"To an eight-year-old kid, "star wars" was... a drug." "I wanted to be part of the..." "that "star wars" universe, and I really felt like having the toys was the way to do it." "If you asked me what other toys or things I was into in, say, first through third grade," "I got nothin'." "* past the oceans far below * * through the stars and heaven's glow * * take us from this overload * * on these rockets * past the oceans far below * * through the stars and heaven's glow *" "* take us from this overload * * on these rockets" "* ah ah ah ah * on these rockets" "* ah ah ah ah *" "90% of the toys I had as a child were "star wars" related." "So, right from the get-go, it dominated my interest more than the other, um, cartoons and toy lines that were sort of vying for the attention of your average kid growing up in the early '80s." "These were something that enabled you to create a world and play in there." "There were no toys like that." "There was no toy line that I can remember." "The universe lent itself to really fantastic and interesting and... and, you know, kind of crazy stories with weird characters and new planets, and I think that really just grabbed on to kids' imagination." "Having one of the "star wars" action figures in my... in my hand was about as close to having one of the characters in my room." "You know, having 3po on my table, sitting there with r2-d2 next to him." "In the late '70s and early '80s, you weren't gonna see the movies over and over." "For a lot of kids, the toys, I think, became more important than the movies because they were gonna get to play with the toys nearly every day." "They were gonna get to talk about the toys nearly every day." "You know, if you were going over to your friends house, you almost didn't have to ask," ""do I need to bring my 'star wars' guys?"" "You know, you just showed up with 'em." "Once parents came into a room, "what are you doing?"" ""We're playing 'star wars.' see, hammerhead, he's from..."" ""okay, we'll leave you alone."" "The parents would not bother you for two hours 'cause they knew you were in another universe." "We were pretty rough with them." "We used to like to build a lot of different forts and bases out of, you know, cardboard boxes and bricks or whatever else we could find, um, to play with." "They were sort of the modern, I guess, you know, army guys." "You know, setting up the battles." "Pew, pew, pew, pew!" "My rewards tended to be "star wars" related." "A decent report card, my dad would take me to the store and let me pick out a "star wars" figure." "Christmases, birthdays, there was always some sort of "star wars" toy." "I think "star wars" set new ground rules for what was collectible and the emergence of popular culture as being a major phenomenon, certainly in the us and then spreading elsewhere." "This is sort of a funny story." "In my scrapbook, I have, uh, this sign." "When I was a teenager, I sometimes didn't always lock the door to the house and would get in trouble." "So, my parents went on vacation one week, and I came home, and I saw this sign taped to the front door of the house." ""Dear Mr. burglar," ""the most valuable property in the house" ""is the old 'star wars' toy collection" ""on the 2nd floor." ""Help yourself." "Don't forget the lucite star!"" "So, these are my original loose "star wars" figures." "This is most of a set in the case here." "A lot of these are from when I was a kid." "The same figures I played with." "Actually, I have two loose sets." "I always had mine that I kept and, you know, re-armed and kind of finished out as I got more seriously into collecting." "And then a few years ago," "I got a box in the mail from my brother." "He actually sent me a darth vader case full of his figures from when he was a kid." "You know, I have one set to pass down to my older son, and one set to pass down to my younger son." "I've since had a daughter as well, so now I'll have to work on a third set." "For collectors that now collect the stuff today the connection they had as a kid plays a big part in why they collect today." "Every kid around my age had "star wars" toys." "While there's a finite number of people that collect this stuff, there's a lot of people that know what it is." "They realize that this stuff has played some part in popular culture." "Whether it's just children's toys or that it has sort of evolved into its own hobby," "I think more people are generally aware of that than we give credit for." "I don't think our connection with vintage "star wars" toys is much different than if you had gone to your dad, you know, 25 years ago and handed him a stack of baseball cards from the '50s or '60s." "The fact that these particular toys are tied to something bigger," "I think that's a big part of where their staying power comes from." ""Star wars" revolutionized so many things." "The lived-in universe that Lucas created, taking the epic hero and villain story and placing that in the context of another universe changed film, it changed the toy industry forever." "You know, if you read books on the toy industry they almost always will have a chapter that talks about "star wars."" "It is a profound change to the toy industry." "To the best of our estimates, and there are no solid numbers on this, kenner sold three quarters of a billion action figures." "Just wrap your head around that." "That's a lot of toys." "There had never been a successful toy license based on a movie." "Movies came and went." "Plus, the licensing industry at that point was fairly new." "There had been some tie-ins of movies and toys." "So there are examples of like "planet of the apes"" "years after the films came out." "Nobody had really done a massive toy line at the release of a film." "You know, I think somewhere in George's mind, the feeling of "star wars" was on the 1930s serials." "And they had been merchandised." "For its time it was a good success." "And I guess that somewhere in his mind he thought," ""well, you know, maybe there's something like that for "star wars."" "Send away for a Luke Skywalker decoder ring." "**" "So, lucasfilm and fox, you know, the sent out the information and a solicitation to all of the major toy companies in the us." "And that included mattel and hasbro." "They decided, ah, you know, by the time we would get the toys out, nobody's even gonna remember this movie." "And so they all passed." "But there was this second-tier toy company in Cincinnati called kenner products." "They were know for making toys that kind of mimicked real-world experiences." "So the easy-bake oven was like a toy oven that girls could mimic what their mom's did with a real oven." "They made a toy that was like a miniature cow and you could milk it." "They made a goat that you could feed things to." "They became associated with play-doh." "Activity-type toys." "Here we are on kenner street where the company got its name." "**" "So 1947, when the company originally got started out, it was a spinoff of a soap company, Cincinnati soap." "The soap company, like any other company, was looking for a way to get people to use more and more of their products and to differentiate from somebody else." "And they came up with the idea for a gun that shot bubbles." "Procter and gamble at that time was really wanting to get into consumer home-goods, so they bought Cincinnati soap." "And the guys from Cincinnati soap called up and said, "well, what about the bubble gun?"" "Did you buy the rights to that?"" "Immediately, "no, no, no interest in that."" "And they said, "well, do you mind if we run with it?"" "And, uh, kenner toys was on its way." "Colonel Steve Austin, the six million dollar man, and the new bionic transporting repair-station." "Kenner had had a lot of success with the six million dollar man, and that started to get them thinking about doing other properties." "So I'm sure that's what kenner saw in "star wars" partially." "And that's probably what, uh, lucasfilm saw in kenner, that they had successfully done this with the six million dollar man." "Bionic eye, a-okay." "Six million dollar man, ready for action!" "It came into the office as a script and a series of black and white photographs." "Different locales, there were different vehicles, there were different characters waiting to be turned into a toy." "Everyone, especially in the design department was very intrigued and very excited about working on "star wars" as a property because it was so different and revolutionary from what they'd worked on before." "We were foraging into new territory, and a lot of us didn't even know where we were going with it." "Like, you know, what kind of toys would we make, what would sell, what wouldn't sell." "Up until that point in time, "Star Trek" as a license, everything was polished." "And almost all science fiction was done that way." "When it came to "star wars," all of a sudden we've had weathered effects on things." "And I thought that was neat." "And then to put a brand-new form under that kind of treatment and then sell it as a product would be really, really nice." "Bernie loomis, who was then the president of kenner and became very well known in the toy business, said, "I thought it had a 'toyetic' appeal."" "It would make an interesting line of toys."" "And they literally signed the contract a month before the movie came out in April of 1977." "Bernie loomis called me into his office, and he said, um, "I want you to take your staff to a movie this weekend."" "And I said, "Bernie, it's, uh..." "It's a holiday weekend."" "And he says, "so what?"" ""We just bought the rights to this movie." "I want your staff to see this."" "He didn't tell me anything about the movie." "He didn't tell me what the name of the movie was." "At least they paid for the tickets." "They took the whole department, all of the development people over, they rented a movie theatre, and we all hauled in cameras in there so we could take pictures of the screens looking for all the elements in that movie" "that we could create into toys." "...and George Lucas bring you an adventure..." "Everybody was just blown away at the number of machines and all the fighters and the robots." "Everybody that walked out realized that we had something here that was incredible." "Not a product line, it was probably a phenomenon about to occur." "They went into it thinking the movie would be out there for, you know, a decent period of time." "And their original product plan was," ""okay, well, in the first year we'll have" ""one or two board games, you know, maybe some puzzles." ""In the second year we'll have a vehicle." "And then maybe some figures."" "But they weren't over-promising." "**" ""Star wars" came out in may, 1977." "By mid-late summer, it was just this amazing blockbuster success." "Everything was about "star wars."" "Everybody wanted to know about "star wars."" "The marketing and merchandising plant at kenner changed overnight." "How much can we have and how fast can we have it?" "You had to have something by Christmas of 1977 or you're dead." "It's may, we need product out for Christmas, which means you have to have it in the store by August." "I realized that there wasn't enough time to make this work." "So, I was in a meeting, I mentioned," ""what if we sell the right to buy the product when it becomes available?"" "R2-d2, Chewbacca," "Luke, and princess Leia, they're the "star wars" early-bird set of figures." "These action figures are not yet available, but this "star wars" early-bird certificate package is in stores with this colorful" ""star wars" picture display stand and certificate to send in to get a set of figures by mail." "They'll be sent to you at home between February 1st and June 1st." "The "star wars" early-bird certificate package." "New from kenner." "So, this is what you'd see, probably on a counter advertising the early-bird certificate package." "And if you were a lucky kid, the parent would pull out an envelope and buy it for you for Christmas." "This is the display stand portion of what would be inside of the early-bird envelope." "It was just a cool-looking piece of cardboard until you got the figures to put the on there." "And you can see I put the figures on there." "That's how it would look once you got them in the stores." "It sounds really lame today." "You hear it and you go, "well, oh, my God, you just gave these kids, like, a slab of cardboard."" "People pretty much shook their head, going," ""how are they gonna do that?" "How are you gonna pull that off?"" "Well, this was kind of up there with the pet rock." "You know, where, what..." "I'm..." "I'm spending this much money for an empty box." "This needed to sell this to lucasfilm and 20th century fox." "So what they did is they created prototypes of what the kids would get in this package and presented it to George Lucas." "All the different people who were in the meeting filled them out and gave them back to kenner so they could get the toys when they came out." "I hadn't been there that long." "And this was..." "My idea." "And even though it might have been embraced by some of the top people, it didn't necessarily mean that they were going to embrace it if it didn't work." "It sounds like, wow, they pulled this amazing con game on kids in Christmas, 1977." "But it was actually a very successful campaign, although a lot of the sets went unsold." "As a kid going through it at the time, it was one of my favorite "star wars" things" "I ever bought." "And you had a little catalog that came with it." "You saw the play set, you were looking forward..." "I actually loved the thing." "The early fans had that hunger for it." "And so, when that hunger was met, oh, the satisfaction!" "The, "I've finally been fed."" "And I think that still exists in the minds of those of us who grew up with "star wars."" "It was that wonderful feeling that that itch had been scratched." "Once the "star wars" early- redemption program was done," "I was walking down the hall, and Bernie loomis was walking down the hall in the opposite direction." "He saw me and he looked at me and he says, "good."" "Behind me is the kroger building." "This was the headquarters when kenner toys was making the "star wars" license." "In this building, you would have had the executive offices, the sculpting department was here, and even a foundry to help make early prototypes." "Even before the license was signed in April, the toy team was very busy doing it's thing and coming up with concepts way beyond what could actually come out in 1977 because of the lengthy production time." "We had scripts and we guessed at what we were going to be the most visible characters and the most visible vehicles and sets." "The first things we worked on were the figures." "The very first figures were all kind of carved out of human figures that we found." "Like the stormtrooper," "I took those figures and used, uh, bondo to start roughing out the helmet." "I was kind of playing junior sculptor." "Some of the figures are a little funky." "Like the tusken raider's head is all funky lookin'." "The original death squad commander looks more like a stormtrooper." "Dave okada, who was head of the design team told me, as soon as he knew that there was really gonna be a contract, he and everybody else was so excited, he went home, he raided his sock drawer," "got out some brown socks, and made a plush jawa." "Here, so you can see here that this is actually just a brown sock." "It just shows that at that time they were probably just doing whatever they could to get these products made." "It's kenner's new" ""star wars" action figures." "Each sold separately." "I gotcha now, Ben Kenobi!" "When you're the kid with the box full of "star wars" toys." "You are..." "I think "hero" might not be the right word, but everyone wants to see the figures." "Maybe not you so much, but they want to see the figures." "What makes the movie great is the same thing that makes the toys great." "There's all this imagination involved." "There's all these varied characters." "You have really strange alien characters, down-home looking characters, military..." "I mean, there's all this stuff all built in to it." "When the figures finally hit the stores, there was 12 available." "Luke Skywalker, princess Leia, darth vader, obviously, r2-d2, c-3po, han solo, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan Kenobi, stormtrooper, death squad commander, the sand person, and the jawa." "The first time I saw "star wars" figures or any other toys in the store," "I don't think my dad understood exactly what I was trying to say because I was basically just howling and whooping and making all these noises, pointing..." "You know, like..." "He probably thought I was doing an impression of one of the sand people." "My first figure was Obi-Wan Kenobi." "You know, he had the arm, and the lightsaber would pop out." "That was mind-blowing to a seven-year-old kid." "The first one I got was a jawa in the cloth cape." "Darth vader or Luke Skywalker?" "Darth vader's cooler." "My mom bought me r2-d2, and that was my first figure that I ever had." "Of course, the bullies that lived around the corner from me later soaked him in the creek that was by my house and he completely got ruined." "They didn't make them to last, and if you broke them, all you needed to do was go to the store and pick up another one." "I always kind of made Luke much more of a hero even than he was in the film." "He was pretty much the invincible" ""star wars" character." "He was, you know, my favorite character." "This is my original first-12 figure stand." "Um, not all of these are my original figures from my childhood, several of them are." "I know the r2-d2 is, which is of course why he's so beat up." "I believe it was called an action stand because it has action levers." "And you can see it's cracked and the stickers are coming off, but I will never get rid of this because this meant so much to me." "There were 12 action figures and I had them all." "This figure is sort of important to me." "When I was five or six years old," "I lost one of my teeth, and I told my parents that I hoped the tooth-fairy would bring me a "star wars" figure." "And I remember waking up in the middle of the night and reaching under my pillow and sort of felling the bubble of the carded figure, trying to figure out which figure I received." "I probably should have just pulled it out from underneath my pillow and held it up to the moonlight and saw, but I was afraid at some five-year-old level that the thing would disappear or turn to dust if I got an early peek at it." "So, I laid there all night till the morning and then pulled it out and got fx-7." "My most favorite thing to do with my "star wars" figures as a kid was to take han solo and put him in a cup of water and put him in the freezer overnight because then, the next morning," "you would have han solo frozen in his block of ice." "And you could play with that for a while the room wasn't just a room." "It became the environment like I saw in the movie." "So I'd pretend the top of my desk was the floor of the death star, or take one of my mom's tan blankets, throw it on the table, now it's the environment of Tatooine." "That's when I realized I need more characters here because I can't do the rest of this movie on my own without more figures around." "So I need jawas, I need sand people." "Kenner, even from the very start, they realized that even though they may not have had a lot of screen time, many of the characters were not even pivotal to the plot, they were different, they were unique." "They knew that kids would still be interested in it, and would really have an affinity for it." "So they made, for example, the tusken raider character." "They do get some screen time when they attack Luke in the film, but really not a central character to the story." "I tended to gravitate toward some of the characters like walrus man and hammerhead that really had no part of the overall story in the movies." "They're just there." "So, I could do things with those characters that I thought could have actually happened sort of off screen somewhere." "It's possible that hammerhead could have stolen the falcon at some point." "Yee-haw!" "One of the big challenges with the first "star wars" movie, and working on the very first one was the lack of documentation for the movie." "They had not photographed every costume, the models weren't shot from every direction." "People that did the set designs, we would use their drawings." "We would use some photographs, and interpolate into our own turnarounds, our own side and front and back views." "The lack of reference material, or the inadequate reference material that kenner had is probably responsible for some of the... the more famous, um..." "Screw-ups known in the "star wars" line." "For instance, the original version of snaggletooth which was designed for the sears exclusive cantina play-set was a large blue figure with silver go-go boots." "**" "Lucasfilm decided they didn't like that." "When the figure actually appeared in stores, it was a much shorter figure in a red outfit with hairy feet." "All you really saw in the film was his head." "So, you know, how big he was was kind of up to conjecture." "When lucasfilm got more in the business with kenner and everything became integrated, they would actually send props out the kenner, and they had to be kept in a locked cage." "So you really saw the toys get better and better in terms of design as the line went on." "You can walk through the history of an item by looking at the pre-production stages for that item." "It's kind of neat to be able to go," ""look, here's a whole progression of how this thing was created."" "Here we have several prototypes which reveal quite a bit of information into how a figure was developed at kenner." "First of all, we have the original wax-sculpting, and that is the actual 3d art for the figure." "The wax is specially formulated to hold a lot of fine detail." "Next we have a hard copy, which is made by taking molds off the sculpt and pouring into those molds a two-part urethane material." "Often, some of those hard-copy figures will be painted so that the designers at kenner can use them in photography or to test different paint schemes the actual production figures, which you see an early example of here," "are made by sending a hard-copy figure over to the orient where they make a tooling master that's used to cut the final steel tools that are made to make thousands of these things." "One of the challenges was the lightsaber." "We were trying to figure out how do you make a lightsaber happen without electronics because we didn't have anything that small." "I was a big proponent of a... of the spring-loaded device that would allow it to pop out." "Unfortunately, our friends in the cost department would not allow us to spend three cents on a spring, and it was a more difficult product to manufacture." "I had the model shop put a monofilament down the arm of the figure and it would come out through his hand... through the hand and curl up into a nice curlicue." "And ultimately, you know... that was it." "Now I know the force is with us." "The regular Luke had a lightsaber in the arm that slid out one time." "The earliest versions had one that slid out and then telescoped out a second time." "So the early-bird set is known for having that early-bird Luke that has the double telescoping lightsaber." "These are all four-inch darth vader prototypes." "What's notable about a lot of these are, of course, the double telescoping sabers." "This particular example is a prototype stage of that at the very tip is what we call the mushroom tip because it has a small disc." "And the idea was that it would give the person that was manipulating the inner saber, like, you know, something to grab onto to help extend it." "**" "I think kenner really bottled lightning with those figure." "It's hard to explain why these toys became so important to so many kids, but they did." "The card-backs to me were as neat as the figures, even as a child." "Not only did you get the figure, but you got this big color image of that character in the movie." "That was sort of part of the toy." "When I was a kid, I don't think finding a beat up card would have been acceptable to me because you want to rip through a fresh card." "You want to rip through a fresh card." "I, nowadays, look for figures that are in the best condition." "I wanted to be reminded of actually seeing these figures for the first time at the toy store." "This is a early conceptual sketch, kind of the rough-out ideas for the "star wars" packaging." "You see that the top has the pyramidal logo which you see in some early "star wars" products." "It kind of looks like it's "star wars"" "fading into the background." "Some commentary about the racetrack piping around the figure, which did make it's way into the final product." "You'll see also that there's a star behind the figure rather than a rectangle, a colored rectangle." "Obviously, as things moved along in the design process, it got more to the traditional look." "The distinctive double silver-piping is around the side." "The distinctive logo, it's not the pyramidal logo anymore." "Here, it looks though like they're using the hildebrandt Luke and Leia rather than as a small design element, as the main card art." "It looks like this is, like, an idea for a unified card art across the whole line." "Whereas the final figures would have had, if it was a darth vader figure, you know, has a picture of darth vader." "Kenner, unlike any other toy line, put at the back of the package" ""collect all 77!" Or 65 or 92." "And really no other toy lines, even though I was into lots of other toys, were really like that." "You know, they continued to build on the back of those packages this idea that you could get 'em all." "You could kind of see where that would come from." "Like, hey, we have a line here where you're not gonna want your favorite character, you're gonna want every character." "It was..." "It was like egging you on." "The back of the card-back says, you know, "collect all 92."" "It doesn't ask you to, it tells you to." "You'd get, kind of, this anxiety if you don't have them all." "And that stayed with me all through my childhood collecting these things, you know?" "I can remember that's how kids used to keep track." "You'd keep a spare card-back around your house." "All the action figures were pictured on the back, and when you got one, you'd "x" it off." "I would construct lists of ones I wanted." "I actually constructed lists of ones I didn't want." "So, you know, if I sent my dad to the store for an ig-88, he better not come home with, you know, a bespin guard or lobot or one of those poor guys." "I remember, you know, sitting in the toy aisle with my brother, looking over the back of the cards, looking for figures that, um..." "Did they have them yet?" ""Return of the jedi," they had a few blacked out, the ewoks." "So you wouldn't know what they would look like." "And sitting there and thinking, you know, what was this about?" "And who are these, and why were they blacked out?" "They must be really special." "Um... we didn't know any better." "Really, people didn't collect toys back then." "But they were actually creating this whole culture of kids trying to collect all the toys." "The collect-all philosophy is, I think, a pretty important idea behind the early success of the toys." "Not that they wouldn't have been successful anyway, but I think most kids at that time definitely remember that whole um... call to collect all of these figures." "It is pretty insidious when you think about it, but, you know, it was fun... it was a fun sort of insidious." "Now you can get this new 4-lom action figure free for five proofs of purchase from any" ""star wars" action figures." "Details on specially marked packages at participating stores." "Offer expires... you know, every year they'd have a different mail-away figure, just about." "And you'd have to collect the proof of purchase from the back of the blister card." "So you'd have to cut it out." "And you'd need, you know, five proofs of purchase or whatever it was to get admiral akbar or Anakin Skywalker." "When you went to the toy store, you could look and see all the action figures." "You could look and see all the spaceships." "This wasn't something that you could buy in a store, so it was a new "star wars" thing." "A lot of times they'd do it as a carrot to get you about a new upcoming film, a new, secret character." "They would try to kind of keep it mysterious and keep the mystique of the new character there." "And now, boba fett," ""star wars" villain, with his laser rifle." "Boba fett is not yet available in stores, but you can get him free with four proofs of purchase from any" ""star wars" action figures." "Kenner, in late 1978, began advertising its first action figure mail-away offer for boba fett." "And in those illustrations and photography they showed for this offer, boba fett had a rocket-firing backpack." "When we were kids, we saw the rocket-firing boba fett on the back of the cards, and we were totally expecting to get this figure." "And when it came, it wasn't what we thought it was." "Kenner had looked at this rocket-firing mechanism, and found that it was a huge safety hazard." "They were never shipped to kids." "But before the toy went into production, kenner had made some prototypes of it." "So, the one on the left is the... what they call the "I-slot version"" "of rocket-firing boba fett." "There's a cavity that's the shape of a backwards "I"" "where the slider would go down and then to the left, lock in, and then release a rocket." "Well, the problem with this thing was that because it was this... this I-shape, it'd be easy to kind of knock the tab and have the rocket accidentally fire." "They then updated this to the j-slot rocket-firing boba fett." "And you can see the slot is the shape of a "j."" "And it would hook around this "j,"" "but the little piece at the bottom could break off very easily." "There are a few other styles and differences that have turned up over the years." "Not very many, of course, these are extremely rare, but those are the major design considerations they had." "Kids never got this toy." "There are countless stories of people who remember getting a rocket-firing boba fett, but that never happened." "They were never shipped to kids." "One day, I come home and I get off the school bus, and my friend is waiting there, and he's holding a landspeeder." "**" "And of course, I just freak out." ""That's so cool!" "Wow!" "Let me see it!" "Let me..."" "he was there to play with one of the other kids that day." "Really?" "!" "Um, up here I have the original, vintage tie fighter that I received when I was six years old." "You know, it has a cockpit, you can put the figures in." "This is my childhood millennium falcon which I received for Christmas of '81, I think, or maybe 1980." "And it's a bit worse for wear, it's fairly beat up, but it's... this toy, I probably played with more than anything." "I mean, the millennium falcon's supposed to be beat up anyway." "Uh, this..." "Is my original x-wing." "It has no cockpit, most of the wings are gone, there's hardly any stickers left, but I will..." "Never part with it." "When you pick up that kenner x-wing, and you push down on the r2-d2, and the wings pop open, you're in that." "These were a way for me to feel like I was flying around in that x-wing." "Clearly, they saw this rich universe of "star wars"" "that George had created with all these environments and ships, and understood that this was a line." "It was not just a few eight-inch, cloth covered dolls." "Yeah, I think it was cognizant of the design department to give the children a world to play in..." "With "star wars,"" "as much as Lucas tried to create one on camera." "I think, you know, these are some of the... some of the most playable and best designed of the toys." "I mean, you know, you got the rancor, what's not to like?" "A big monster you could play, you know, on its own." "Had a lot of monster battles in the backyard with this particular guy." "The objective, always, it was the word that loomis used constantly in his conversations with all of us, is show me the play-value." "What play-value are we giving these kids?" "Every product that became a toy had to have child involvement as part of the premise." "So, it wasn't a toy without it." "Otherwise, it was a collectible." "It was a baseball card." "The ewok play-set was probably the most fun play-set that I did while I was at kenner." "I wanted my model to look exactly like the movie set." "They had an artist do a picture of what the ewok village would look like." "And they gave that to one of their... their, uh, employees, and he went and took sticks and stones and built a hand-made prototype of the ewok village." "Every lunch break, I would go out, wander through the park." "I spent a lot of weekends just wandering around the woods looking for the exact, right stick." "I'd just come into work with a... a bucket full of sticks and bark, and I just built it." "There was a passion there." "I mean, these guys weren't just punching the clock." "They really loved what they did, and they loved making toys that kids would get..." "have exciting time with." "There came a day that it was necessary to come up with a product that used a talking device which was supplied by ozen sound company." "It was used in a lot of toys previously." "Let's play house." "And they wanted to maintain a relationship with this company within the "star wars" line." "The "star wars" imperial troop transporter." "What's that?" "It's my troop transporter!" "It makes five more sounds too!" "R2-d2, where are you?" "Some of the ideas that were bounced are here." "This was a... sort of like a mono-wheel." "Not very possible in a toy, though probably great for film." "And here we have a boba fett-ish sort of guy riding a funny-looking motorcycle." "A little further along, we got to a point where there was a troop transport with maybe some guards on it." "The double-pointed version came about because I wanted to have a prisoner or a droid in the center." "And in this case, we went to making a black r2-d2 to be the bad droid that worked for the imperial guys." "Well, the pointy version was problematic for somebody, aesthetically, at lucasfilm." "They came back with another sketch, and Joe johnston did that." "And it turned out to be the blunt-nosed version that you saw in production." "Here we are in oakley at the kenner morgue." "80% of this massive facility was all kenner." "This is where old kenner ideas were kept." "This is also where they did a lot of their photography for catalogs and other items." "Other things that happened here were quality control." "A lot of choke hazards were handled here." "They also had a giant sand-box that you could throw toys in to see how they do in the sand." "No, I didn't feel like I was a rock star or anybody special or different, but it did seem to go well with people that you would meet around town." "They say, "oh, what do you do?"" ""Oh, I design 'star wars' toys for kenner."" ""Oh, that must be a cool job!"" ""Yes, it is."" "I believe that, at that time, kenner was the place to be in the toy industry, not just for designers, but for marketing people and upper-management as well." "That's why we attracted so many people from other big toy companies" "I mean, if you're going to work on a doll line today, where are you gonna go?" "Barbie." "Number one." "Go to the top." "And at that time, if you wanted to do really cool vehicles and space stuff," ""star wars" was it." "I felt like I belonged there because all of the other people and characters there were a little bit eccentric and strange." "They tended to frame that environment, and me in it, in a comfortable way." "It was like a fraternity of designers that were really honing their skills and really using their skills to create these amazingly different things." "Kenner was a very social company." "And a lot of different people would throw different social events, parties, whatever." "This is, um, a brochure for the after hours." "It was, uh, this one's second annual kenner employee art show done at a gallery in Cincinnati." "These were actual artists doing real work for a toy company." "The outdoor adventurers club." "And it shows some of these guys going out and hunting and camping and stuff." "There was, um..." "The now infamous" "Halloween toy show..." "Where everybody was supposed to come up with some sort of something to show as a toy for Halloween." "I had this monkey at home." "I just saw another role for that monkey." "The flasher monkey." "It was a great toy." "Really great." "Dum-dum dum." "Well, it's a toy company." "You're supposed to have fun." "I mean, that was pretty much my attitude." "I'm designing the coolest toys in the universe and my job's the best one in the world, so what's not to like about that?" "One of the things that I admired about Bernie loomis is that Bernie had, um, an understanding that when you have creative people, you gotta give them an outlet for it." "You can't just tell 'em what to do, and go design this." "I'm thinking about one particular idea I had when I got there." "It was called an r2-d2 choo-choo." "Taking an r2-d2, a little three-and-a-quarter or whatever it was, bending him over, and having a removable head on the next one and shoving it into the bottom of that one, and on and on and on" "so that you could have a choo-choo of r2-d2." "It died, but nonetheless it was worth it for the day or half a day, or whatever I put into it to explore it, because the license was there." "There was money to be made." "When we developed these individual items, we would do renderings and concept images of them." "And then those items would be taken to marketing, and if it looked like a item that would sell well in the market and all that, we would go ahead and develop that." "Every week, there were design review meetings." "They were very stressful for the people who were presenting." "There'd be Bernie loomis, the president, and probably four or five other people from different departments in marketing that would be looking at all the products being presented." "And there'd be multiple presenters." "So this is an example of one of the ideas that I submitted." "It's about four..." "three-foot long, and it was a blow-molded chair that little kids could sit in." "It had a little projector box inside of it that could scroll through some "star wars" images." "And then it had a light on the front of it so that you could project images on the wall and then shoot at those images on the wall with the little..." "little led laser light." "They were close to picking this up, but it required a very large tool and blow-molding." "I still think it was a great idea, but it didn't make it." "Bernie was a very hard critic." "He would chew you out if he didn't like what you did in front of everybody." "Or he would say, "I think that's a good idea."" "You know, "carry my golf clubs."" "So they were considering this for the vehicle line, first in '83 and then again in '85." "So, you can see it's got a number of features." "A gun on top here that turns, there's a..." "An escape pod..." "That would eject, and the canopy that opens and closes." "Okay, so this is a folder of some concept designs." "These are all dated 1979." "So, the interesting on here is a little module you'd put onto your bike handlebars, and another little one that had... go over near the handle that you could punch a button and make a laser sound, or and ignition sound" "of your bike, and a little targeting computer screen here, we've got a darth vader pencil sharpener where you'd put the pencil in darth vader's nose to sharpen your pencil." "Here's a r2-d2 telephone." "And here, finally, is a r2-d2 gumball machine." "If it wasn't in the film..." "It was not prohibited, but it wasn't necessarily an encouraged thing." "The droid factory came about" "I think just from sketching robots." "And then realizing that there were no parts to customize the robots that were there." "You can see..." "These guys." "They all had a "star wars" aesthetic." "And everybody said, "well, it's not in the movie."" "Well, so what?" "I used these sketches basically as a starting point." "I came up with a tripod droid." "This guy was just a little idiot walking around looking like a mouse sort of." "This one was a roll around quickie." "Tiny droid." "This guy was walking droid like "silent running" droids would be other ones would have maybe clamps." "Like this one, for instance." "I saw it having maybe an over-center clamp where it would just snap on to whatever you put it around." "And this is another just roll around thing." "Probably analogous to this one with wheels." "I was just like drawing droid." "And when you see the "star wars" movie at participating theaters, you get kenner's cash-refund booklet, good for refund coupons from 50 cents up to two dollars each on 14 different "star wars" toys." "Offer expires December..." ""Star wars" was really the first one to really grasp onto marketing pop-culture in a toy." "There had been certainly TV ads for toys, um, before "star wars,"" "but they really took that and ran with that." "With their television commercials, I think kenner was trying to put the idea into a kid's head of how exactly they could play with these toys." "They put across this idea that if you have these figures, you can create a miniature play environment right in your bedroom, and it's like the movie." "...he's after the boat." "All troops report to base." "Glider attack, hit the dirt!" "The commercials would sometimes have scenes that didn't happen in the movie." "And I would think, "hm, I don't remember that part of the movie..."" "We'll get you to safety!" ""..." "But, wow, I want to recreate that part."" "You're trying to teach kids through the ads and through the showing the playing that you are part of this "star wars" universe." "That was a big, big emphasis at the time." "Beep, beep, beep, beep!" "It's okay, r2-d2," "I've got my laser pistol." "My dad took me to see "empire strikes back"" "when it hit theaters in '80 or '81, and I was five or six years old." "I was pretty young." "And then immediately after we saw the film, he took me down to kiddy city, the local toy store, and he bought me my first couple "star wars" toys." "And I remember staring up at this wall, this aisle full of toys." "It just looked like a Mountain of "star wars" toys." "And my father said, "pick out and action figure."" "And I looked them over and I picked out darth vader." "I was a little kid, so it just seemed like this display was towering over me." "Just this rack of all the "star wars" figures on the peg." "What a terrible choice to have to make!" "I've got 12 figures, I can only get one." "The term that companies generally use, or at least kenner used for setting up, like, its toy aisle in a coordinated way was a "plan-o-gram."" "Catalogs or brochures that they sent to retailers that told them this is they way it's supposed to look." "Hopefully it actually looked that way when they set it up, but who knows if it really did?" "These shelves here show some of the, uh," ""star wars" kenner marketing campaigns, stuff that they would have sent to toy stores to help push the line and help decorate the aisles that the toys were displayed in." "That big "toy center" sign is basically what kenner would have used, I believe, in about '79 to kind of brand a whole aisle." "I mean, that was kind of their signature gondola display." "These here are shelf talkers." "And this would have just gone over a shelf to mask the front of the shelf and kind of give it a different "star wars" flavor." "Okay, what we have here is a popai outstanding merchandising achievement award that kenner received in 1978 for their "star wars" floor display." "A temporary, free-standing display of action figures with a bell sign on top that said" ""'star wars' action figures,"" "and and had pictures of all 12." "And they kind of did that throughout their line." "They had all kinds of different merchandising kits that you could buy that were specific to "star wars,"" "and made "star wars" stand out in the toy aisle." "Roy frankenfield, to my knowledge, was the first "star wars" photographer because he'd been doing it from the very beginning." "I took over for him in 1981, basically doing..." "Almost all of the shooting of "star wars,"" "if not all of it, and never looked back." "How many people get paid to go to work and play with toys and have fun?" "I like having the boxes with the toys because that was what people saw on the shelf." "I really love the way they did the racetrack around the side and the logo." "And then they always used big, primary colors, and they show the picture of the actual toy." "It had, you know, started off as a point of sale item." "It wasn't intended to be art." "I think it has become art, the design of the box, how each box sort of has its own color, how the toys are sort of arranged on the box" "I think has become, in and of itself, a piece of pop art." "Early stuff is attractive to me because it more of a retro look." "To me, these really look '70s, you know?" "You have this kid in the bell-bottoms and the pink shirt here..." "I don't even know if that's a girl or a boy, but whoever it is, the early "star wars" stuff has a real flavor to it that the later stuff doesn't, packaging-wise." "I really like the early..." "early photography." "It does have a totally different feel." "And at that time, everything was hot light, minimal diffusion, if at all." "And I'd look at it and go, "whoa!" ""Couldn't we have softened this down a little bit?" ""Couldn't you have reflected this this way?" You know." "That's why you'll see a difference later on when I came in." "This..." "Is an 8x10 camera." "It is a..." "They called it a century camera." "That was the name of it." "And... hi, guys." "It's been a long, long time." "I used this one uh, many times for doing different..." "different "star wars."" "If anybody knows greta garbo, this was probably an old camera at that time." "It's always the toy, you know, sitting in a jungle with four or five characters around it that aren't included in that toy, but it's instantly creating that," ""look, here's a story you can create when... if you buy this toy."" "You're selling to kids more than you are to adults." "The idea of showing a toy in an action environment appeals... it makes sense." "I think one of the things that's really different about "star wars" is how international the phenomenon was from the beginning." "I think what the merchandising of "star wars"" "all over the world shows us is that it was really an international phenomena, it caught on, and, you know, to this day there are collectors who have, even recently, started up, and try to collect stuff" "that was made for their own countries." "There were Barbies in other countries there were other toys in other countries, but nothing captured everybody's attentions simultaneously the way "star wars" toys did." "The most common foreign variance that you're gonna see are most likely the tri-logos." "Now, the tri-logo cards were actually produced by palitoy, which is a uk provider." "You had the logo in English, you had the French, and then Spanish." "All of the international products, they were either kenner direct subsidiaries or affiliates of kenner or they paid a fee, because the... the... with the exception of the lili ledy toys in Mexico, which were made in Mexico, all of the toys" "were made in the kenner factories in Asia, and then they were packaged in a certain way and then shipped to the countries." "This is actually an Obi-Wan Kenobi made by French company meccano." "Meccano decided to completely abandon the normal sizing of a card by using a more perfectly squared card." "For "empire strikes back," a Japanese company called popy picked just 15 of the figures, used them in kenner baggies, and then put them in these cool boxes as part of the "world heroes" line." "So it mixed "star wars" with others." "And you can see it's just the, you know, kenner baggie of the boba fett, and... oh, wait a second, this is a rare, missile... oh, no, no, sorry." "This right here is an original hand-drawn package that Italy, under the brand harbor sent to kenner in order to get lucasfilm approval of the package design." "They wanted to make sure that lucasfilm was okay with the overall design and layout of the package." "So this is all hand-drawn and everything." "As you start to go around the world and see some of these other pickups, there are some minor variations on some figures, and there are actually some huge variations on others." "This is the Mexican lili ledy line." "The Mexican ledy line had a couple of variations." "The jawa actually has, instead of a one-piece cloak, the jawa actually has a hood that you pull off, revealing the figure's head sculpt." "This is a Mexican large-size r2d2, which is interesting because it's basically just kenner's small r2d2 figure blown up to larger size." "And you can see this is the..." "the kenner version is quite a bit different." "Japan even went so far as to, you know, articulate the figures and build them up to a larger size, and use vinyl and, in some cases, die cast, which were more culturally in the mainstream" "over there at the time." "So there were some products that were made that probably weren't supposed to be made." "George did not want the "star wars" label just slapped on things, but up in Canada, um, they put out these utility belts, you know." "It was like Batman." "And they had the "star wars" label on a rubber tip dart and a plastic belt and a cheesy lightsaber thing." "And as soon as lucasfilm saw the first production samples, they said, "uh-uh,"" "and they made them take it off the market." "So, of course, these are among the rarest Canadian toys." "Unlike movies today, which open day and date all around the world," ""star wars" didn't open in any other countries, apart from the us and Canada, until at a minimum six months later, and, in the case of Japan, a year later." "And so there was time for people to gear up for the toys and all of the related phenomenon." "So, unlike the us, there was stuff available." "Most of which people didn't find out about until, you know, 15 or 20 years after they were produced." "**" ""Star wars."" "The impact is staggering." "Never in the history of motion pictures has one film been so popular, but the craze did not stop at the box office." "In 1977, kenner launched the "star wars" collection, with a massive advertising blitz." "And, thanks to your efforts and faith in the force, the response has shot sales right off the ground." "I think they were totally unprepared for..." "The magnitude of the success, and how sudden it hit them, and how rapidly they had to convert from a sort of small-time toy company to one of the major players." "For "empire," they were a little more prepared." "They had the figures ready actually even before the film was out." "But they were still fairly conservative." "No one had bet on a sequel before." "People were like, "well, I'm not sure about this."" "The force is back." "The rebels won't tire till they see the last of the empire." "And kenner's there with star wars" ""return of the jedi" collection." "Return of the jedi, they were ready." "They had a massive lineup of action figures." "Lots of vehicles, lots of toys planned." "Even if it was a horrible film, they knew it was gonna do very well." "But, really, it took them... it took them even till about '83 to really get..." "build up the momentum, and no one knew what they were doing yet." "It was the first time this had been done." ""Star wars" unfortunately set off an unfortunately chain of dominoes, where kenner went from this little, charming toy company to like this big kind of entertainment-related company that had a corporate face to it and was kind of less..." "Fun, I guess." "It became less fun." ""Star wars" had an enormous impact on not just the bottom line, but the culture, per se." "Eight to ten hours a day." "We were asked to come in on Saturdays for a while to work on especially "star wars."" "I really lost the first two years of my kids' growing up, because I literally spent most of my time in my office or with my staff." "I had a cot in my office." "I slept there." "People put holes in the wall." "Broke out in psoriasis." "Tore their phones out of the wall and threw them across the room." "I know the managers were under a lot of pressure, but they seemed to try to keep some of that pressure off of us because, as long as they saw that we were doing the creative process and getting the items done as quickly as we could," "you know, they just kind of gave us, uh, yeah, say, "yeah, go work on these three fighters."" "Get 'em done as quick as you can."" ""That toy's your baby." "You're responsible for it."" "But, to me, I really enjoyed the pressure of it, just because, you know, it was the adrenaline." ""Oh, get it done," you know." "And you know what the schedule was, and, yeah, of course everything's in a hurry." "If it wasn't in a hurry, they wouldn't have you there to do it, so..." "Trying to keep "star wars" alive past 1985 was just..." "Not happening." "Lucasfilm was smart enough to say," ""you know, guys, we've had a great run." ""But we think we want to give it a breather." "We... we... we think there's not a market out there."" "After "return of the jedi,"" "when there was no more anticipation for another "star wars" movie, it's not that I drifted away from "star wars."" "I never stopped being a fan." "But there just wasn't that ongoing... there wasn't ongoing things kind of fueling that fandom." "People thought it was gonna be three movies and out." "You just had a real feel that that was there." "There was gonna be a break." "There was a conclusion to it." "Kenner really had a project ahead of it, because lucasfilm had indicated they were not making any more for the foreseeable future, and how do you market and sell a line of "star wars" stuff without "star wars" being in theaters?" "Um, the movie line moved from "return of the jedi"" "to a line called power of the force." "Power of the force was their plan for 1985 to, uh, look beyond "return of the jedi,"" "knowing there were gonna be no new "star wars" films." "They had wonderful characters they had chosen, like han carbonite or Luke in stormtrooper, the Tatooine skiff." "They bundled these things with coins." "There's so many things in power of the force line that many collectors view as kind of the pinnacle of "star wars" collecting." "Ironically, it was also the period of least interest in "star wars" toys." "Like it literally was the biggest failure ever in "star wars" action figure toys." "The whole generation that was brought up on those toys is starting to move into junior high and high school, and getting out of toys." "So I just don't think there was... there was any..." "anything to bring the next generation of kids into it." "By about 13, it was a little ridiculous for, you know, me to go into a toy store and buy figures." "Of course, 20 years later," "It didn't matter what people thought anyway." "By 1985, kenner had killed the power of the force line." "They still had the "droids and ewoks" cartoon series." "Those were TV shows that were running in a couple of countries, the United States and Canada." "Eventually, it did get all over the world." "I think by around early '86, they even killed off the "droids and ewoks" lines." "Yeah, I was aware, after power of the force sort of fizzled out, I was aware that there was no "star wars" product being made." "I mean, walk into a toy store in 1986, and there's no "star wars" stuff on the shelf." "You know, I don't think you can sell the public anything that it doesn't want to buy." "In 1991, hasbro would buy kenner and move operations to elsinore place, in this building behind me." "It was administrative offices, it was boys' toys, as well as some manufacturing and things in the back." "They would close their operations here in the year 2000." "Kenner by the '90s is the preeminent action figure company doing a lot of stuff for movies, so I think that's where hasbro saw the value in acquiring kenner, because they would bolster their gi Joe line" "and kind of take over their action figure operation." "Hasbro looked at it, and I think..." "Honestly saw an amazing amount of talent here in Cincinnati." "And if you wanted to get to that next level, come to Cincinnati and get some people." "You know, it really wasn't until... 1994 when the first really..." "Major line of "star wars" toys came back." "And they were those execrable bend-ems." "The bend-ems were a runaway success, and those were terrible action figures." "So you could imagine people thinking like," ""man, if we made actually good action figures, this thing could do really well."" "By then, uh, vintage "star wars" collecting had come in full force." "People were digging up the old action figures at toy shows." "Kenner was obviously aware of this, that there's this huge opportunity." ""People are paying a lot for the old ones." "Why don't we make new ones?"" "Hasbro decided to release new versions of the classic "star wars" characters." "The figures were based off production figures back in the day." "I remember in my hometown, the toys-r-us has them and sold out of them within like three days." "With the success of... kind of that "put your toe in the pool,"" "uh, they decided to go full force into the deep end with "star wars."" "These three shelves are my power of the force ii shelves." "And power of the force ii was the first line that kenner, owned by hasbro at the time, reintroduced in '95, to bring the figures back." "The power of the force, from kenner!" "The biggest, most realistic force in the universe!" "Only the power of the force brings you the biggest heroes and villains straight from the movies." "Hasbro went on to make that into one of the big action figure lines ever." "You know, "star wars" part two." "Well, once people got over the excitement that new "star wars" figures were out, they soon began to really, um, have kind of a disdain for them." "Because they were so overly muscular and did not really resemble the characters from the film." "A lot of people at the time called this han solo" ""han soloflex," because he was..." "So overly muscular." "They wanted to do something different, and particularly the sculptors, some of them wanted to be..." "artistically create these different likenesses that weren't necessarily the screen likenesses." "They were trying to create this kind of other look." "Well, I know a lot of collectors can't stand them." "I have a special, um, appreciation for them." "Uh..." "I just think they're fun." "And I continue to think they're fun." "And I will always display them." "Now, for its 20th anniversary, the adventure of a lifetime returns to the big screen." "The special editions came out in '97, which kind of amped it up to an extra notch." "And that's when I think it really hit the mainstream, that "star wars" was..." "Um, still a cultural force or pop cultural force." "As much as the older generation didn't really care for the prequels much, those movies brought in a whole new generation of collectors coming up behind me." "As the head of one of the smaller toy companies once said to me, the "star wars" generation passed on the gene... the "star wars" gene..." "to the next generation." "And now we're seeing three generations of "star wars" fans, and they all love the "star wars" toys and stuff." "That's amazing to see." "I think it's gonna last a long, long time." "The compelling thing about these toys is the fact that it can take you back to that time." "I think that's the coolest thing about it." "When you had a "star wars" toy..." "There were no limits." "And when you look at them now, even through older and different eyes, it can still trigger some of those... those feelings and that adrenaline." "And... that..." "that kind of wonder." ""Star wars" was not just another toy you had as a kid." "It changed everything..." "it changed film, it changed toy." "It hit people on a level that's unparalleled." "I still care about these toys, 20 years after I started collecting them, for the same reasons that I enjoyed them in the first place." "I like "star wars."" "The sense of nostalgia that I get from owning these hasn't diminished at all." "And I still get a thrill out of them." "You know, I knew it was something popular and everything else." "But I think when it came to a point that, 15 or 20 years later, some kid found out that I worked on "star wars,"" "that's when it came home." "Certainly "star wars" has had, uh, you know, the longevity, uh, and that it's still being enjoyed at this point is, you know, one of the things that make you feel really good about..." "Your career as a toy designer." "It... it is really satisfying to me to know that I was a part of something that had an impact on a whole generation of... of children, and they're still enjoying it today." "My time at kenner, those four years were probably the most fun I had in the toy business." "Looking back, I had such a great time doing it that" "I wouldn't change anything." "Add it all up, you say to yourself," ""I was there." ""I was a part of that." "It was something bigger than me."" "** * past the oceans far below * through the stars and heaven's glow * * take control and take us home * * on these rockets * past the oceans far below * * through the stars and heaven's glow *" "* take us from this overload * * on these rockets" "* ah ah ah ah * on these rockets" "* ah ah ah ah * on these rockets" "* ah ah ah ah" "* ah ah ah ah"