Originally posted at the OS on May 2, 2006
Attack of the Action Figures...Revenge of the Trailers: YOU'LL LAUGH, YOU'LL CRY, YOU'LL KISS THREE BUCKS GOODBYE... Memories from a long, LONG, time ago, in a state not too far away...
I spent the afternoon photographing Star Wars Action Figures for Ebay ...those things are annoying to photograph... all that shiny plastic in the packaging reflects light... natural light, overhead light, strobe light... didn't matter, so I finally said the h-e-l-l with it and used the flash... and the pictures looked pretty good... on full screen, but shrink them down to Ebay size and they're crap! R2-D2 looks like stapler...but the see-through Darth Sidious came out better than I expected... I kept thinking how much fun it would be to take them all out of the packages and stage my own little movie scenes... but no, no fun for me today... sigh...
Well anyway...while I was snapping away, memories of Christmas long ago came over me... not the Christmas of the Infamous Empty Box, but the First Christmas of Action Figures... Beginning with the first week in November 1978, I worked the Christmas season at Toys R Us. Right off the bat I was discouraged because I was assigned to the dolls aisle... puleeze... but The Force was with me on my first day, because another young mother was moaning that she'd been assigned to one of the "boys toys" aisles and she had a daughter... and didn't I have a little boy? Well, my son was too young for that sort of toy, but I said "Sure! You want to trade?"
I passed my days in the Star Wars aisle... oh, there were a few other toys in that section, but they didn't need the attention of a full time stocker... There were other Star Wars toys there, too... and I remember lovingly straightening them on their shelves each morning, and throughout the day, reading the packages, and explaining them to befuddled parents. They must have thought I had received special training or something.... HA!
The thing is, I can't remember now what those toys were... as my son got older he had a lot of Star Wars toys, and his sons have a lot of Star Wars toys, and they've all become a blur in my mind. But, I remember those ACTION FIGURES!
Every morning the pegs would be bare of figures, and I'd wait for the truck from the warehouse to see if we'd get any more... I sorted them out and hung them up, and re-hung them up 10 times a day as people tore through them looking for Luke Skywalker or R2-D2...the closer it got to Christmas, the more desperate the parents became to find any ACTION FIGURES... there were only 12, I think... Luke, Han, Leia, Ben Kenobi, R2 & 3PO, Chewbacca, a Stormtrooper, a Jawa, a Sandpeople-person, an Imperial Officer and of course our favorite baddie, Darth Vader... I just saw something in the Star Wars shop about the 500th figure... who knew?
By Mid-December it seemed safer to just open the box and throw it out onto the floor from the back room and not go out there myself... the trick was to carry a handful out at a time so not to be overwhelmed by crazed shoppers... maybe I should have used The Force to levitate those things out to the rack...
The day after Christmas I was put to work writing refunds... we had scanning registers in those days, but refunds had to be written out by hand first... anyway, I don't remember a single Star Wars action figure being returned... two days after that I had to go back to my aisle and it was decimated... a few Jawas and a Imperial left... Sad... Eventually it was restocked, but long after I was gone.
LATER THAT SAME LIFETIME
Fast forward to summer, 1980...Episode 5? What do you mean Episode FIVE?
I'm standing in line to see The Empire Strikes Back at the Marin Cinema (I think that's what it was called) in Corte Madera, California, when a car full of teenagers roars by on the street out front... a guy sticks his head out the window and yells at the top of his voice: "Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father!" Looking back I can only think, "Man, you don't know the half of it...."
I bought a car with a hatchback that summer and my son, who was three, liked to climb out the back every time we stopped somewhere... there was an inside release lever that I could use to pop it open... so whenever he wanted out he would tell me "open the top hatch!"
SPRING OF 1983... I got into an argument at work on whether it's "Revenge of the Jedi" or "Return of the Jedi" LOL... I'd seen a trailer that called it "Revenge..." we settled the argument by deciding that it was going to be really cool no matter what it was called...
And it was! We went on Opening Day, and I had to get my son out of school early... at the end of the school year his teacher told him he was lucky to have parents who gave him "such interesting experiences."
And now I have that "Revenge" trailer on DVD... after we saw ROTS last year, my grandson, Tyler-Wan, wanted to see the OT again... I had videotapes, but I decided to splurge on the DVD box set... He was very amused at the trailers from those days... the tone of them was a lot different. Then of course we had to watch "Hardware Wars" again...
Now that I'm done shaking my head over the variety and the sheer number of today's Action Figures, I'm going off to bed, where I will probably dream of little plastic battle droids fighting little plastic Jedi Knights on my kitchen countertops... with tiny little plastic lightsabers and blasters... with salt & pepper, probably...
May THE FORCE be with us all!
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