Welcome!
Thank you for visiting my website! This section is all about Star Wars toys made between 1978-1985. In this time a whopping 300 million were sold worldwide! Star Wars toys were always my favourite toys growing up and still are today! Whether you are a long term collector or you are just starting out, my guide will hopefully help you. I hope you enjoy the guide and find it useful!
This guide is under construction and currently just has pictures of all figures, playsets and vehicles. Click the above buttons to check out the toys.
Navigating the Star Wars toy guides
Above, you can see a number of different boxes. You can visit each year that Star Wars toys were produced by clicking on the boxes that run from 1977-1985. Alternatively you can click on guides for all of the smaller figures and vehicles as well as the die-cast figures and large size action figures.
I will be looking to add individual guides for each toy, but for now I hope that you enjoy my Star Wars toy guide and that it helps you with your collecting.
A brief Star Wars history
Kenner, was a subsidary company to General Mills and were lucky enough to obtain the rights to produce toys based on the movie Star Wars, that was soon to be released. The rights to these toys had been offered to Mego and Mattel but they decided not to go ahead with them. When Star Wars was released, there was a huge demand for the toys from children everywhere. Kenner were unprepared for the demand and had not produced any toys for the 1977 Christmas period!
To solve this problem, Kenner created an Early Bird Certificate Package. This was an envelope which contained a cardboard display stand, some stickers, a fan club membership card and a certificate. The child receiving this certificate could then mail the certificate to Kenner. Kenner would then mail back four action figures based on Star Wars characters as soon as they could.
Palitoy was the toy company in the United Kingdom that sold Star Wars toys there. there were alot of different companies around the world that sold the toys. This led to alot of variants in the toyline!
1978-1979
In February 1978 Kenner shipped out mailer boxes containing Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and 12 foot pegs for the display. In February 1978 Kenner produced the first 12 figures from the Star Wars movie.
In the same year eight more figures were made along with the very popular Boba Fett. Boba Fett had appeared in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, in a cartoon which you can view here. Boba Fett’s figure originally had a rocket firing mechanism, but sadly a child choked on a similar Battle Star Galactica toy and so the missile firing action was scrapped. This delayed the figures release until 1979. The total Star Wars figures available at this point was 21.
1978 also saw the release of six larger scale figures. In 1979 five more larger scale figures were released.
In 1980 the Empire Strikes Back hit cinemas. Kenner were better prepared now and 29 action figures were released. The original 21 figures were also re-released. The total action figure line was now at 50!
1980 saw the release of the final larger scale figure in IG-88. Unfortunately sales of the larger figures were not good and so the line was cancelled. Kenner had planned to release more of the larger figures.
Return Of the Jedi was released in 1983 and was the final movie in the trilogy. Kenner released 31 more action figures taking the figure total to 81. The figures from the previous movies were re-released except for R2-D2 and C3-PO from the frst 12 figures.
In 1985 Kenner released 15 more figure and also re-released Paploo and Lumat from the Return of The Jedi Line. The17 figures released at this period are known as the last 17. The figures released at this time were released under the Power Of The Force line. 37 figures were released on Power Of The Force cardbacks which also contained a collectable coin.
In Europe, due to budget costs the 15 new figures were released without the coins and came on lower quality tri-logo cardbacks.
90 figures ended up being released on the Power of The Force cardbacks and they included re-releases of figues from the last three line of Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi.
1985
1985 saw the release of two animated Star Wars television shows- Droids and Ewoks.
The television show Droids had 12 figures released in 1985. The line got poor sales and a second line of eight figures was cancelled.
The television show Ewoks had six figures released in 1985. Due to poor sales, the planned second line of six more figures was cancelled.
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