Probably the daddy of them all in the 1970s. It was George Lucas who brought us the moves, and changed everyone’s life from that day on. It was 1977, when every cinema in the world had queues and queues of people trying to get in to see a Sci Fi film that had a great theme too.
Of course the film was going to have toys, but little did we know that those toys would still be selling in 2012 and even beyond I am sure. The merchandising for Star Wars, across all the films has kept most boys in their bedrooms, playing non -stop space adventures, and the girls all wanted to be Princess Leia.
Of course every toy shop in 1977 had given nearly all the shelving space to dozens of the characters from the film. Darth Vador, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia , R2D2,CP3O and Hans Solo. But the people were only part of it, we also had the gleaming white space ships that we could run around the room with too. The Millennium Falcon, the battleships, and the list is nearly endless. It wasn’t that the toys were the best, it was that the film opened up our imagination to playing with the toys, that a lot of kids would not have considered prior to Star Wars.
Companies like Kenner, AMT, and Palitoy were the early companies to be licensed to make the merchandise, and they only just kept up with the huge worldwide demand that was created. We all had to have a light-sabre, although looking back on our 1970s versions they have nothing to compare with the 2002 that almost seem to be the real thing.
Remember at school, we would have Star Wars parties, and you would come with masks of the soldiers, or you would really want to be Darth Vador. And horror upon horrors, some of us had to be dressed up in some concoction made by our mothers, sorry mum it did not work.
It was not just the high end toys, we also had versions for those of us that were even younger, like the Lego versions and the cuddly versions too. It was not something you could escape from, as we would have Star Wars in the Cinema, in the charts, in books and magazines. Every sweet manufacturer wanted to give us Star Wars collection cards to swap at school. We made sure that our toys were accompanied by the T shirts, and Star Wars watches, along with Star Wars pens and wallets, and it all went in our school Star Wars satchels. The billions of dollars that Star Wars has produced show s just how important it was in our lives, and is now for a lot of our children’s children too.
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