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Thursday, April 26, 2007

A Wookie, a Droid, and some coffee filters

I was probably weird when I was a kid because while I had Chewbacca and C3-P0 figures, they were not necessarily my favorite characters from the saga. Which makes this post a little strange to begin with. These are from the Star Wars Galactic Heroes line by the Brothers Hassenfeld. I always thought this was a cool idea, taking characters and applying a different "cutesie" style to them. Just wasn't too excited about fur ball and golden rod here.

I had an interview with Hasbro back in 2000 for a design position, and one of the comments made by one of the managers about the sketch area of my portfolio was that the Star Wars team would love some of my Star Wars Kids stuff since they were currently working on a line similar in style. I can only assume he meant the Playskool Star Wars stuff that later became this line of miniature figures. All I can say is they thought of way more characters than I did, and theirs looks a little cooler too.

Back to old Chewy and his Droid friend. Earlier this week I realized about 9:00 in the evening that I had run out of coffee filters and it was off to the store. Now I have never bought coffee filters before, I had just picked up the habit of drinking coffee recently from my wife and she had always purchased the coffee supplies. So filters could cost fifteen bucks for all I knew. I ran to the store with just my debit card and no cash, we had already done our grocery shopping for the week and coffee filters were all I needed to get. Ninety-nine cents! That's all they cost? Two hundred filters for ninety-nine cents!? I actually thought about buying five dollars worth for a split second, but it would take me the rest of the year to go through two hundred. We didn't need anything else, so my wife said she was getting a magazine and I headed to the Toy Isle.

I had been buying some of these Galactic Heroes and they had two packs at the store. I had the second one already, so I said what the hell and picked up Chewy. I know there is probably tons of stuff that I could have purchased that would probably have been a much more sound buy, but these looked sort of fun. We went home and I finished up some chores before going off to bed. That's when I saw the Star Wars guys staring at me from the package, so I set them free. What a surprise, these little guys are pretty fun. C3-P0 can be broken down and put in a net on Chewbacca's back all-la Empire Strikes Back. They actually represent that scene better than the regular figures do, plus you can put C3-P0 back together!

I'm still not sure about the characters, but these two little toys are fast becoming some of my favorite Galactic Heroes so there could be some hope for a Wookie and a Droid, especially if they can make coffee.

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