Question #3: from September 9, 2002:

I passed up on a Deluxe Mace with red battle droid to pick up Teemto and Palpatine. I'm on a limited budget. Now it seems they are all gone. Did I screw up? I've seen a white battle droid version at Walmart, but I want the red.

--Dave

My answer from 2002 With commentary from 2025:

Considering that in my neck of the woods Palpatine is more common than dirt, you might say you did screw up. But just last week, I did see a few Mace Windu with Red Battle Droid. (I still need to snag one, myself.) So don't worry, there are still some in the pipeline... just keep your eyes peeled.

I eventually bought a a Saga Deluxe Mace Windu with Red Battle Droid variant, and 23 years later it's still packaged. While scarce at one point, a lot of figures from before The Vintage Collection returned are pretty cheap. This particular one will set you back $15 or so today. He was $9.99 in 2002, and that puts him at about $17.99 adjusted for inflation. It turns out you made a perfectly reasonable choice, Dave, and a lot of figures just aren't worth anything anymore. That's great for anyone backfilling their toy boxes.

The mass hoarding and speculation by adults kept prices low. There are likely thousands of these figures still packaged in closets and storage units, keeping prequel figure - but rarely ship - prices low. It's probably because there was never a moment where Prequel toys weren't available. The 1970s and 1980s figures disappeared from 1985-1995 unless you found them at a garage sale or antique show. Anything from after the mid-1990s you could pretty much always find for sale, somewhere, on the internet. That generation of figure collector never experienced the trauma of their favorite space opera action figure line being raptured from American retail. Sure, there were toy flippers, but it's not like someone, somewhere, in most major cities didn't have one to sell you.

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And that's where we are today. 30 years ago, Star Wars figures and vehicles from Kenner were still just starting to trickle back into stores, were white-hot, and we would slowly see Luke, Han, Vader, Chewbacca, and R2-D2 start to sit around a bit. Leia and C-3PO would quickly follow as the new hotness, leading people to shrug away most of the first wave (except Stormtroopers, which we bought for that big Death Star playset that's still not here) and chase down the never-ending flow of new action figures.

I'd love to say things are better than they've ever been, or that I've never been more excited. But it's been 30 years, and I can count the number of all-new characters in this figure line each year on my fingers and maybe toes. I've had to back off of LEGO and The Black Series over the year due to space, cost, and antipathy with scarcity on some items. On the other hand, Hasbro brought back Kenner-style Retro figures and I honestly would have probably been a much happier person if we just had that back in the 1990s. The Vintage Collection gives us the best 3 3/4-inch action figures on the market, and it's usually a split between incomplete lines based on new TV shows and remakes of figures we own alongside incredibly detailed vehicles and the occasional playset.

Way back in 1995, my hopes and dreams were to get 3 3/4-inch figures like Vlix or Jaxxon - no go there - alongside Tarkin, Slave Leia, Wedge, and Biggs. But we got those last four! I was also expecting we would have seen remakes of the entire Kenner 1978-1985 line before Kenner started work on the new movies, but 30 years later this still hasn't happened. I'm hoping they're planning to do something with that in 2027 or 2028 for the fiftieth anniversaries of the movie or the toy line. More realistically, I would predict that Hasbro Star Wars toys in 2030 will be a lot like it is today - expensive, scattered, with a few items that seem spitefully absent after three solid decades of toys.

Here's to 30 more, and so help me if I am writing about them at that point in the future.

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