May 2007 will mark thirty years since the original theatrical release of Star Wars. John Booth, who at age six converted his thumbs and index fingers from cowboy shooters to Han Solo-inspired blasters, is raking together his memories of the saga in a series of essays for Field's Edge.The series begins here.

   When I was little, getting Star Wars stuff was great. And yet it’s easier to remember – I mean really, relive-the-feeling-physically remember, not like “I went to the mall yesterday” remember but like “I sliced my knee open on a windshield wiper” remember – the deep-seated wanting of Star Wars stuff than it is to recall the actual getting or having. 
   Having Star Wars stuff really only increased the wanting. Have you looked at a modern-era Star Wars figure? Hasbro pictures 10, maybe 12 other figures on the back. Know why? Because since relaunching the Star Wars toy line in the mid 1990s, there have literally been hundreds of Star Wars figures produced. Having them all, though possible, isn’t even a practical marketing ploy anymore. But as a kid, imagining the day when you had every Star Wars guy (that was the generic term we used: “guys,” as in, “Should I bring my Star Wars guys over?”) was a pastime rooted in reality. Even up through Return of the Jedi, Kenner never lost sight of that, showing every figure on every cardback and encouraging us to “Collect all 92!” 
   In fall 1978, I started second grade, and had an assigned seat on the bus with two other guys who were also Star Wars fans. (We were still small enough to sit three to a seat, which made for at least one less-than-fun ride home when one of my seatmates barfed up his school-cafeteria mac-and-cheese all over the seatback in front of us. The three of us rotated spots daily, and that incident really made sitting in the middle no fun because the resulting stain never fully faded and stared you right in the face.) We regularly used to flip through our Topps Star Wars trading cards or sneak a figure or two into our bookbags. And then one day, Doug (I think) brought the backing card to a new Star Wars guy he’d just gotten, and what I saw on the back of the package made me sugar-buzz hyper: Eight new Star Wars guys. 
   And what a bunch. As cool as the original dozen figures were, even with the “exciting” figures like Chewbacca and Darth Vader, it was a pretty bland color palette – the bright spot was the lemon-yellow hair on Luke’s head, unless you counted the lightsabers. All the rest was black and white and greys and tans, except for the robots, and even shiny gold C-3PO was kind of subdued. These new guys, though, stood out on the back of the package bright as Life Savers: Luke in his orange X-Wing flight suit; sun-struck-grass green Greedo; bright red accented R5-D4 and squat, dark red Snaggletooth. OhmanohmanohMAN I had to get those guys! Hammerhead! Power Droid! Death Star Droid and Walrus Man! 
   Half the new guys were from the famous scene in the cantina, which you could now re-create in your own home, thanks to the playset advertised on the package too. 
   To this day, the thrill of seeing those new guys resonates: Looking at one of the old cardbacks I have, that particular version with the 8 new figures (Collect all 20!), I can feel the distant thrum of gut butterflies, like the vertigo you get sitting high in an arena and looking out at the girders supporting the roof. 
   After school, I begged begged begged my Dad to take me to K-mart to get one of the new guys, any one, I didn’t care which – I’d have even been happy with Power Droid, even though he was about the lamest of the bunch – because that’s where the kid on the bus said they were. Whether it was that day or the next, it wasn’t long before Dad and I made the five-minute drive to the North Canton K-mart and I made for the toy aisles, only to find nothing new at all among the Star Wars shelves. Zippo. Same old Stormtroopers and Jawas and Hans and Lukes. It was like a punch in the stomach. 
   Whether because he felt bad for me or because I whined a lot, Dad bought me a couple Battlestar Galactica figures instead: A four-armed Ovion and the purple-lizard-esque Imperious Leader. (I wanted funny-looking aliens, after all.) They were weird felt chunky, like preschool toys, next to the neat, straight-limbed Star Wars guys at home. I kept them for years anyway. 
   That K-Mart, though completely overhauled inside, is still there, and I can still picture where the Star Wars toys were, and remember fishing frantically through the shelves trying to find a new figure. 
   As with the first bunch of Star Wars guys, I remember the heartache of not getting them right away much more than I remember the times I actually got them. Eventually, though, I did, and of course, needing a properly wretched hive of scum and villainy for these guys to hang out in, I got the Cantina Playset. This is another toy I still have, although the backdrop is a full-color copy and the swing-open saloon-style doors are long gone, and I don’t think any of the action levers work anymore. All that really survived was the molded plastic base with its semicircular bar and that round table that sat in the back booth. 
   Action levers were a great thing about the Kenner playsets: You’d stand one figure atop a small slot in the base, then put another figure on a little platform nearby. Pushing a lever rotated the platform and then, at a certain point, activated a little spring-loaded fin that would pop up through the slot and make the first figure tip over. Instant barfight! (Or Jawa attack or Stormtrooper ambush or whatever.) 
   I used to meticulously set up Han and Greedo in that back booth of the Cantina, positioning them so that Han would draw his bead on the bounty hunter just as the spring popped into position and sent the bad guy sprawling. If I was feeling particular, I’d even try to get Greedo to fall across the table, since the Kenner designers had gone to the trouble of printing the image of a spilled drink on the tabletop’s decal. 
   During this second surge of Star Wars stuff, my family and I paid a visit to grandma over in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Among Upper Sandusky’s claims to fame are an old Wyandot Indian mill, a cemetery headstone recognized by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and being the home of a character in the Infocom text adventure “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” when those games were the computer geek rage in the 1980s. 
   My grandma was a librarian at the Carnegie Public Library in Upper, so I spent a lot of time there. Classic small, old building with narrow staircases and a basement that felt dark all the time. I can almost imagine into existence the wood and plaster and book-page smell of the place. 
   Up near the front door was a glass case where people would display collections of things, and on one visit, my grandma wanted me to see the collection of Star Wars toys in there. And that’s where I saw something that would literally confound me for years: An action figure that looked kind of like the Snaggletooth I had – same face, same hands, same belt buckle design – but this guy was tall and blue and had shiny silver moon boots. 
   Now, of course, this guy’s well-known as the Blue Snaggletooth, product of a Sears exclusive Cantina set and a Kenner design fluke. I wouldn’t learn that, though, until I was in my early 20s. Right then, I was just too fascinated and jealous and mesmerized. I stared at this thing, trying to figure out what it was and where it had come from and why wasn’t it in any of the Kenner Star Wars catalog booklets and how, good God, could I get my hands on one? (Wouldn’t happen, by the way, until I was married and living in Florida almost 20 years later, and that one cost me $80.) I remember telling my friends about it, and none of them had seen or heard of one of these things either, and I probably sounded like that kid on my street talking about his supposed Grand Moff Tarkin toothbrush. It didn’t help that I never saw another Blue Snaggletooth as a kid. 
   This second wave of Star Wars toys also included the Droid Factory Playset, which was, I think, the first toy made for the action figure line that didn’t have an on-screen counterpart. In fact, you didn’t need any action figures at all to play with it – the point really seemed to be putting together robots, most of which really didn’t look like they belonged in Star Wars at all. There was a book of blueprints to follow if you wanted, including instructions for a monster droid that used every single piece in the playset, and was impressive from that standpoint but was really a pretty goofy-looking thing when it was done. You could even build an R2-D2 that included his third leg, which put it a step ahead of the regular action figure, although it also fell apart pretty easily. The factory had axles and wheels and arms and skinny tubing and little rubber pegs that held stuff together, and I’m sure I started losing parts about five minutes after I opened it. 
   Now, with all these new guys, I had the full potential for a real battle royale. A laser-gun massacre in plastic. So I divvied them up one afternoon up in my room – good guys vs. bad guys, with the unknowns (most of the Cantina guys and extra droids) split up between both sides. For some reason, I set this up like you hear they used to fight in the pre-American Revolution years: Two forces at a standstill, face-to-face. I lined up the good guys in a row on the orange-brown carpet of my room, and had the bad guys hunkered down in a plastic lunch pail propped open and standing on its lower front edge, making a two-level “base.” All the figures were sitting, since it was too hard to make them stand on their own. 
   Then the firing began. 
   I handled all the dialogue and all the taunts and all the final, dying words and the laser noises and the explosions. One by one, my Star Wars guys perished. (I don’t seem to recall any lightsaber fights, actually. Back then, we didn’t know how kick-ass Jedis and Sith could be. They were just swordfighters, no matter how clumsy and random they thought blasters were.) I was a very nearly equal-opportunity battle god, inflicting heavy casualties on both sides. 
   When the smoke cleared, and the camera panned up from the carnage of the battlefield – yes, I actually used my hands to “frame” the shot as if I were watching it on a movie screen – there were just two survivors. The good guys had won, but only Luke and either Han or Chewbacca (time and trauma of the battle have scarred my memory) had lived to tell the tale. 
   There was, of course, one more figure in the original Star Wars line: Boba Fett. This new mystery guy who showed up for a few minutes in the Star Wars Holiday Special, before the release of The Empire Strikes Back. Some kids ordered this guy as a bonus figure in the mail, but I got my Boba Fett the old-fashioned way: in Click’s. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found this incredibly cool enigma of a guy who, judging by the illustration on the package, could shoot fireballs from his wrist guns and maybe even fly using his rocket pack. It must have been autumn, because Dad said I could get it, but I’d have to make a choice: Either Boba would stay in storage until my birthday or Christmas, or I could open it up and play with it right away but pay Dad back for it.
 
   I couldn’t wait. When I got home, I scraped together the money from my room and ripped open that Boba Fett package and had that masked badass flying all over the house, up and down the stairs, arms extended Superman-style and unleashing carnage from his flamethrowers. I even roped Dad in for a few minutes, who role-played Han and taunted this new arrival to the house by nicknaming him “Bubble Head.” Boba fried him for that one. This was at least a half hour of pure Kenner-drenaline. 
   And then I crashed hard from the high and wanted my two bucks back, knowing that Fett would be mine again soon anyway. I put the figure back on the card, placed the bubble over him even though I’d completely torn it off the package and went to Dad, meek and regretful. But there was no going back on the deal. I was sad for a bit, but then probably realized that now I wouldn’t be heading into my birthday already knowing what one of my presents was, and besides, did I mention that I had a brand new Boba Fett? 
   It’s only been as I’ve been writing this essay that I’ve realized what a milestone and turning point that action figure marked. 
   When I walked out of Click’s into that sunny afternoon, soon to be two bucks lighter, I had done it. 
   I had Collected All 21. The next figures would come out with the release of Empire, and 21 became 32 and then 41 and 45 and 48, and the figures went up from $1.75 to $2.50 and then $3.00 and four bucks and change and there were just too many to get. 
   But for a few months in there, I could look at the back of any Kenner Star Wars action figure package and put a magic-marker ‘X’ over every one pictured. 
   It was the last time I could ever say that I had all the Star Wars guys.   

   Here are the links to the rest of Remembering Star Wars:

Part I: Summer, 1977
Part II: The Droids We Were Looking For
Part III: Perfect Hibernation
Part IV: Into A Larger World
Part VI: A Certain Point of View
Part VII: A Pack-A-Day Habit
Part VIII: Size Matters Not

Part IX: Along A Different Path

Part X: There is Another

Part XI: Bounty Hunting