Last time on Fitz’s Toy Chest, I shared the story of my very first 3 3/4″ figure. It was not surprisingly from Kenner’s line of Star Wars figures. That figure would prove to be the very tippiest tip of the iceberg.
So, without further ado let’s see what’s in Fitz’s Toy Chest this time…
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Company: Kenner
Acquisition Year: 1978
Acquired via: Purchase, Gacen Drugs
Years In Possession: 40
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m keeping with the early Kenner Star Wars theme, but there’s another reason why I chose to showcase Obi-Wan this week.
Last time I teased one of my earliest Star Wars memories, something my mom said as we were rifling through the figures for the first of what would be many MANY times over the years.
At that time I’m not sure that I had even seen the film yet, and if I had it was once at the most. It would be years and years until my mom would see the first Star Wars, not until the arrival of VHS in fact. So between the two of us we knew next to nothing about the world of Star Wars, and I can see and hear as clear as if it were yesterday, my mom taking a figure off the peg and lowering it down to me (yes, I was that small at the time) to look at. She said “Oh look at this one! This is Luke Skywalker’s father!”
The figure she had chosen was, you guessed it, Obi-Wan. So close mom. So. SO close.
It was a reasonable assumption, and I’m sure she only made the connection because the old white haired dude had been hanging next to a figure boldly labelled LUKE SKYWALKER, but turns out she wasn’t nearly as far off as I thought at the time.
The other thing about some of the old Kenner figures, especially in that first line, was their smell. There were no “soft goods” in those days and instead of cool cloth capes, Obi-Wan, Leia, Vader, the Sandpeople all came with crude vinyl approximations of capes.
When you first cracked open one of those figures you were hit with the smell of those vinyl capes. It was almost like a new car smell. In a way I guess it was the kid version of that. There have been many times over the years where I catch a whiff of a similar plasticky odor (like a fresh shower curtain for example) and I almost get goosebumps. That smell is forever imprinted in my olfactory system.
Sadly, those capes weren’t very durable and after a few years of heavy play they always developed splits around the arm holes that eventually grew until the cape was in tatters and unusable. As you can see my Obi-Wan’s was lost to the ages.
Old Ben was my first experience with the “telescoping” lightsaber feature that Vader and Luke also shared. I remember I used to think it was cool to take the blades out and swap the colors between the three characters. That’s probably why my Obi-Wan has my original Vader’s red lightsaber instead of the proper blue one. Who knows what became of the original. I would always lose the blades and then sometime later they’d turn up again. There were times I remember replacing a missing blade with a round toothpick. Very ghetto, but they worked just fine.
1978/79 would eventually see a second wave of Star Wars figures released. That second wave consisted mostly of brightly dressed cantina creatures and droids. It would be the start of Kenner’s long legacy of putting “blink and you miss them” characters front and center, encouraging kids like me to make them the main protoganists in their own adventures.
Before long I would have the entire line of figures from the first film, and then the wait for Empire would begin…
Thanks for indulging me for a second time, come back for another installment in 2 weeks! Next time I’ll be switching lanes and sharing something from another line of toys that dominated my childhood and oddly enough led me to a lifelong love of…comics!
