The first mail-away offer to appear on Return of the Jedi cards was Nien Nunb. He was the co-pilot with Lando of the Millennium Falcon during the last half of Return of the Jedi. This figure was the last one to include a flyer describing his role in the movie. The promotion required 5 proofs of purchase and expired June 15th, 1983. Here is how the offer appeared on the back of the cards.
Here is mine with the mailer box and paperwork
and finally the original T.V. commercial
As was expected new Macbooks were announced at the Apple event yesterday. Apple has kept the white Macbook for their lowend laptop and slashed the price from $1099 to $999. They introduced to new models up from the white that now have an aluminum enclosure like the Pro and the air. They also feature a new nvidia chipset and the onboard video is now a lot faster than the old intel on board that was used before. One of the things I do not like about the new Macbook is the loss of the firewire port. I know that probably the majority of owners of the Macbook probably never use firewire, but at the same time Apple is always talking about how creative you can be with their machines. By removing firewire they have taken away the ability to capture footage from a video camera and most of them use firewire. However, Apple is always thinking ahead and most cameras are now moving to flash memory or hard drive storage, so in the near future this won’t be a problem.
The Macbook Pro also saw a redesign of the case and have removed the option of having a matte screen. All the ports have now been moved to one side like the Macbook and the optical drive is now on the other side rather than the front. Also, they have now removed the latching mechanism when you close the lid to the magnetic latch system of the Macbook. They have removed the firewire 400 port and now there is just an 800 port. This isn’t as big of a deal since you can pick up a cable that goes for 800-400 for a few dollars. The other cool thing about the pro is it has 2 graphics cards. One is the built in like the regular Macbook and give you about 5 hours of batter life. Then when you need extra speed like with gaming or video editing then you can kick on the separate video card with dedicated 256 or 512 mb of memory depending on which model you get.
Both models also include a new glass trackpad and the button has been removed so the trackpad now is the button. It sounds like that could be clunky, but I need to try it first. Knowing Apple they have implemented it in a way that works great. Anyway here are pictures of the new Macbook and Macbook Pro. LIke I said previously I just recently got a new laptop, so it will be a few years before I upgrade, but by then they will have some other neat new features.
The last mail-away figure to be advertised on Empire Strikes Back figure cards was Admiral Ackbar. Admiral Ackbar was the sneak preview figure for the new Star Wars movie Revenge of the Jedi. The title later changed to Return of the Jedi. This offer required 6 proofs of purchase and expired January 31st, 1983. This one again came with a flyer describing the role the character would play in the movie. Here is how the offer appeared on the back of figure cards.
Here is mine with the mailer box and paperwork. There does exist a version where the paperwork has the Return of the Jedi title and they are much harder to find than the Revenge.
Finally the commercial advertising the offer.
Over the last couple of weeks I have added a couple of items to my Luke Jedi focus I blogged about a while ago. The first is the Trillogo Luke Jedi. This version was mainly sold in European countries. During Return of the Jedi the packaging in Europe was standardized to this card back which features 3 languages. Somehow Kaybee imported a bunch of these, so they were actually available in the U.S. as well. I can tell from the price sticker tear that the one I got came from a Kaybee.
This one I received yesterday. It is the earliest cardback known as the 65A version. It has 65 figures on the back, but the ewok figures were blacked out as not to spoil the surprise for kids. A little while after the movie had been released they were updated to show the ewok figures which that cardback is known as the 65B. This Luke has the blue lightsaber and snap cape. As I said in the earlier article the blue saber was change to green to match the film and the snap cape also was changed to a sewn cape to probably help cut down the cost of the figure. That means this was probably one of the earliest Lukes available. I managed to find one of the older trailers for Revenge of the Jedi and if you go in about 20 seconds you will see some footage showing Luke’s blue lightsaber which was changed to green when the movie was released.
Today I received some custom cases I had made from Oscarscases.com for my mail away figures. They are made of acrylic and completely custom made. Sarah helped me with figuring out the dimensions of everything and it looks like we got it all right. I plan to order a couple every few months until I have cases for all my mail-away figures. Now I just have to figure out how to display them with my collection. Oscar is another collector and he does these cases as a side business. He makes cases for lots of other toy lines and I am very impressed with his work. I’m glad he is able to offer these to the collecting community.
