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I was re-arranging my Emperor's Arrival display the
other day and realized I had a small army of Stormtroopers
in it. A glance to another shelf a group of six Sandtroopers
had detained a landspeeder with Luke, Ben and the droids.
And I'm not even going to start on the clone troopers from the
newer films. All this got me to thinking about the days
before army builders, repaints, and before Episode 6 was even
released. I was captivated by Star Wars
before I'd even seen the first film. I was about six
when the film came out. I remember I had a "Story of Star
Wars" book with pictures and would endlessly flip through it.
Then the action figures came out. Somebody at school had
brought a couple of figures to class. I thought they were
pretty cool, and really wanted some of my own.
The trouble was we lived about 20 minutes from
the nearest stores of any size and only went on the weekends.
That, weekend, my parents took me to a couple of stores, and in
the last store (K-mart, I think), we found the last two figures
they had. So, at that point Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper
became my first two Star Wars figures. A week or so later my
collection increased to include some of the heroes, and grew from
there.
As new figures would come out, I'd want each of
the new ones. My parents weren't real hip to buy a bunch of
figures at one time, so I'd get a couple of new characters when I
saw them. This would always lead to some decision making in
the store. Rating the merits of a Bespin Han Solo over an
Ugnaut. However, because I wanted new figures, I never asked
for something like extra Stormtroopers.
Somewhere along the line I got a second
Stormtrooper as a gift. The really strange thing is two
seemed to by the most I ever had of the same figure in vintage
times. To be exact, I had two Stormtroopers, two Death Star
Troopers, two Jawas, two Sandpeople and inexplicably two Princess
Leias. When the Empire Strikes Back figures were released I
got two Hoth Stormtroopers and two Rebel Troopers.
So, the sum of my front line Imperial troops was
6. When playing as a kid, it wasn't unusual for Snowtroopers
to show up on the sands of Tatooine riding a Dewback.
Snowtroopers and Stormtroopers did it all back then. They'd
man the man the control consoles in the Death Star. They'd
take duty at the big gun. Which was a cushy Stormtrooper
job, because you'd get a cool chair to sit in. They'd fly
TIE fighters, because the TIE Pilot hadn't been released.
When the AT-AT Driver was released he normally took over the gun
duties at the Death Star, because he was used to sitting.
Well, actually, I didn't have an AT-AT or and AT-ST. I
remember taking my AT-AT driver to a friends house once that had
an AT-AT but not a driver.
I remember when I saw the first pictures of
Return of the Jedi, how cool it would be to have enough figures to
make the Emperor's Arrival scene. I don't know if that
influenced my modern buying habits. But, for some strange
reason, I tend to buy Stormtroopers and their kin two at a time.
My wife unknowingly rekindled a few of these
memories a few years back. She had went to a local toy &
comic book store looking for something to fill out my collection.
She came home and presented me with a bag of various loose
figures. All of them in white shiny armor. The first
few were modern day Snow and Stormtroopers. The rest was
made up of vintage Hoth Stormtroopers and regular Stormtroopers.
I know there was no way to explain to her how happy I was that
she'd doubled the size of my vintage "Grand Army."
-Engineernerd
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