Wow - I totally forgot about that. I remember a friend had the giant head version. It was one of those weird things that you didn’t understand as a kid. Kind of like the
giant purple Snaggletooth (that my friend also had).
I liked the one-man battle ships that Darth and his crew used to fight the x-wing guys in the end of SW. I had the one Darth used, with the curved wings, and if you hit a button with your thumb the wings popped off like it was hit and crashing.
I also had an X-wing fighter, and you could push down on R2-D2 to make the wings spread.
I never had any Star Wars toys, though I suppose I am young enough for them. I later got myself a lot of the video games: X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, etc. Though my friend did have a set of Return of the Jedi bedsheets. Oh, and I did play the CCG for a while, but I could never find anyone to play with and my favorite expansion set was Hoth, which generally wasn’t a favorite of others when I could find someone.
Of course, now I want stuff like that $300 Lego Star Destroyer.
I started collecting Star Wars stuff well after “Return of the Jedi” closed when stores were unloading stuff cheap, plus I got an allowance bump whenever I helped my dad fill orders. So I have a lot of the stuff you kids drooled for. 
I could darn near put “Jedi” on complete, as I had Jabba, the Rancor, the Imperial shuttle for the Emperor’s arrival and the infiltration sequence, a speeder bike, the Ewok village, a two legged walker for Chewie to commandeer, and this weird thing that wasn’t even in the movie. Nice to see it’s worth something, and it truly was a blast to play with. The downside of buying in this time was that you could never find stuff from “Star Wars” itself or “Empire Strikes Back.”
The centerpiece exhibit was the “Millennium Falcon.” It was a ship, and a setting, and awesome. It was also way overpriced; tell me this thing isn’t any different in mass and design from a tackle box. Oh, and it’s poorly designed. The gangplank and the radar dish would fall off even if you left them in a dark, empty room in a vacant building in the deep woods of a seismically quiet area. The cannon required you to stuff your guy upside down into the chair, so he could bang his head a lot falling out. Luke’s practice ball was pure misery to set up. The smuggling hold meant everyone was tripping on thigh high partitions, or stormtroopers would be falling through it. The worst part was the battery-run sound of the engines. The engines went, “Rrrgh.” I don’t remember this in Star Wars anywhere. The “Millennium Falcon” properly goes, “VOOOOoooooommmmmmmm.” Only parrots and dying video game characters say “rrrgh.” I lost half the ship’s interior for all the electronics and battery space and what not for “rrrgh.” I was not amused. Still my favorite of the bunch.
Worst accessory? Jabba, hands down. He was another that’s head twisting made his tail thrash. Made him look like he was trying to disco. He didn’t leer correctly either, he had a hookah pipe (that fell apart easily) so he had to have a dent in his mouth to hold it. Result: Stroke Victim Jabba. The hookah contraption got stored and I pretended the base was a bowl for his frog dinners. His plinth had the trap door to the Rancor in it, in case Jabba felt suicidal or just wanted to poop on his prisoners. The trap door opened the wrong way, too.
Best figure: Luke as a Jedi Knight. Cloth cape, black glove, a gun AND a lightsaber, when no one came with more than one accessory. (And it was a lightsaber he could hold, not slide out of his arm like Ben and Vader. They had a little thread of plastic sticking out the end that looked like their sabers were dribbling. And once you pulled that off, the sabers would fall out of their arms. And no matter what, they had that cup in their hands, like they were looking for someone to top off their drinks.) Runner up cool: Chewbacca, because he is. Vintage 1977, for Christmas, age two. The gun vanished in a garage sale long ago. And pull apart C3PO, always good to shoot him and knock an arm off.
Worst figure: Endor Leia. This was the only version of her around by then, and she was ugly. Her camo poncho frayed at will, and if you took it off her, you saw her light gray jumpsuit and jackboots. And since you didn’t want her to always look like she was expecting Ewoks, you had to play with SS Slut Leia a lot. Runners up bad: R2D2 had paper details that peeled off and a thing that stuck out of his head that I could only pry up with my teeth. Boba Fett was baby blue and had a rocket stuck to his back that didn’t do anything. What a loser. Why did we ever think he was cool?
Wants: Figures mostly. A decent Leia and R2 were always high, as was Han in carbon. Instead, I used a butter tub for my regular Han. Any ugly face half-hidden behind a pillar in Jabba’s palace had a figure all over TG&Y, but there never was a Tarkin, Piett, or Jerjerrod, or Wedge, or Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru with “after” smoking corpses. Likewise no Vader with removable hand and helmet (I wanted this bad) or Bikini Leia (not so bad, but I was confused why there wasn’t one.) Never were enough stormtroopers. They should have come in six packs so they could storm things properly, and so the rebels could develop a dangerous new weapon resembling a Superball that you could blast a bunch of them across the room.
The AT-AT and the TIE both eluded me, though I have their pilots. (Why? They were cheap, and I only found stormtroopers once, so there had to be more Imperial baddies, not just accidents of birth on Jabba’s payroll.) I never even saw a TIE. Saw an X-Wing, but passed it over for Jabba and missed out. That Death Star playset is tempting even now, even if it looks completely wrong. The Star Destroyer does not tempt. It would only have worked as a toy box to get the scale right.
Oh, and I tried to play chess with the figures. Luke was king, Leia queen, Han and Chewie were bishops, Ben and Yoda were rooks and the droids were knights (the other way around would make more sense.) I know the Emperor was king, Vader was queen, and stormtroopers and biker scouts were pawns. It all gets hazy after that, especially when there were gaps and I had to use ordinary chess pieces. The figures always fell down to much to be practical.
Guess I was lucky to have quite a few Star Wars toys, including the Millenium Falcon, an X-wing, Slave 1, the Dabobah playset, and the Ewok Village playset.
My favorites, however, had to be the micro playsets, which included Bespin, the Death Star, and Hoth. I coveted the Death Star set but never owned it. I was also missing the central portion of Hoth. I kept the pieces I did have in a big orange bucket and was careful not to lost anything. Bespin later served as a backdrop for my miniature Transformers figures.
Guess I was lucky to have quite a few Star Wars toys, including the Millenium Falcon, an X-wing, Slave 1, the Dabobah playset, and the Ewok Village playset.
My favorites, however, had to be the micro playsets, which included Bespin, the Death Star, and Hoth. I coveted the Death Star set but never owned it. I was also missing the central portion of Hoth. I kept the pieces I did have in a big orange bucket and was careful not to lost anything. Bespin later served as a backdrop for my miniature Transformers figures.
:smack:…stupid server!
Darth Vader was my first figure. My sister and I collected the toys. We had the Ewok Village, a Tie Fighter, and A-Wing, a Y-Wing, a Tie Interceptor, the Imperial shuttle (it was huge), tons of figures, including the mail-away Emporer and Annakin Skywalker, an AT-ST, Jabba the Hut, and lots more. There was a set of bookshelves in our house that would become the “Death Star”, and we’d play for hours. I recently shipped all of my toys (Star Wars, GIJoe, Transformers) from my parents house to mine…maybe I should go through them and see what I have.
And Skopo, thanks for the Adventure People link. I didn’t even know what they were called, but we had the jeep with the canoe, the rescue people, a green van with a camper. Wow, I had forgotten all about them. Funny, I melted one of their feet (I think it was the guy in the red shirt with the red beard) on a lightbulb as well.
Your mother must have seen the Star Wars Holiday Special.
A friend of mine had the Ewok Big-Wheel. I can’t remember what made it different from a regular Big-Wheel, though. I tried to Google for a picture but no luck.
Aahh the memories.
I had a bunch of action figures. My friends would bring theirs over and we’d do battles.
My favourite piece was probably my Y-Wing or the AT-ST.
Is four-and-a-half years a record for necro-posting?
Ah, sorry it was linked from another thread I was reading. :smack: