[I haven't posted in this thread in a while, but this memory didn't really seem germane to my other more active threads. Actually, it doesn't really fit in with any other thread I've ever made, so this one will have to do.]
When I was a kid my neighbor Craig and I would often combine our Star Wars collections for epic adventures. We might do this at my house, usually in my bedroom or in the den. We might also do this outdoors, but if we were at his house we had one other option. They had... a toy room.
Situated on the front of the house, across the foyer from the dining room, it was simply a large carpeted rectangular room with some large windows on one wall. At my house, my parents called a similar space the 'living room' which contained a huge stereo and quadraphonic speakers, plus a fancier sofa and chairs than what was in our den.
Although their toy room had some random shelves and furniture, it was mostly empty. It eventually evolved into an Atari room, changing the focal point to the small TV between the windows. But prior to that, it was a fantastic freeform space for our imaginations. This was the room where after Christmas I first saw and coveted Craig's Sears Cloud City.
In that foyer nearby was where I pored over Craig's Empire Strikes Back bubble gum cards from TOPPS, learning from the Star File cards that Leia was 20 years old and Luke was 22... a fact which mystified me three years later when we were informed in Return of the Jedi that they were twins.
One toy of Craig's that I can still vividly picture seeing in his Vader carrying case was a wind-up Tomy Rascal Robot. I stumbled on a pic of one last year and made an eBay Saved Search until I got a functional, unbroken sample for a price I liked. I made sure to get the deco with the orange limbs and blue dome just like Craig's.
Craig was four years younger than me, but very precocious intellectually. Like me, he was the youngest and the only son in his family. But whereas I had two older sisters, he had one: Kristie. Their age gap must've been a good six years apart, because she was at least two grades ahead of me in school.
(* I think her name might have technically been spelled with a C, as was Craig, but for some reason whenever I type Christie it just doesn't look right. Possibly because I have cousins who spell it with a K.)
Kristie's toys ranged from some Kenner Sea Wees (mermaids with little foam lily pads) visible in their hall bathroom to Strawberry Shortcake characters and Glamour Gals in the toy room, plus the usual Barbies and stuffed animals and whatnot in her bedroom.
Naturally, at a time when there were less than a hundred Star Wars figures made, other toys crept into our playtime. I had an Ovion that I'd won at school who often hung out in the Cantina.
My Fisher-Price Adventure People frequently traveled across the street too, and both the father and the son from the Safari Family set wound up having Star Wars adventures. The fedora-wearing dad would put his arm up the back of Yoda's tunic to portray Frank Oz, while the blue jump-suited son would serve as our self-surrogates when we imagined what it would be like to win that contest to visit the set of the next Star Wars movie.
If Kristie happened to join our playtime, since after all somebody had to be the Princess, there was a rule about not 'flying'. If you were over by the sofa in the corner and said "Let's go get in the Falcon" which was in the foyer, you weren't allowed to stand up and walk that distance with the figures in your hand. She'd say exasperatedly, "That means they're flying. They can't fly!" (We had to be reminded of this often.)
Kristie would move the length of the room on hands and knees, making the 4" figures take tiny hopping steps the entire distance. We often joked that Craig's Star Wars figures were easy to discern from mine, since they were all an eighth of an inch shorter due to these frequent impacts to the soles of their feet.
In the mid-90s when I shot my toy-video that reenacts Star Wars with the vintage figures (Whoever Dies With The Most Toys Wins), characters' feet are occasionally seen in closeup doing that two-footed Kristie hop as a deliberate homage.
So since I'd bought a Rascal Robot because of Craig, I decided the windup bot really needed a companion piece for Kristie. And the first thing that popped to mind was... Princess Leia's giant cat.
Kristie once decided Leia needed a companion pet, and she cared not a whit about the scale difference.
I mean, if giant rats can frequent the Cantina in the Holiday Special, there must be giant cats somewhere in the galaxy, right?
Maybe it's a womp cat.
This toy was a little harder to locate because I'd always assumed it was a Barbie item, but when I actually went looking on eBay, I saw no matches. I had to get a little fuzzier in my search terms, but eventually I got a hit. Turns out, Mattel yes, Barbie no. This cat was from a line of dolls called Sunshine Family, circa 1975. Once I had the right Saved Search term, it was just a matter of time finding someone selling the cat by itself for a decent price. (There was also a dog, which I don't remember Kristie having, and most sellers had both listed together.)
This kitty arrived with a bright green bowtie/collar accessory made of a more rigid plastic, which I had to carefully remove because of visible stress lines where it would snap on over the little bumps, very similar to the design of the straps on the Survival Kit's Hoth backpacks, Jedi training harness, Asteroid gas masks, and AT-AT grappling belt.
So here they are together again, flooding me-- and probably only me-- with nostalgia.
If you saw this photo with no explanation, you would never think "Star Wars toys from the 70s"... but seeing them together conjures up so many 'adjacent' vintage Kenner SW playtime memories for me.
Thanks for reading.
Alex
