From Part 1
In 1977 there was Star Wars, Right there on the big screen, and We Had Never Seen The Like. We had Space battles on the screen, and Lightsaber battles...OK, some of this stuff had been done before- Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers serials...but we had never seen... Star Wars
Love him, Hate him, think he's the devil made flesh, George Lucas had some amazing ideas about how he wanted his movie to look, and he created a whole world of special effects just to do it. What we see in Modern movies would not be possible without Lucas and ILM paving the way
But I come not to praise Ceasar, but to bury him- and I come not to talk movies, but toys...
with Star Wars came something else we had never seen before- the 3.75" scale toys which would become the industry standard for the future. in the entry I linked, it talks about Mego turning down the license for Star Wars toys when offered...Mego is long gone now, the only thing left is the memory of their 8" figures and the fading sounds of them kicking themselves over that decision.
We had the Star Wars Early Bird Offer, one of the greatest marketing coups in history. we got the main movie characters, plus some others and a toy line that spanned multiple companies, six movies, and countless "expanded universe" books and media. I remember picking up about 5 characters from a toy store called "Guys and Dolls" in 1978, when they were released
I mentioned Mego, and they were not long to jump on the 3.75" bandwagon with the Cheesy(extra cheesy) Buck Rogers movie/T.V. show, the Dukes of Hazzard and the Black Hole. Despite all of this and bringing the Micronauts from Japan, Mego went under for the last time in 1983. Here is a site where a lot of their toys can still be viewed today.
Something else momentous happened around this time- my sister Spawned Young- making me an uncle- and she moved back from the forbidden wastes of Arizona. Suddenly I had her kids to play with, a fact which would become really significant in part 3
On to Part 3....
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