I originally hadn’t really planned on picking up any of these, but some showed up on ebay with nice Buy it Nows, so I couldn’t resist. These are silver first shots of some of the Droids and Ewoks coins. The produced coins were packaged with figures from the cartoon series, but were colored gold for Droids and bronze for Ewoks. Most likely these were tests of the coins before they switched to the anodized gold and bronze blanks for the final coins. I managed to get 4 out of the 6 that were available by the seller. For Droids: C-3PO, R2-D2, Jord Dusat and for Ewoks: King Gorneesh.

Here’s one of the items I previously mentioned for “The Force” lightsaber focus that arrived today.

This is a press photo that was used in the Seattle Times and is dated June 6th 1983. It was taken at a Toys R Us, the back mentions the child’s name and that he was 5 1/2 the time the photo was taken. He’s roughly a year older than I am. It’s fun to see all the old toys in the photo. You can even see my store display in the lower right.

I’ve been really slacking off on the updates lately and there has certainly been a lot of news with regards to Star Wars and of course Apple. I’m going to do my best to try and break these up into a couple of blog posts and try to get this thing going again. I thought I’d start first with some new additions that I’ve been able to add to my collection.

This year has somehow become the year of “The Force” Lightsaber for my collection. This is one toy that somehow managed to survive my childhood that I still own. Earlier this year, I found a red one that was unused store stock, to go with my original beat up green one. I got it for a great price and was happy to have both colors now. Then, later this summer, I found an auction for the original store display. The display holds 12 Sabers and I have a vague memory of originally getting mine from one of these displays. These displays usually have fairly high Buy it Nows on ebay, but for once I found one on auction and won for a great price. It happened to also fit exactly into the spot I had hoped it would within my collection. Now, shortly after winning the display, I also found a version of the Green saber with the packaging hanger on it. These packages were created in 1984 for stores to hang on pegs rather than using the displays. I picked up a prototype of the packaging last year from a former Kenner Employee and was excited to finally find one of the sabers with the packaging as they do not come up for sale often. That’s it for now on this, but I’ve already lined up two other items to continue this focus, with one of them coming later this week.

Another item that I recently found, is the last U.S. Bagged version of Luke Jedi. I’ve been not he lookout for this for a few years now. The one I was looking for, just simply said Made in Taiwan on the bag, and can be seen, 3rd from the right, in this group photo.

The last item, for now, is the Rebel Rocket from the C-3PO’s cereal. This was the free item in the box of cereal and also included the form for 4 free micro figures. Here’s a picture of the form and the setup within my display. I still need to find the original envelope that the micro figures were mailed in.

On Monday, the July episode of The Star Wars Collectors Archive Podcast was released. I was quite pleasantly surprised to hear them mention a recent article that I published on my website, about a mail away promotion that I’ve been researching. Unfortunately, I didn’t win the final auction with the missing piece I had been looking for, but I now know that my theories on the subject were correct.

For anyone that would like to listen to it, I’ve chopped out the except which can be downloaded here.