The vintage carded figures. So the above picture is from around 2004 I think. It features some of the guys I had been picking up on their cards. Second row, second on the left is the Yoda I mentioned already.

The we have some others of varying importance. The Weequay, the second one on the left on the top is one of the ones I got because I wanted him. Being I was older when ROTJ came out, that figure was always won I seemed to play with a lot. Then in jr. high and high school used the weequay race for my Star Wars RPG character, that also became my personal fan fiction Star Wars guy too, named Jak. So yeah I wanted to grab that one.

The next figure was the Royal Guard, another one of my favorites from the ROTJ figures. Then there is cloud car pilot. I actually never had a cloud car pilot in the 80s. Its an odd little duck, it was also at the time I was buying these guys one of the cheaper carded options around, so I decided he was worth it. But no real nostalgia points with him like the others so far.

Next to Yoda are the Snow Trooper and Scout Trooper, almost all troops are going to be figures I loved and still love to this day, I was also making sure to get them on their first printed cards if I could, so the cloud car pilot and snow troopers are on their first ESB printings even though I could have maybe found ROTJ versions at a smaller cost.

Next row down under Yoda is a Gamorrean Guard. This was a figure I had in my childhood collection, but wasn’t something I was clamoring for, however this particular carded one was super cheap because the proof of purchased used to order the mail away Emperor Palpatine was cut off the back of the card. Seriously he looked fine on the wall and was like five dollars on an Ebay auction for being damaged.

It was also cool to have something else that mentioned the mail away figure for Palpatine. For that was a figure, maybe the only figure if I think about back in the original line that I did clip proof of purchases for and mailed away and got back then. I missed Boba, Ackbar? and Anakin, but I managed two Emperors.

And so the rest of that row of vintage carded figures is kind of in the same boat, as cheaper carded figures, except for the Imperial Officer. The headless one in my childhood collection was purchased at a drug store in Indio when we were visiting my Aunt Dorothy. And he is oddly the figure that I associate with the plastic smell of the vintage figures when they were new, and it’s a strong sent memory and I therefore really was excited to get that figure.

The bottom row has another long storied figure, Gonk. The original Star Wars power droid is the figure I spent the most money on to get. I bought him at comic con 2004 if I recall the right one, much to the shock of Justin V. but it was the only Star Wars lined vintage carded figure I had, and it was the Gonk droid which starting with Jen and I back in San Diego had some cult fandom behind it. It was a very cool little guy.

Next to him the B-wing pilot was something I picked up because it was super cheap and if I did ever try to get all the vintage figures, well then I had one. Probably one of my least favorite figures from the old line. Then we have Admiral Ackbar. Now I should research this, but I think he was first available as a mail away figure, so its technically not his first version, but I love the big squid so it was great finding this guy on the cheap back in the day.

Okay Now we need to talk about Storm trooper figures in greater scale. So my first figure ever was a vintage trooper that I played with until he lost half of his limbs. The need for troopers never left me since then. I have more than just that storm trooper in my original loose collection. I always wanted more, I loved the silly look of those guys with their unarticulated heads.

In 1996 when the new figures came out, the first three figures I bought, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and a Storm Trooper. I would have bought a Yoda had one been available, but those where the three at the drug store in the mall that I wanted. I didn’t care too much that the trooper was a little large in the chest and biceps. Or that he seemed to be stuck perpetually running. I got a couple anyway.

But when the new Commtech trooper version came out with better articulation. http://www.rebelscum.com/POTF2CTstormtrooper.asp

Initially this was a hard to find figure. But I needed them. I would get this version here and there. But then something amazing happened. Thanksgiving 2000. Now for the first time in my life in 2000 I wasn’t with Mom and Dad for thanksgiving. Instead, I was stuck in San Diego. The only benefit for me from this was that Jen and I at that time lived right behind a Toys R’ Us.

Rumor on the internet that the scare line that had the trooper in might be out for the Black Friday sales, and marked down at something like 1.99 or 2.99 as part of the sale. So at 5 in the morning that Friday I got up and got in line outside of the Toys R’ Us. Now winter of 2000 was a surprisingly cold winter in California that year. Even in San Diego, so I had to bundle up a bit.

But once they opened the doors I found them, pegs and pegs of the new trooper and at a extreme mark down. I bought a lot of them. Did I feel bad if someone was still looking for one in their collection later, yeah sure, however if I didn’t get them that morning odds were more likely a reseller was getting it, so that eases the guilt.

And so, for a few years I had a pretty cute collection of troopers on display. And people started to know that was a figure that I would always be happy to get. I even did a speech for college about how a Storm trooper was always a safe gift for me, because even though I have one, I always want another.

Then I think around the time Attack of the Clones was coming out, the star wars website, or official fan club started having trooper builder packs available for order. And I pulled out the credit card. Now the bedroom, front room and beyond always had troopers available for display.

Then there was a vintage trooper that came out with slightly better articulation, so I started grabbing some of those. In the end I probably had more than a hundred troopers easily. I never actually counted oddly enough. In the 10s when I divided up figures between the four kids that Christmas, even after giving them all a fair amount of troopers, I think I was able to still stash a couple in one of my boxes so I could rebuild later on in life if I ever get so lucky. Having a storm trooper brigade will always be something I want.

The ATAT. So there might have been a larger vehicle I needed to go Storm trooper on. and that was the ATAT.

Let’s start with that weird silver one in the middle. That is the most important one because it was beat up through the garage wars in the 80s. When I got into Junior High I wanted to try and restore it if I could, since at some point when I was little I decided to paint the ATATs legs blue and yellow. With no internet around to reference at the time I tried to remember what I thought it’s new color was and I picked like a silver or, actually I think it was aluminum, or some other such Testors spray color meant for use with car and army model kits.

And I repainted him. That is also as far as I ever got with that restoration. I quickly realized it was not the right color and decided, oh well, its pretty now. But it was my childhood ATAT. Found like most of my larger toys by Dad at the thrift store. It never had its guns or anything in the first place. So now it was just pretty. He now lives in storage.

Now the other ones. To his right are two of the New Hasbro re-issues of the same mold that came out in the late 90s. the complete one on the far end was part of the 19.99 and 9.99 vehicle closes outs in 2000 that Jen and I cleaned up on. Next to him on his left is another closeout ATAT but it’s incomplete. That guy has a name, and his name is Bobo, and he was bought on extra closeout discount by Jen and I, and was our pet in San Diego.

On silverbacks left are my other two vintage ATATs. One of them, which was complete I did sell off for Christmas money or some such thing for the kids in the late 10s. Oddly when I pulled him out of storage he was missing his guns, which we can see on him, I still haven’t found them, and still technically owe them to the comic store I sold the beast too.

The other one is a mystery to me, I don’t know where that is now after a lifetime of moving he is either hidden deep in a box in storage or lost in transport. This is a mystery I will have to look into.

Beyond those guys, Jen and I kept one of the clearance ATATs in the box. Then in 2015 I gave that guy to my nephew Justin’s two oldest boys. He now exists, beat up like silverback in their closet somewhere.

Now at this time in my bed room if you look north of the ATATs you see another vintage figure that I really wanted and was super happy to get. It was a Power of the Force Imperial Dignitary:

http://www.rebelscum.com/VINtImperialdignitary.asp

When I was a kid, this was like the Luke Skywalker in Stormtrooper disguise, I wanted this old man in a purple robe really badly. Well unfortunately he was released in that same late line that is a lot harder to find that the movie branded figures. Luckily I found that particular specimen though. If you look closely at it, you can see a little damage to the logo on the  card. This allowed me to get him well, cheaply and I was happy to do so, because he was a figure that was on my list of wants.

Now like all the stuff that held value I sold him later on in life, but I did manage to get a loose version of the figure, which hangs out with my vintage Bossk next to my monitor to this day. Like I said there were other vintage carded figures I kept getting over time beyond the ten or so I wrote up about on the wall picture I have, but I don’t even remember which all I had.

My Power of the Force 2 carded collection.

1996, In whatever the drug store in the University Mall was at the time is where this story starts. I have probably already touched on this a bit in the 1996 section. But while at this store with Dad in the mall I came across a new bin with the new Orange carded figures for something like four dollars and ninety nine cents.

So above we see some of the carded figures I had on my room wall at the L street house. Vader, Boba Fett, Yoda and the Stormtrooper were the first figures I would walk away with. All but Yoda came from that trip with Dad, and I think I had to hunt down the Yoda.

I wasn’t terribly happy initially with the exaggerated physiques so I went with the characters that I liked and didn’t seem as silly looking as say Luke, Han and of course Leia did in this part of the line. This is where I happily stayed with these figures for the next year or more.

I loved Star Wars, had my old toys, was initially excited to see new product but then would have rather had remakes of the old style figures over these new ones. I was also still a High School kid and had other things I cared about and getting a honcho version of young Mark Hamill wasn’t really a priority.

Then in 1997 the special editions come out. I was starting to get into my internet web phase and keeping up with the special editions online was fun. Now oddly I only attended A New Home and Empire, but I was getting pretty jazzed about the Star Wars again.

Then as I have gone over, that summer, in Utah, a nineteen year old me realized collecting the new Star Wars figures would be a fun thing to try and do and started gobbling up any of the figures I could. It was the fact that Bossk and the other aliens I saw at the store looked better than the initial waves and that I realized I didn’t care if people wondered why I was buying kid’s toys.

That fall I took a picture of where I got. It wasn’t far, but my taste to start completing things was getting set in, and with the internet I could see what I hadn’t found. I would then for the next year and a half start to go out of my way to look for missing pieces and on occasion look on the internet to see what might be coming out soon.

So, the wall grew. By winter of 1998 we see me using Dad’s Christmas present to snap a picture of the increased wall coverage. To the left of my head, you can see my Darth Vader autographed picture from 1983, which was in the first picture from 1997. I haven’t re-ordered anything, just added too it over that year to where it covered most of that wall.

When I put up the first few figures on the wall, I wasn’t actively collecting carded figures for the idea that carded was the value in the hobby, it was just a neat way to display what I had bought. Then as I added to it as it grew that became half the fun was adding to the wall.

This made collecting the vehicles and boxed stuff not as important to me, in fact at this point in time I was just keeping myself to almost exclusively single carded figures. Of course, though we have a huge year, maybe the biggest in Star Wars not named 1977 coming. 1999 and episode one.

There is this amazing group of things that happened during this year. Episode One is coming out, Dad gets into eBay and somehow I got into the idea of getting all the available figures that the modern line had released.

This is a year that will see Episode One itself add so many figures that this new motivation would became a large time sink for me as well. Along with the internet opening up even more with sales of figures. The challenged was on.

By the end of that year, I had built up that mess in my room. I am even starting to put some of the figures into Star Cases. The now carded and boxed figure collection was the wall. With episode one as well I started buying two copies of figures I liked so I could have opened copies. This came about because it was during 1998 and 1999 that the figures overall look started becoming something that was just as near to display in little action scenes.

Or as I built next to my television the Mos Eisley cantina. I was even building up overflow now in Dad’s room in the closet where I was allotted space for my collecting “table” over the years.

I was getting carded figures in faster than I could figure out how to put them on the wall, then the boxed stuff on top of my desk was built up to the ceiling. This was probably the golden age for the collection. It was so big it was a defining part of what I did during the week, and as we got into San Diego and 2000 would continue to be something I did pretty feverishly with the help of Jen.

With Jen, the split off to collecting loose figures would become so big, that there really is two different hobbies from one that have formed. The loose collection of modern figures and the carded collection. Interestingly there is a slow down because of space with me getting carded stuff through 2000. But when I returned home in 2001 I quickly caught myself back up on the new figures.

This would be the second major collecting period, I woud keep up with the figures pretty hard which led us to this amazing photo from midnight madness before Episode Two.

The massive additions to the collection after Episode Two would lead to me needing to organize things better and got me to mass order the plastic Star Cases for them in bulk.

Next to Karl there on the couch is one of the many boxes that invaded the front room during the Star Case the collection project, I had to order around 200 of them if I recall, and was an interesting system of opening shipping boxes then putting the figures in the cases on the dinning room table, then arranging them onto the wall in the bedroom.

The finished product is where the initial pictures of this little section come from.

My bedroom became a toy museum. After six or seven years of collecting the figures I had cased and added so many that my room was this sort of shrine to the endeavor. As you can see collecting the Star Wars men gave me access to other toy lines, which in turn I found corners to display in the room as well.

Also we can see some vintage carded figures on the wall. That was another bi-product of getting into carded Star Wars figures during the turn of the century. This was actually one of my favorite parts because finding the right carded figure to add all the time at the right price was a bit more work, so all the editions were pretty fun.

And I went over these guys a bit.

Post 2007 and the carded collection. When I moved to Los Angeles Mom and Dad had to pack my figures off the wall in my room. Thus starts a weird period of carded figures packed in boxes. In L.A. I had a large walk in closet in my bedroom there, so I just packed all the boxes in there.

Funnly enough of the large boxes housing the collection, one of them was the box Blueberry, the emergency computer from 1999 came in. Without a wall to thrive on, and with more money going into things like living, this period is also the end of adding to the carded collection.

Its in the boxes they will be in when they live in a storage unit, a garage, then another storage unit. In 2016 I started moving them to a shed, but this also coincided with other events and I started selling the carded collection.

Harper will always get the honorable mention of her Christmas Hatchimal and the liquidation of the carded collection. At the Toys R’ Us on sunrise in Sacramento. A location I used to look for figures with Dad back in the 1990s, I was selling off some of the figures to another collector when we found her elusive Hatchimal.

Another major event during the liquidation was that in order to get Aidan his Wii U and other birthday presents/events, I sold the vintage ESB Yoda that hung on the wall for years. I don’t know if the kids will ever understand how much of my history I sold off for these holidays, but it is at least cool that they get to be part of the story.

Which I needed to expand once I get this added in.

As of 2023, the old collection was entirely sold off. I have found two uncased carded figures from that era in storage that somehow never got star cased and managed through all the moves to hide in random boxes. I have also started buying some of the retro reprint versions that have been coming out. I was pretty sad I missed the Yoda and Stormtrooper that came out in the first waves, so I have been keeping up with a couple of the figures lately that have some significance to me.

Modern Vintage 2.0

Well I wrote this all once, and Microsoft Word could not for whatever reason save an HTML file without blowing it up. So Now we get to re-write the entire section. There is an argument to be made that some team at Microsoft has spent a lot of time coding a save feature to go out of it’s way to do things not instructed by the end user. It’s a weird

2023, February, my birthday to be precise. I decided it was time to look into upgrading or at least cleaning the storage situation for my little plastic Star wars men. This collection would be of my loose figures, which mainly is comprised of guys I got when I was little and have been well loved. This is not my first foray into working on the original figure clan.

Around twenty years prior I made a pretty solid attempt to start complementing figures with missing pieces and store the figures in some safe manner. This was also about the same time I was doing so with my carded figure collection, so unfortunately I did neglect some of the ideas I was working on for the loose boys.

This idea of completing the figures had started that year when after at least a decade and a half of being headless, at Comic-Con that year, I found a new noggin for my Darth Vader figure. So I managed to collect up some accessories and plastic Ziplock bags and started completing the figures that had lost parts over the years.

As I said though I never really completed the job, so eventually when I bought a couple nicely drawered tackle boxes from Walmart, I just loaded up the figures in their new homes, where they ended up spending the next twenty years of their lives.

It was through basements and storage units that they survived this way until that night in February when I finally started sorting out their living situations.

Surprisingly even though some where not bagged at all, the figures did pretty well in their home. Decently dust free, mainly still perfectly intact, and without much yellowing on the stormtroopers.

All in all I was pretty happy with the state of my men after all that time. The tackle boxes had done their job and kept what is essentially an important part of my material childhood alive. So, I went through with some light cleaning and unbagged the team to access the situation.

From this a mystery arose. And it came from this:

In one of my labeled baggies from 2003, one of the prized members of the community, my completed Yoda, was missing. It was a stumper. While going through the assets, there were two other occurrences of the same thing, empty labeled bag with no man inside. The other two were, the jawas, and 4-Lom. (who I think is now called Zuckuss).

4-Lom was the first part to expand the mystery. Because I knew were that figure was. Initially in 2003 my plan was to get all the figures in clamshell protectors, much like I was doing with Star Cases and my carded collection. 4-Lom was the test pilot for the project. I had a single clamshell and I put him in it and then tried to put him in a drawer in the tackle box. He was like a half centimeter too deep, and the drawer was unusable with him.

Distracted by the much larger carded figure project, I kept that 4-Lom in his shell, and he moved around on a different path then his other loose brethren. So much so that I knew he was in a drawer in the room just feet away from his old baggie I just pulled out of the box. Good, sort of. His story was not the same as the jawas and Yoda though. His story was unique and so instead of helping explain why I had two other empty bags in lieu of figures it only heightened the mystery.

I ended up talking to Nora about it quite a bit over the weekend. The jawas bag happened to still have their gun in it, which was even more puzzling. Why on earth would I have gone in at some point in the last twenty years and removed those figures from their bags? To sell them was out of the question, as much as I have liquidated over the years, I have made a pretty hard line at the figures I still had from when I was super little. So what was I thinking when I did it? And why couldn’t I remember.

The next week there was a holiday and me, and one of my many friends over the years named Chris, got some drinks and went out to the storage unit to do some work. I figured I had some unaccounted for men and maybe I could go through some unsorted boxes and discover some piece of the puzzle I was missing.

And I did, I found some more guys in different boxes, most notably I found the jawas. This was a good thing, I was only down the most important guy, but I found one of the missing bags contents. Perhaps I would get lucky and find Yoda. However, this didn’t occur. Chris and I did another trip out to storage later in the month and Yoda was still a mystery.

Then one night looking around at old pictures for this project I came across this:

 

Two lights came on above my head like the old cartoons. I did move Yoda, probably the next year in 2004 and I know some more about these pictures.

Yoda and Luke here as photographed on my phone of images on the computer, are living on these clamshells a friend of mine, Rick from Courscant City .net sent me four of that were able to house the figure and a custom “card back”. Sort of a nice way of displaying your loose figures.

I had given this idea a whirl and made four figure setups this way, Yoda, Luke, Bossk and Chewbacca and then mounted them on my wall at the L street house way back when. I remembered these instantly once I saw them and it at the very least solved the mystery of why Yoda’s bag was empty. But as I said something else got awoken in my memory.

Chewbacca. The Chewbacca figure was the one I prototyped the clamshell setup with. Unlike the other three figures he wasn’t complete, but was just one of many Chewies I had from ordering a clutch to give away for the almost successful “Chewbacca Project” I was trying to do for coruscant city .net. Then once I was happy with him I tried it with a couple of the more important figures, most notably Yoda and Bossk, who are my boys. I think Luke got added in because it was the original look and he had his saber.

Now I don’t know why I stopped at four, but that is all I ever did this way and until seeing the picture I had forgotten, well no. Chewbacca we come back to again, back in 2019 when I went to Texas to visit my mother, in a plastic bin, there was some Star Wars stuff. Mainly Dad’s diecast starships he was selling on eBay in the late 90s and some other random modern stuff, and, that Chewbacca.

The contents of the box not seeming that important to me, well not important enough to lug back to California with me, instead got taken to a nearby Star Wars store in Fort Worth Texas called:

https://holocrontoystore.com/

A rather amazing Star Wars emporium. I took the contents of the bin there and sold them to the store. I remember Chewbacca was part of the contents because the gentleman giving me the quote thought the item was cool and commented on it. I know for a fact I sold that store the Chewbacca.

For a second or too I try really hard to remember if I didn’t just decided to let go the other three that day. But I really felt like if I would have had Yoda in there, I would have kept him. He and Bossk I would have been willing to bring back to California. So, we are back to wondering what on earth happened to Yoda, and well now, two other figures I can’t find.

Time will pass.

I manage to clean up the tackle boxes, which had a pretty good amount of filth built up on them from the two decades of plastic men protection. But like I said, they did a decent job of keeping the contents free of the same disaster.

I also am able to get the non-lost figures sorted and Ziplock bagged to await however I decided to store them for the future.

Nice and cozy and awaiting further developments. Since the tackle boxes are now cleaned and worked so well, I really wanted to clamshell the figures and then reinsert them into the drawers. However as of writing this, I have tried a couple different protectors, al suffer from the same issue as the one governing 4-Lom, just a bit too deep to work.

Instead, currently some of the figures seen above have been shelled and are living in a couple airtight, UV, blah blah blah, storage boxes I am trying out in the meantime. I am currently decently satisfied with the progress on the update.

And not all is lost for the tackle boxes. My current backup plan is to use the baggies with my modern line loose figures, which I still have some of since I just gave them to Harper and Aidan when they were little. We still have some of them in storage and it would be nice to preserve them. Not only because they were mine back in my twenties but just in case Harper or Aidan suddenly get a sentimental streak about them when they get older and wax nostalgic about them as well. Nora thinks they won’t, but we can’t predict the future, so it seems like an okay idea.

Now Yoda. Time is going to pass an in the following month I am going to agree to help out with getting one of the super nephews a laptop. It’s set to arrive on March 10^th a Friday. After work I hustle out to their neck of the woods to help intercept and check out the new computer. When the UPS man arrives, he has two boxes, one which is obviously branded and another much larger box.

Hastily without checking the packing labels I set aside what is obviously the laptop to see what this other box houses. What kind of extra goodies are we getting with this laptop? A free printer? A monitor? I open the box and once again things dawn on me as I see a rolled up piece of paper.

Cindy, she had a few weeks back sent me an early Saturday morning text about finding some comic books in Mom’s stuff that she thought were mine. In fact that morning I had mentioned to her that the box with those items still hadn’t arrived. This was that box. And that piece of rolled paper, as I unrolled it was Reise’s rough draft of the Conan the Barbarian, which was going to eventually grace the garage wall at the L street house and had been a focus of intense research of mine for the last year.

 Stunned at that, I pulled out my phone took a picture and started getting ready to send Reise a message about it. That is when Calvin’s curious eyes dove deeper into the box, and I heard him say “Star Wars figures”. I moved my attention to the box, and there to my surprise I pulled out Luke, Bossk and the missing Yoda.

Solved, somehow when moving back in 2006, instead of getting put in with my stuff, those three little guys ended up in some storage box of Mom and Dads and have been living for a decade and a half in there. Luckily nice and safe. Humorously the comic books, were almost all not mine, but without them who knows if I would still be hunting down Yoda.

Now Yoda resides on the wall next to my computer, which what little of a carded collection I have these days.

Another figure of note during this project needs a quick mention here:

Paploo the ewok. Partially eaten by Napoleon. When I was little and Paploo met this fate at the sharp end of my poodle’s teeth I was pretty upset. Pollie had essentially destroyed one of my toys. However, here we are decades later, and these teeth marks are probably the only remaining amount of physical evidence that good boy ever walked the face of this earth. While the figure is pretty much considered worthless or next to nothing on the market, it’s worth to me is unaccountable because other than a couple pictures it is all that is left of that dog and therefore this is an irreplaceable figure in the collection.

As for the loose collection, as of publishing this, this is where we are at.