Rogue One is out today, and it's as good a time as any to get some stuff off my chest. I've been bottling this up for decades, and I need to let it go. And it is this: some of the Star Wars figures were really bad.
And these are the worst of the worst: figures so wretched that I couldn't even suspend my disbelief to play with them.
Certainly, by the time I bought them all back off him, a decade later - in my early-20s, when he'd grown out of them - most of them were damaged due to his gross mistreatment, and many of the guns were missing. What a terrible, terrible boy. A horrible little monster.
Nevertheless, I was happy to have turned my back on playing with toys, if the above is the sort of rubbish Kenner was prepared to put out in the years following Return of the Jedi. There had been a perfectly good Han in Carbonite bundled with Boba Fett's Slave-1 ship circa The Empire Strikes Back, but this version allowed you to put a figure of Han into a plastic Carbonite block.
Also: as you can see... it recreates the scene from the movies where he tries to swallow a bucket of sand to impress Chewbacca, and the bucket gets stuck in his throat.
Did they know nothing about Star Wars fans? It had been over a decade since a new Star Wars movie, so the only people remotely interested in their toys were grown men who would always be profoundly bothered by the inaccuracy of depicting Luke Skywalker with a distressingly sculpted chest. Also: a pig's face.
It's just as well they gravitated to more movie-accurate designs before they started making toys of the tertiary characters. Nobody needs to see Aunt Beru's rippling abs.
Look at those hands: perfect for grasping space bananas. Which, if her latest memoir is anything to go by, Carrie Fisher spent a good deal of her time doing while filming Star Wars.
They released slightly updated versions - such as one with a pop-up "sensorscope" - but stuck with that weird metallic blue disc and those other two bobbly bits. They could've at least made it square. God, it feels good to be unloading this. It has been stewing inside me for almost 40 years.
I showed the toy to my grandad, who inspected it and concluded that - yes - the legs were indeed meant to move by themselves, in a sort of walking action. Something must've snapped off. I only realised as an adult that we were both wrong.
This belief, as wrong-headed as it turned out to be, nevertheless ruined this toy for me. I mean... utterly ruined. I rarely even got it out of the box.
Also, for some reason this version of Luke had a face which always remineded me of Playmobil figures. You know: toys for stupid little babies.
Admittedly, the Jawa's original vinyl plastic cape was less accurate to the actual costume, and in Kenner's mind such a diminutive figure could be seen as less value than the rest of the range (which is why they released an updated version with the cloth cape), but at least it was consistent with the materials used on the rest of the toy. For pity's sake. What were they thinking?!