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Friday, March 9, 2007

The Toy Drought of 77'


It's no secret that I am just a big of fan of the original Star Wars Trilogy as I am of Batman (among other things). So I thought I would post a photo of one of my first Star Wars items. This was purchased at a now closed mall named Windsor Park. I had seen the movie about a week before and was hooked, I had to have some stuff from that movie. As most of you know the toys would not be around for another year (things were a lot different then) and I really do not think manufacturers were ready for the Star Wars fever that hit back in 1977. My parents took a trip to Windsor Park Mall that weekend in search of Star Wars stuff, at least in my mind. What we found was a little circular table in the middle of an isle of J.C. Pennys that had buttons, posters, and t-shirts. I made out like a bandit with two buttons, one The Brothers Hildebrandt poster, and a t-shirt with the poster image on it. This is the surviving artifact from that trip. The big tah do about this button is that the manufacturer was in such a hurry to produce it that Darth Vader's name was misspelled. Making the button that much cooler in my opinion, but probably not worth much to anyone except me because of the memories.

2 comments:

Brian Ashmore said...

This was SUCH a great time...before everything started getting fleshed out in the Star Wars story. Great button!

"Darth Vader Lives" I have socks from back then that have this on them. I remember all the playground discussions on whether or not Darth Vader was alive or dead after ANH (I prefer to just call it "Star Wars" but I guess it's not descriptive enough these days.

I ache for this era, sometimes. :)

chunky B said...

You are not alone, I refer to it as Star Wars unless I write about it here and longing for the simple times, the times before the new movies and cartoons, the time when we were unsure if Vader had made it out alive. We had that same debate on the playground, we also thought R2 and C3-P0 were real.

I picked the DVD up last year, even though I already had the set so I could watch the original release that was in the extras on the disk.