Reflections: Collections that are important to me

I’ve never been very successful with collections.

That’s not to say I don’t try. I do. I have small collections of a variety of different things. First there’s the Transformers toys, my sets of manga, my anime DVDs, my old SNES games, my weapons, my Star Trek CCG cards, my pogs, my… well, I digress. You get the point.

I have lots of small collections. But none of them are huge; none of them really live up to the word “collection”. I tend to get tired of buying variations of the same thing over and over, and move on to something else in due course. I have a short attention span, you see.

But I do have one collection I’m rather proud of, one that I started back when I was but a wee lad.

That collection was born from the mating of nerdy impulses and a child’s love of science fiction movies.

I admit it. I was (and, to a degree, still am) a Star Wars nut.

Any item branded with that strange and wonderful logo was a must-have for me. Mugs, chip bags, posters, books, drawings, magazines, cereal boxes and lord knows what else. If it was developed by Lucasarts I wanted it. I even had a life-size cardboard cutout of Boba Fett, which stands tucked behind my door to this day (and, lemme tell you, he scared the crap out of me the first few nights).

But the majority of my love went to the toys. God, but I loved the toys.

I spent my weekends on mad hunts for Star Wars toys. I bopped from garage sale to garage sale and flea market to flea market in a ravenous quest to spend my allowance on plastic figurines. I seldom walked away from a weekend without at least one new (well, a used sort of new) Star Wars figure tucked away in one of two Darth Vader carrying cases.

These were seldom pretty figures. More often than not their paint was worn off, they had no weapons and, on some memorable occasions, they were missing arms and legs. Not being a fussy child I bought even amputees with great relish, lovingly stuffing them into my twin Darth Vader heads and then heading out to buy more plastic.

I had multiple versions of most of the major characters. Princess Leia appeared in her buns-on-the-head and Hoth winter gear variations, the latter of which had no fingers (our dog liked chewing plastic). Han Solo came in his Hoth gear and blue coat with brown pants. Lando Calrissian came in his original, dashing blue bell bottoms and his Jabba the Hutt prison guard armor.

And Chewbacca, well, I had three copies of Chewbacca. All the same, except my first