A perfectly legitimate rainy day activity
It’s been a miserable, rainy, stormy day all day, and therefore a perfectly valid day for building the Death Star. Apparently the pride of the Empire already suffered a little bit of battle damage, and as a result, there’s barely enough pieces – as in if I’d been short one more support strut the deal would’ve been off – to have everything free-standing. The trash compactor is missing, but y’know, I think that was the first part of my Death Star to get ditched too. 😆 The cardboard scenery inserts are all intact, the elevator works, and the whole thing stands on its own – and yet amazingly, for being one of the biggest Star Wars toys of them all, it’s both bigger and smaller than I remember. If you didn’t have one of these, the best way I can describe it is that it was a sort of “pie slice” from the Death Star, with a few locations built into it that were vaguely reminiscent – very vaguely – of scenes from the movie. There was a crossover bridge that you could “swing” Luke and Leia over, the tractor beam controls with an impossibly narrow catwalk for Ben Kenobi, and one of the massive cannon emplacements. On the bottom level, there’s an open slot for an orange “trash masher” which came complete with chunks of foam, a green rubber dianoga creature, and a vise-like twist handle that would mash your trash (and whoever was in there with it) until the pressure caused a door to pop open. The trash compactor even had windows on the sides so you could see your plastic heroes getting squished! There’s just something endearingly funny about how harmless it all was back then (and really should be today – none of this stuff scarred me for life from childhood onward, or made me a more violent person).
Of all the stuff that Kenner/Hasbro has reproduced from the original toys, I have to say that I’m surprised that this particular playset was a singular phenomenon that hasn’t been repeated. The most Hasbro has ever done with it was a couple of dinky little interlocking “playset sections” representing the swing-over-the-chasm scene and one for the hexagonal detention center hallway shootout (a location that’s somewhat conspicuously absent from this original playset – the second floor has a trap door that allows you to chuck your figures into the trash masher below, but that’s as much of a concession as that scene gets). For a location that’s such a central part of not one but two movies in the original trilogy, that’s a mighty odd omission. In fact, I think Kenner even passed up the opportunity to reissue it for Return Of The Jedi in 1983, though that’s most likely because what few specific scenes there were built into the thing were so specific to the first movie.
If you’re wondering why there aren’t more pictures, those’ll be going into the ToyBox section proper, maybe, say, round about the time of the new DVD releases with the original original trilogy movies included? 😉… Read more
