Vehicle Maintenance Energizer Toy

The last of the "Accessory" line I'm covering is the Vehicle Maintenance Energizer. And in doing so, I'm bending one of the collecting rules I've established for myself, which is "nothing in the collection that didn't appear onscreen in the Trilogy."

This means no Ewok Battle Wagon or mini-rigs, thank the Maker. However, the VME gets a bit of a mulligan here for me, since it's more likely than the mini-rigs to have been "just offscreen."

Like the other accessories, the VME debuted in 1982 in ESB packaging, but is most often found nowadays in RotJ box.

And once more, there's not a lot of box art to imitate here, just the one image of Chewie holding his hose (!)

But this is where the VME gets interesting - all the fiddly little "hydrospanner tools." Finding a VME that's not MISB but has all the tools with it has to be a rarity - and each of the 8 tools is subtly different. Fortunately, though, loose tools to complete your set are pretty readily available on the secondary market!

My boxed VME came with instructions, to boot. Helpful!

Gotta say that the suction cups are pretty useless in sticking to anything at this point. I pretty much gave up trying to stick one to the X-Wing in the tableau pic.

Another thing that shocked me, frankly, was the price point for this toy. You'll note the "Graham Crackers" price sticker in the first pic that notes a price of $16.95 (!)  Dunno bout you, but that seems pretty pricy to me, when an action figure cost 3 or 4 bucks at most in 1983. I'd have imagined less than $10 as a reasonable price here, but that's just me. And I guess if hydro-spanners are your thing, this is the only way you're gonna get any. Chewie seems to like them, anyway.

Tri-Pod Laser Cannon

The second "Action Figure Accessory" I'll cover on the blog is the coolest one - the Tri-Pod Laser Cannon. First issued in 1982 in Empire Strikes Back packaging, the version packaged in the Return of the Jedi box is considered one of the most common vintage toys. This means that they are readily available at a reasonable price, which is great because it's an awesome piece! 

Of course, a lot of the coolness is due to the fact that the prop on which the toy is based enjoyed some significant screen time in Empire, being featured prominently in the Hoth battle scenes.

A pretty simple box tableau here - just a lone Hoth snowtrooper and his trusty laser cannon. To be honest I'm a bit surprised that the box art didn't include a couple more troopers or maybe even an AT-AT Commander. Originally I'd thought that Kenner was the dictating force behind what ancillary toys were used in the box art, but after asking Kim "The Man Who Shot Luke Skywalker" Simmons this question at Star Wars Celebration Chicago, I have come to a different view... but that's for another blog post :-)

Here's the second tableau - a close-up of the snowtrooper with the "energizer unit" and hose. As shown below, the hose neatly stores away inside the unit.

Original instructions came with the toy, showing in detail how to assemble and disassemble the cannon from its component parts.

The cannon rotates and elevates of course, and makes "machine-gun" clicking sounds (why lasers in the Star Wars toy universe always sound like machine-guns, I have no idea)…

All in all, a very cool little toy. I can see why so many were made - the low-ish price point combined with the significance of the subject must have made it a hot commodity back in the day.

TIE Bomber Diecast

In trying to maintain a focus on production items, there is inevitably some scope creep. For me this involves some tertiary toy lines like the 12" "Large-Size Action Figures" and on the other end of the scale, diecast.

I still have a few diecast pieces left from my childhood collection - the X-Wing Fighter, Millennium Falcon, TIE Fighter, Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, and Imperial Cruiser/Star Destroyer. So of course I started adding the other missing pieces from the line as I saw them come up. They're mainly easy to find and inexpensive.

So with the other diecast pieces collected, there remained only one - and that's the tough one - the TIE Bomber. Apparently only "test-marketed" in a run of 75,000 pieces (that still seems like a lot to me), the TIE Bomber is undoubtedly cool but hard to find and expensive.

Condition is key for this ship too - the white plastic parts tend to yellow significantly and this can really detract from the appearance of the piece.

So this item was my target to obtain on my recent trip to Star Wars Celebration in Chicago. In fact on the Friday night, I'd been having dinner with some of the lads from the Vintage Rebellion podcast when the topic of acquisition targets was raised, and I mentioned that this piece was basically all I was looking for. Later when we got to the room sales, we'd just walked in when Steve S. turned to me, pointed at the floor and said, "there you go Dallas!"

Yes, this lovely TIE Bomber was waiting for me at the very first vendor in the room sales. I foolishly took a quick spin around the room before returning and negotiating a deal, but with that purchase my collecting goal for the weekend was achieved.

As you can tell from the (completely unretouched) photos, this is a pretty nice piece, and I've seen a lot worse ones sell for a lot more money. To me, that's the beauty of room sales - collectors sell to collectors and most stuff is priced realistically. What's even better is that lots of the room sale guys are well-known collectors in the vintage community and that gives some extra peace of mind. I didn't know the person who sold me this piece, but as I handed over my phone for him to type in his Paypal payment address I recognized his name immediately as having been a guest on the Chivecast and a well-known good egg. Cool!

Both wings are identical (as on all the diecast TIE variants) and bear copyright date of 1980.

The Bomber is much larger than Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. I guess that goes some way to justifying the 10x higher cost of the Bomber (!)

I was really happy to pick up this piece and with it, complete my loose diecast run. It's a very attractive ship with some cool features, including the plastic high-detail parts on the hull and the Snowtrooper pilot. It's truly the ultimate production diecast ship!