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!