I am writing this blog after a visit to ‘May the Toys be With You’, an exhibition of Star Wars toys that was held at a conference centre in Coalville, Leicestershire on the original site of the Palitoy factory where the very toys were manufactured in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
Incredibly, but perhaps not surprisingly, all the merchandise on show
came from the personal collection of one Star
Wars fan, Matt Fox. For anyone who was around when the first Star Wars
films were released between 1977-83, or who had any of the toys, this exhibition
would have been very nostalgic. For those who were local to the Palitoy factory
off Jackson Street the sense of nostalgia would have been two-fold.
Palitoy was the home of Action Man, Tiny Tears and Pippa – the latter a diminutive
fashion doll, and much cooler than Barbie in my opinion. Children from North
West Leicestershire (like myself) lucky enough to have had relatives and family
friends who worked at Palitoy were inundated with staff-discounted toys. There
was also a factory outlet on Owen Street where you could buy these figures. Incidentally,
the Rex Cinema, which was literally a light sabre’s length away from the factory,
is where I saw the original Star Wars
movies.
Film historian Peter Biskind argues that Star Wars proved young audiences would go to the cinema to see a
film without big-name Hollywood stars. And that although merchandising tie-ins
with films had already existed for several decades, Star Wars alerted the studios to a larger scale of merchandising
through items such as T-shirts and action figures. Good or bad, this gave film
studios from then onwards an incentive to replace complex characters with simple figures that
could be turned into toys (Biskind, 1998: 341).
According to information given at the exhibition, approximately 300
million action figures of Luke Skywalker et al were sold between
1977 and 1985. Intriguingly, there is a legend that unsold leftover toys were
sent to landfill and could be worth a fortune if they were dug up today. If
only us kids had kept all our Star Wars
figures – preferably still in their blister packs!
 |
| My last remaining Star Wars toys |
Bibliography:
Biskind, Peter,1998, Easy Riders
Raging Bulls, How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood, London: Bloomsbury
