by one card: #90, “The Ordeal,” which showed Han on the torture rack in Cloud City. We were morbidly intrigued by that bit of the movie. Maybe it was the spookiness of that machine, with its flashing lights and electric shock noises, or maybe that it got Han Freaking Solo to just howl in pain from behind a closed door. It seems pretty tame by just about any standard today, but man, it stuck in my head when I was nine. I remember when another kid at school brought his “Ordeal” card and we clustered around him during recess to look at it. (In the second, blue-bordered set of Empire cards, a similar card of this scene was called “Han’s Torment.”)
My friend Jake and I also snickered a lot over card #67, the scene where C-3PO interrupts Han and Leia’s first kiss, because the caption on the front read, “Pardon me sir, but … ohhh!” At that age, while make-out scenes in movies were disgusting if your parents were
around, references to them were clearly playground-talk fodder. Our laughter was a more innocent version of the “bwomp-chicka-bwow-wooow” porn music jokes that came with high school and college.
I was 12 by the time Return of the Jedi came out, and while I was as big a Star Wars fan as ever, I was reaching a point where getting all the toys wasn’t as big a deal. The trading cards, though, still appealed to me. I remember going up to the flea market with my mom and brothers in the summer once, and none of the trading card booths there had any of the still-new Jedi cards, so I decide to walk to the nearest drugstore to search.
I don’t remember the name of the store, but it was about a half-mile away, in a shopping plaza where there was an IGA and a Fisher’s Big Wheel department store. To get there, I hiked east on Route 619, a fairly busy street with no sidewalks, past the concrete-and-gravel business and the barn that housed the hobby and craft shop (which had sold Dungeons & Dragons stuff until the local churches threatened to boycott the place), and the gas station, and it was sunny and hot.
And the drugstore didn’t even have any Jedi cards. I wound up buying one of those “Official Collector’s Edition” Jedi magazine/program things, though, so it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip.
Getting cards was always about the collecting – the hunting and comparing and swapping – rather than achieving a full set. It was about the tactile experience of tearing into the wax paper, chewing that brittle, crunchy gum into something half-palatable, and flipping through the cards to see what you got and piling the doubles off to the side. It was buying a couple packs at a time, but never going someplace like a comic shop and asking for a whole unopened box.