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Vintage Star Wars Action Figures | Modern Star Wars Figures | Star Wars Ships | Star Wars Playsets | Star Wars Creatures | Star Wars Articles

The marketing genius of Lucusfilm and Kenner starting to merchandise the 3.75 inch Star Wars action figures quite simply resided in giving kids something the best part of 4 inches long to grab hold of without having to resort to sticking their hands down their pants for comfort. Whether you agree or not, kids of the late 1970s and early 1980s fell for these toys in a big way.

One of the major innovations over other action figures of the era was to make these Star Wars figures and ships much smaller in scale, compared to say Action Men. This meant that we could afford to buy more, and once we had the bug, much more. It meant that the production of Kenner Star Wars figures could be cheaper and more variation of toys could be produced. This fired up the imaginations of fans, tantalising them with the possibility of being able to create something which had the feeling of being true to the Star Wars movie experience. That army of Imperial Stormtroopers was always just a couple of weeks of spending money away, and that fleet of Imperial Tie Fighters just a few birthdays and Christmases away, but of course most of us never made it that far because new Star Wars toys got released which we just had to have in the meantime. Kenner set us on a perpetual and unfulfillable dream of owning everything and having a better Star Wars collection than our peers. More recently Kenner's parent company Hasbro and then Disney have continued to do the same as new generations of Star Wars fans have got the bug.

Vintage Star Wars Action Figures

Since the demise of the production of vintage Star Wars action figures in 1985, the design, detail and quality has evolved considerably. We have gone from the muscle-bound monstrosities of early Power of the Force Two in the 1990s, to some truly beautifully designed figures in many of the series since the millennium. The Black Series, Vintage Collection and 30th Anniversary Collection in particular have been a real tour de force and many of them are now equally as collectable, and often even more costly, than the original vintage Star Wars figures. Even the POTF2 collection had many redeeming features since, once we got past the muscle-bound six-pack figures and the appalling Planet of the Apes Princess Leia, Hasbro started to take serious Star Wars collectors into consideration and we got many nicely sculpted new figures to expand our own Star Wars Universes whilst we eagerly waited for the new film, The Phantom Menace, in 1999.

All of a sudden we had a Grand Moff Tarkin, Captain Piett, a Wuher with Droid Detector, a double blister pack of Jawas, an R2D2 with tripod legs. I should have been in heaven but I was too busy with the academic world to notice at the time. There were also movie afterthoughts such as Jabba the Hutt's Dancers three packs and ASP-7, background figures such as Muftak and Kabe, the mysterious Garindan Imperial spy, the Cantina Band the Modal Nodes.... We were being spoilt, after having been being jaded, and we were being wooed back in a big way. I remember looking in a Sci-Fi shop in the mid-1990s and being really disappointed by the new range of figures and glad I'd left the whole thing behind, so the Star Wars action figure renaissance took off and expanded behind my back really. I came to everything retrospectively, as a fan who'd taken a sabbatical. Kenner/Hasbro had started to really lose their way by 1985 with the body rigs which bore absolutely no relation to the movies and then they suddenly found their voice again whilst my attention was diverted elsewhere.

And then came the Sneak Previews, including the Mace Windu action figure in a box. It looked great. A new Jedi with a purple lightsaber. This figure looked like a Jedi Knight with gravitas and didn't prepare us at all for the buffoonary of Jar Jar Binks.

Expectations were high. The sneak preview Battle Broid with STAP was also intriguing and felt in keeping with earlier initialised vehicles such as the AT-AT and AT-ST in name at least. The Star Wars universe was about to grow...

Modern Star Wars Action Figures

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When I was a kid we could almost all afford the biggest hunk of junk in the galaxy (with a little saving up and pestering of parents at Christmas). These days just to pick up spares and parts for these ships and vehicles, it's almost true to say, 'You could almost buy a whole ship for that!'.

Star Wars Ships and Vehicles

These playsets are the little pieces of magic that allowed us to bring the Star Wars Universe to life in our bedrooms. All it took was suspension of disbelief and the power of our imaginations with a little help from Kenner. Suddenly our imaginations could be whisked off to Endor with the Kenner Ewok village or aboard Darth Vader's Star Destroyer, in the thick of the battle for Echo Base, or even on Dagobah with Yoda and Luke cooking lunch or making cargo float in the air.

Star Wars Playsets

Star Wars simply wouldn't be Star Wars without all the weird and wonderful creatures and monsters that crop up in every episode. Whether they are beasts of burden, ravenous, bloodthirsty flesh eaters or benign comic asides to the action, the Star Wars world contains a zoological treasure trove of exotic critters. Many of these have been immortalised in plastic by Kenner and the toy manufacturers that followed them.

Some of these creatures were really hard to come by in the UK including the original vintage Dewback and the Dianoga from the Kenner Death Star Playset. Others however were much easier to acquire such as the Tauntaun, Wampa and Rancor Monster.

The number of Star Wars creatures available has multipled rapidly from the Power of the Force Two series onwards and we now have numerous variations on the original creatures as well as ones such as the Bantha, Kybuck, Mynocks, Gellagrubs, Acklay, Nexu and Reek and so forth.

Star Wars Creatures and Monsters

One might say that the best place to learn about vintage Star Wars accessories is from the inside of a 1980s vacuum cleaner. Those Shake 'N Vac adverts have a lot of answer for when it comes to the enthusiastic sucking up of what are now highly sought after weapons and accessories. These have been covered so exhaustively elsewhere that there is little point me adding anything extra here. Instead I focus mainly upon the vast array of post-1985 Star Wars accessories for which there is a real gap when it comes to cataloguing them.

Modern Star Wars Accessories

As much as I adore all the Star Wars films, and their faults, I've tried to give as fair and as objective a critique of them as I can, whilst also not holding back on my compulsion for irreverence. I explore the Star Wars motifs, themes and tropes, theology, historicity, epistemology and much more. I'll also just throw a comment in about whatever I find of general interest within the LucasFilm and Disney movie canon.

Articles, Essays and Thoughts on the Star Wars Films