Category: ToyBox

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

Our story begins in 1978, when Kenner put Star Wars toys on the market. I had already been Star Wars-obsessed for over a year before I spotted the first such item, which as I remember was an R2-D2 figure spotted in the Service Merchandise store in Central Mall in Fort Smith. My mother had hauled me there because she needed to pick something else up; when I waited patiently in the toy aisle for her to return – this was 1978, when you could actually leave your kids in the toy aisle and have a reasonable expectation that you could still find them there when you returned – clutching the newfound R2-D2. I was either six, or rapidly approaxing six, years old. I think my mom knew then and there that she was in trouble.
Our next story begins in 2000, when I moved back to Arkansas from my cavernous apartment in Green Bay, and I had to put a bunch of stuff into a self-storage unit, whose owners seemed to pride themselves on how secure it was. The apartment was just too small, I had no choice, but I was very, very reluctant to put my fleet of well-worn plastic spaceships under someone else’s lock and key. I’d go and check on the stuff in there every month whenever I went by to pay the rent on the unit. In late June 2000, about a week or so before my wedding, I went by, dropped off the check at the office, and went to check my unit…and found that my key didn’t fit the lock. Maybe it was because it wasn’t the same lock I had put on there. I went back to the office and asked them to come take a look at it. They handed me the bolt cutters and told me that if anyone was going to break the lock, it’d have to be me, so I cut the lock off of the door and opened it up, and it was pretty obvious that I had been robbed.
Very selectively robbed, mind you – four massive tupperware tubs containing virtually all of my Star Wars and Star Trek vehicles were gone, as was my old stereo amp and a little B&W TV. We’re talking the old-school 70s and early 80s Star Wars stuff too – not the reprints which were showing up by that time. My figures weren’t in that storage unit – I annoyed the heck out of my bride-to-be by refusing to put those in self-storage – but in one shot I had lost just about my entire collection of ships, with the only exceptions being my Playmates Star Trek 1701 and 1701-D models, which were on display at the apartment. As for the old amp, it was in storage for a reason: I had replaced it, primarily because, before my cats were fixed, one of them had perched on top of the nice warm amp……..and peed into the ventilation grill on the top surface. If that thing warmed up and got cooking, it reactivated that smell quite nicely.
I’ve always imagined that the rather selective thieves, who – given the layout and controlled access of the place – had to be either renters of another unit or the proprietors of the place, got home with their loot, switched on the amp, got some music going, started putting my huge collection of sci-fi wares on eBay…and then had their house filled with the smell of heated cat piss within about 20 minutes. Let’s just refer to that hypothetical incident as “Iago’s Revenge.”
Our last story begins earlier this year, when Dave let me know that an ex-roommate of his from college was unloading his Star Wars toy collection, consisting mainly of ships and playsets. The cost: nothing – he was looking to find them a good home where they’d be appreciated – though I do need to reimburse Dave for the shipping.
What the heck?, I figured. Even if they ships aren’t in great shape, that probably makes them about even with the ones I used to have. As it turns out, I was about to get the sweet end of the bargain. … Read more