Okay, raise your hands, how many of you out there remember when the Star Wars toys were finally available everywhere, and you bought as many as you could get your hands on? (Or we should say, as many as your long suffering parents could afford.) How many of you remember that the demand for Star Wars toys was so intense, it took forever for them to be manufactured, and you had to order them in advance because Kenner couldn’t keep up with the demand?
Star Wars was a very important cultural event for so many of us, and the toys were just as much of an important part of our memories as the movies. Star Wars reinvented movie merchandising, and created an enormous secondary revenue stream for Lucas and 20th Century Fox. Now the memories of those toys and what they meant to us is in the works in a new documentary called Plastic Galaxy.
As the site Tested reports, Plastic Galaxy, like many movies these days, is a film that went to Kickstarter for help. As the Plastic Galaxy site tells us, this “is a documentary that explores the groundbreaking and breathtaking world of Star Wars toys. Through interviews with former Kenner employees, experts, authors, and collectors, it looks at the toys’ history, their influence, and the fond and fervent feelings they elicit today.”
Plastic Galaxy is indeed a great idea for a movie, and just watching little bits and pieces of it on the film’s official site brought back quite a few memories for me, especially the TV commercials for the toys. There’s certain to be another huge merchandising bonanza for the next Star Wars movie when it comes out in 2015, but if you were lucky enough to grow up when the original movie, and the original toys, came out, it really was a special thing that we’re really looking forward to revisiting again.
