FROM CHILDHOOD FAN TO ADULT COLLECTOR. Funnily, my first Star Wars memories predate me having even heard of the film. It all began sometime in 1979, when my parents gave me a toy robot they'd bought at a mall in the middle east. I remember the card it came on pictured the robot against a bland starfield background, and sadly did not in itself inspire much play. Some years later I saw a film on a bootleg tape with a monster attacking people in what I believed to be sewers. The bootleg was so bad that most of the time you couldn't see what was going on. (Later I would come to realize this was the Dianoga attack in the trash compactor). A year or so later a friend showed me a tape of a movie called The Empire Strikes Back and I was awestruck. Star Wars had at last gotten my attention. Working backwards from that moment, I have realized that the "monster movie" was the first Star Wars, and that dull toy robot I had was actually a Star Wars character, R2-D2. I'd receieved my first Star Wars toy without even realizing it, and it remains in my collection to this day.(See it here.) Since then there have been hundreds more, all motivated by wanting to re-live the sensation of The Empire Strikes Back.
STARTING COLLECTING AGAIN. AND STOPPING.
I was hooked again, and from 1999 to about 2003 I kept buying and buying and buying. My main area was the 12" line (and by now the Internet allowed me access to those vintage Kenner 12" figures as well), but I was also buying all odds and ends -some figures from the prequel films, the Kelloggs cereal, the Jar Jar toothbrush set. I was all over the place, my collecting wasn't focused. Inevitably, after a flurry of activity during the "prequel period", I peaked and suddenly lost the urge. I had subscribed to the buy-what-you-like school of collecting, I bought
the items I thought were well made and actually appealed to me as an adult, but there was always
the temptation to buy any old thing with the Star Wars logo on it. I thought I was being smart about my collecting, but I still found myself with a Queen Amidala pencilcase gathering dust in my closet. Maybe that was part of the problem? Star Wars was becoming overexposed. The market was oversaturated with Star Wars items and no-one could keep up with it all. I found my interest in collecting cooling off. Once again, I became a passive owner of Star Wars items. It's all still there in my basement, but my days of collecting everything Star Wars were, and are, over. (I still couldn't resist the Star Wars birthday set -party hats, candle, napkins and paper plates, table cloth -gorgeous!)
STARTING COLLECTING AGAIN. BUT WITH A DIFFERENCE.
Like every Star Wars fan, I had accumulated several versions of the films on video over the years. I was aware of most of the different releases in North America and England, but always considered them too numerous to ever collect them all. After completing the set my friend gifted me, I kept finding more and more tapes and Laserdisc on eBay. The prices were low at the time, most videos could be had for a pittance but some of the Japanese laserdiscs still commanded a premium. Over the next few years my collection of tapes, discs and spools increased monthly.
From that point on I started to collect ONLY home video renditions of the Star Wars saga, no more toys or C-3P0 flashlights. As such, I trod in the footsteps of many a collector before me, who after a period of great diversity settled into a niche that was/is both more confined and rewarding. To me, collecting the videos made perfect sense, they were cheap and display extremely well (if I had the room to display them). The Star Wars videos have been released in astronomical numbers worldwide, so it was an easy field to get started in, and the majority of them were very affordable.
TO KEEP COLLECTING.
I kept it up from 2006 to around 2014. In that time I focused on my main areas of the collection; the UK tapes, the US and Japanese Laserdiscs, and made major headway on the US tapes as well. I also started accumulating odds and ends from all over the world. The collection was expanding organically. Having more or less finished my "vintage" video collection, I changed focus as Star Wars had started being issued on DVD finally. But as the market changed and moved on to the dreaded world of retailer exclusives, limited editions and steelbooks, I found myself losing interest... again. I just couldn't keep up with the glut of new releases. Also, collecting the videos was getting lonely. Even by around 2010, collecting Star Wars videos was still not part of the collecting mainstream, and there seemed to be few people out there who focused on this. The value of sharing a hobby cannot be overstated, so I published this website and reached out to several Star Wars collecting forums in search of like-minded collectors. Mostly the reaction was one of indifference. If there were any people who shared my hobby they didn't seem to have a presence on the web. I kept buying the odd videos here and there, and kept up with the DVDs, but only intermittently updated my website. My Star Wars collecting days were once again on the back burner.
ENTER YOUTUBE.
This spurred me into action. I pulled out my Laserdiscs and tapes and started sorting through them again. I found many surprise acquisitions I had forgotten about. It was time to update the site, old-fashioned though it may be. Bolstered by my daughter ensuring me that it had a suitably retro "charm", I felt better about leaving the design as it always was, and just focused on adding more content. So I spent my days scanning artwork and making entries for the releases I hadn't added to the site over the years.
One thing became immediately apparent, I wasn't going to be able to catch up with the intense explosion of Blu-ray and 4K releases from the last ten years. I was better off focusing on the analog era of video. The landscape has changed so much in the 2010s, with the modern release patterns and aforementioned retailer exclusives creating a myriad of variations. Nathan Butler has been hanging in there, keeping track of all that, and his work will remain the definitive historic documentation of the modern age of Star Wars on video. This is not where my heart lies, I'm a nostalgia-driven guy, and the latest Steelbook release of a Star Wars TV show does not excite me (though I DO buy them, go figure).
THE STATE OF THINGS.
So where does this leave me and this site? As I write this it is March 2025. I will continue to keep this site operating for the foreseeable future, and try to patch the holes I still have in my vintage video collection. The site will remain mostly a static document of my personal collection, but hopefully be of use as a resource for new and old collectors.
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