Toy Stories : Episode 1

Growing up, my childhood was awesome. I was and am still surrounded by a loving family and because I was a good kid and almost never got in trouble I was given free reign to lose myself in my toys, my art, and comic books. I have so many great memories associated with these things that I've become a very nostalgic person as I've gotten older....whether that's a refusal to let go of my childhood or just holding onto the stuff that made/makes me happy, regardless I have a lot of tales to tell. One such tale took place in the spring of 1983 right on the cusp of the release of Return of the Jedi. This was obviously before the internet and rampant speculation about the plots and characters in movies so it was amazing to go into a film with no idea what was going to happen, except for the little glimpses you saw in trailers and tv commercials....and did I mention action figures? And this is where our tale begins. In Centerville there was a K-mart where Spring Valley and Main street crossed that we used to go to when I was a kid. And this one glorious day, I would have been 9 at the time, my trek into the toy department was met with a huge wall of action figures from Return of the Jedi. I just remember it was like visual overload, that classic Star Wars packaging that upon seeing it would spark the happy part of my brain and probably 90% of them featured characters I had never seen before. I don't want to speculate as to who all was available because I know ROTJ figures came out in waves and I know someone's going to call me out and say "that particular figure came out in the second wave so he/she couldnt have been there." All I know is I gravitated right to the Bib Fortuna figure aka Jabba the Hutt's right hand man. He had these cool tentacle looking things coming off his head and just looked like a complete badass...in my little Fundip addled brain I imagined he was probably some sort of bounty hunter who knocked people out with his staff and howled over their corpses. My brother decided to play it safe with a Jedi Luke, and I probably bragged and bragged how I made the better decision with my action figure choice and would be vindicated when the movie came out. And came out it did. I think I saw Return of the Jedi about three times that summer. Twice with my parents and a third time with my grandma. The time with my grandma is a whole other story. Let's just suffice to say I spent the moments after walking out of the theater with my grandma trying to convince her that she NEEDED to take me to Children's Palace IMMEDIATELY and buy me a Wicket the ewok action figure. No if ands or butts. She was very skilled in negotiations and I ended up losing that particular battle.

But back to Bib Fortuna. The guy for weeks I thought was going to be one of the most bad ass bounty hunter characters in the movies ended up being a creepy pointy tooth droid molester. Moral of the story : don't judge an action figure by it's packaging.