A very odd request...

[New_Bornalex]

Funny aside...

Late one night I had the brainstorm "why don't I de-yellow this beater display disc using the same technique that I had success with a few years back for whitening Stormtroopers?"

I left myself a note in Sharpie on a white napkin and went to bed.

When I saw it again a few days later, my sleepy brain interpreted 'Retro Brite' as a note that Rainbow Brite was going to be reissued in a Kenner-style Retro Collection.

(My nearly 40-yr-old stepdaughter used to collect Rainbow Brite, in case you wonder why my brain leapt there.)

And then, even funnier, I was gonna mock up a Retro Collection sticker on a Rainbow Brite box so I searched for graphics only to discover, they actually DID do a 40th anniversary reissue of Rainbow Brite.

So 'Retro Brite' really does exist.

Alex

 

[Tulgah]

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised!

 

[New_Bornalex]

So, to recap...

My Action Collector's stand got wet because the box was soaked through by rain the day it arrived in 1978.

As a dumb kid, I tried to strengthen the soggy cardboard backdrop on the FRONT side-- the artwork side-- by applying Star Wars stickers. Why oh why didn't I just strengthen it on the back and let the front air dry?

The Ben Kenobi sticker in the lower left corner was from Frankenberry cereal iirc, and the Leia/Luke sticker was from the Topps bubble gum cards.

Over the years I've made some attempts at reproducing the backdrop myself or buying replicas from eBay, with poor results.



In the past couple of years I bought a fairly inexpensive REAL stand because the sticker had been applied on the back instead of the front. This would be the ideal start, to be completed with a better replica backdrop and replica sticker that I'd ordered from the Replicator-Boxes website.

But while cleaning off the old sticker residue on the back, a chemical reaction somehow bleached one of the circular stands, and its surrounding portion of the base.

I had a couple of false starts at fixing this, then finally ordered a replacement circle-and-cog pair from eBay.

In the pic below, the newest one has been put in the 6th spot from the left (where Vader goes) while the original circle at that location was slid over to position 2 (Stormtrooper) which was the accidentally whitened one. The reasoning there was that the Vader circle would be less noticeable due to his own cape and Ben's cape in front of him.



In this next pic you can see my beater stand that I've owned for many years. It was too discolored for its discs to be used, and in fact it has now received the bleached one from the front stand at position 12 (Artoo). It's still missing a cog underneath and another circle, since the one at the 4th spot (Threepio) has the pegs broken off. I've ordered one more replacement from eBay, just to make it "fully functional again", at which point I am considering adding terrain and totally repainting it for a custom creation.



As a kid, I had botched the application of the long sticker with the names on my original, so I really dithered over applying the replica. In the end, I had to force myself to just stop thinking and do it. Luckily it came out well-centered and nothing tore this time, plus there's no wrinkles or bubbles trapped in it.



That just left notching in the replica backdrop, and for the first time since 1978, I felt like I truly had this item in my hands the way it was intended.



Too bad it cost me FAR more in parts than the original cost back in '78. For those of you who weren't there, here's the cardback offer where you can see just how inexpensive this was in '78.



So here's a comparison of my original and the new half-Kenner/half-replica one.



And it seemed fitting to populate it with ten Retro figures and two from the 1995 "Classic Edition 4-pack" (small head Han and the Vader).

Mind you, their peg holes don't really fit on the pegs, and at the current replacement prices I have no desire to break off a peg by forcing them.



Although it's still not 'perfect', the remaining scratches and other flaws can only be seen in person, so I'm calling this one done.

A long time to get here.

Alex

 

[New_Bornalex]

Some additional eBay purchases arrived yesterday.



I felt like that disc's color matched the restored stand just slightly better, so I swapped the one at the Vader position.



The photos don't really do it justice.



And then I took the piece which was removed from the restored stand and replaced the pegless piece from the beater, which also lacked a cog underneath.



There are so many discs of different colors, plus so many places that look melted or built up with some type of superglue substance. And there's the black marker squares on the front.

Suffice it to say I would have no problem totally repainting this thing, or even sculpting some terrain onto it.

What type of terrain, you ask?

Well, the first thing that pops to mind is this craggy lunar terrain from an unused concept for the stand.



I had this photocopied ages ago from an old toy magazine. The two pages were not a continuous centerfold, but the long-gone copy place that did it made it look seamless.

Unfortunately, I did not think to have it enlarged to fit the slit in the stand when I did so, and if I can even find a place to reprint it now-- since most are stricter about copyright these days-- it will also become taller as it becomes wider.



I still haven't found the original magazine itself, but thankfully way back when, I tucked that photocopy in the same plastic under-bed storage box as the Action Collector's display stands.

Alex

 

[New_Bornalex]

It's been ages since I did a fancy edited video. I felt a little rusty, but I thought this deserved the full treatment.

Some info was already covered three years ago in my Toyaholic video 'Straighting to an Inside Draw' but this time there's a better payoff.

Alex

 

[Tulgah]

That is fascinating toy and film archaeology to make the gods weep. That’s some truly magical stuff. I’ll drive to work with chills. Awesome, awesome job. I’m glad the series might get a few more entries!

 

[New_Bornalex]

I still haven't found the original magazine itself ...

Whoops. I lied. I was looking for something totally different and spotted this tucked in one of my Facebook albums just now. It's from four years ago.



Looks like I was totally wrong about it not being a continuous centerfold. Mea culpa. No wonder the photocopy looked so seamless.

The great irony is that the post from August 17, 2021 talks about how I'd stumbled on the magazine itself: "As ever, the only way I can find one specific thing is to look for something else entirely."

But maybe it's not a lie. Wherever it was when I located it four years ago, I honestly don't recall to what 'safe spot' I've since relocated it.

So what I said was... well, you know the quote.

Alex

 

[New_Bornalex]

New video.

Alex

 

[Montross]

Those are pretty wild!

 

[Tulgah]

Sillof is an absolute LEGEND in the custom community. The fact you guys had a personal connection in those days is amazing to me. You both have made tremendous impacts on how people in earlier days entered into a different era (and level) of collecting.

Many times throughout the years I’ve tried to make smaller scale figs be kids, and it’s never really seemed to work. Maybe Jar Jar will be able to come across the right way.

 

[VaderJay]

The 2" TPM figures were the bomb back in the day!
I never realized that line came with an N-1.

 

[New_Bornalex]

Sillof is an absolute LEGEND in the custom community. The fact you guys had a personal connection in those days is amazing to me. You both have made tremendous impacts on how people in earlier days entered into a different era (and level) of collecting.

Yeah, the memories are a little hazier now. My first wife and I divorced when I was around 27, and I'm 55 now. So that trip was more than half my life ago.

I do remember while the cousins were shopping or whatever, Sillof took me on a car ride through endless cornfields across Indiana touring all his favorite small-town toy sellers. I found some neat pieces, including a shop with tons of Tonka figures from the 1988 movie Willow. In hindsight, I should have bought everything, because one time just a few years later I spoke to Sillof at a Star Wars Celebration and he said that all of those brick-and-mortar toy stores were now closed, with the rise of eBay selling.

That trip to Muncie fell during a wild time in Star Wars collecting for me personally. I had just gotten to read the still-unreleased Return of the Jedi Radio Dramas in script form thanks to someone who had access to them and knew that I'd corresponded with Brian Daley just before his passing. And I had just received a Tatooine sandworm bone from a Star Wars author who had gone on the location scout to Tunisia for Phantom Menace with Rick McCallum.

Both of those were topics that Sillof and I discussed as he drove us through Planet Corn in a car that I picture now as a convertible, but may not have actually been. I dubbed it Planet Corn because you know how they go to one Earthly location and make it an entire planet? There's no biodiversity on the Star Wars worlds. Go to an Earth desert, it's a sand planet; go to a glacier, it's an ice planet; go to a redwood forest, it's a moon covered in trees.

Well, my culture shock going from Alabama to Indiana was that corn. It was a bizarre sensation when you've driven for several MILES without being able to see anything in any direction other than stalks of corn and the tiny road bisecting the two hemispheres of it. After a while you come to accept that the entire planet is covered in it.

***

You guys saw these graphics in context in the video above, but I also posted them to my FB albums and people there are having their minds blown, so I thought I'd cross-post them. Not bad for an eleventh hour (actually it was at midnight) photo collage made with images found online because I couldn't locate the graphics I prepped about three years ago when I was first made aware of this bit of recycling.







It's mildly odd now that I think about it, because the two donor weapons were made by Kenner, but the hybrid offspring was technically made by Hasbro.

Alex

 

[Tulgah]

I love the history! Great stuff!

 

[Montross]

I love the history! Great stuff!

Likewise, I find this kind of stuff really intriguing.

 

[New_Bornalex]

Getting back to this long-overdue project.

I made some inquiries with an eBay seller about getting the 1995 magazine image (shown a few posts above) printed onto cardboard. The custom setup fee they quoted was about $40, so I looked for a more economical option.

I scanned the original magazine one page at a time and digitally recombined them, painting out a staple at that time. I determined the exact width of the slot in the base of the display and made a file that when printed at 20" wide would have the art the right size laterally.

I uploaded the file to Walgreen's photo service but their 20" wide option was so tall, I realized I could actually fit the artwork in twice vertically with plenty of room to spare, so I went back and changed my file.

So in essence, I got two prints for $19.99, or around ten bucks each.



As you can see, this was an enlargement of the size it had been printed in the magazine originally, despite the caption saying it was life-size.



I wasn't happy that it came out less blue than the original in the magazine. When I scanned it, I thought maybe it was just my monitor, but the physical print looks just like the digital file. I may eventually make another scan/print attempt.

But I wanted to see how close I'd gotten with the guesstimated rescaling. So I cut one out for a test fit.



I'm very pleased with how it turned out. The paper that Walgreen's used is less sturdy than I'd like, and it had been rolled the opposite direction so it wanted to bow the other way. I put one of my older cardboard replicas behind it for this pic.

But still, it's something I've wanted to do for three decades now, and this is the closest it's come to reality.

Next step will be to customize the base.

Alex