smacky and bucky

I must have been 5 1/2 years old when my mother took me to see Star Wars. The title was so generic, and I honestly don't think I saw a single commercial for it before seeing the movie in the theater. (Boy, you'd have to be the unabomber to do that now. Now we have costume pics and an outline of the plot on the web before a single frame is shot!)*

Today we have what was most likely my very first Star Wars figure, Luke Skywalker, and definitely the character in the movie with whom I most closely related:

(1) Like Luke, I spent most of the movie wide-eyed with mouth agape at what I was seeing.
(2) I had blonde hair. Just like LUKE!  
(3) A cool smuggler who makes wisecracks at chicks? Ha! Han was so not me then (or me decades later, but we won't discuss that).

Luke has that awesome '70s wings hairstyle.

As a figure, Luke was very well made. Sturdy as heck, with his legs surviving years of little uncoordinated hands cramming him into the driver's seat of a landspeeder!

 The white plastic in the torso portion of his shirt is the only real sign that he's 35 (!!!!) years old. Some definite yellowing going on there.



*There have been three times in my life I recall going to movies and having had NO "pre-viewing" hype: Star Wars, ET, and (years and years later) Sling Blade. I was visiting a (then) girlfriend at her college in Florida and I suggested seeing Sling Blade based on a two sentence blurb in the movie listings in the paper. It was a great choice, and I'm so glad I knew nothing about it going in!