And man, it drove me nuts
One thing I don’t do much of is lose things. I have a kind of phantom limb sense of most of my belongings — I can tell you which paperback book of mine is in Boulder Colorado right now — and further to that, being the toy collecting pervert I am, I also have a pretty robust storage system in play, backed up by manifests, backed up on the cloud, backed up by my own brain. So, it was pretty weird when, shortly into the new year, I realized I’d lost a Darth Vader action figure.
Like most people who collect Star Wars anything, I have a lot of Darth Vaders. Darth Vader was once the Baby Yoda of this franchise — the omni-popular graphic icon you could slap on everything from a toy to a sandwich press — the kind of character who (like Baby Yoda now), the people in your life who don’t know a single thing about Star Wars send you pictures of when they’re rolling around the Wal Mart. “You’d like this, it has Darth Vader on it!” and so forth. One wonders how much “stuff with Darth Vader on it” a person could reasonably own (and I do, as mentioned, own quite a bit of it), but I digress.
So I turned my home and my office and my basement and my parents’ home upside down for a few weeks looking for the recalcitrant toy, and then I had to accept that I had simply lost a Darth Vader action figure. It wasn’t a particularly important one in the grand scheme, but the simple singularity of the experience rattled me. As I said at the beginning, I don’t lose stuff.
What’s neat (or at least, is neat for me) to think about is the fact that that dude is still out there somewhere. I lost him, but the figure as a physical object is not lost, because he — of course — is made of plastic. He is still substantively out there, right now as I am typing this, somewhere I do not know or understand, being his Darth Vader-y self. My phantom limb sense is cut, but I can still imagine him as a particle of human endeavour that exists in the world; he wasn’t atomized. I’ve had this thought before, with respect to the mountain of G.I. Joe toys that my father and I threw out when I became a teenager; yes, we threw them out, but every single one of those things still exists on the planet, inaccessible. And they will, long after I am dead. Because that’s the deal we’ve made, and it’s a horrible one.
I think about time scales like that a lot right now, thanks to the TV project (plus, the fact that that number happens to be 10 times my current lifespan; so like, ten of me). In the 25th century, my Darth Vader will be gone. I assume he will be gooey before then; and who knows (like literally, who knows… plastic hasn’t existed long enough for any single piece of it to naturally biodegrade) what all of those stages and processes and end-states even look like.
So: let’s park, for a moment, the thing where any environmentally conscious person should probably stop collecting plastic toys, and talk about plastic toy packaging.
“The garbage my toys come in” is about to go through a change, because Hasbro has committed to put an end to plastic packaging by the end of this year. Which means, toys that used to look like this:
Will now look like this:
Now, this is NBD for me, because I am — as you all know — an opener. I will absolutely miss, on a nostalgic gut-feel level, the sight of racks of blister-carded Star Wars figures row by row at a Toys R’ Us; but then, it’s been (it feels like) about a bajillion years since the action figure economy was strong enough to support such a thing, anyway. And, round of applause for the Kenner blister pack; it basically invented modern toy collecting, 45 years ago, and that’s a good long run for anything to remain basically, conceptually, physically, unchanged.
Naturally, the 40-,50-, and 60-something white men like me who are the last vanguards of a dwindling hobby are pissed.
I suspect this puts the writing firmly on the wall for Star Wars figures in general; kids don’t buy ’em, and if adult collectors make good on their self-serving threats to stop collecting if the blister packs go away, then there’s no version of this where Star Wars figures, as a concept, aren’t just cooked. See above re: the blister packs: they had a good run. The writing’s been on the wall on this for a while; arguably since at least Solo and the subsequent demise of 5POA. It’s right there in the (current) branding: “The Vintage Collection.” A retro throwback thing for people (like me), who have been sucked along in the wake of this hobby since a genius at Kenner said, “make them small enough to fit in the ships.”
I don’t have a summary point here to make besides, yet again, everyone on the planet needs to get substantially better at accepting and moving on from irreversible change. Because man, man, man, we suck at it right now. And also: toys don’t matter, so as bellwether for how hard it’s going to be to, say, convince mask-averse Americans that they aren’t allowed to drive cars any more, the great Hasbro Blister Card Fight of 2022 is not encouraging.
Useful right now
- I finished Horizon Forbidden West. I have had a hell of an experience with Aloy these past 9 or so months; the first game flowed beautifully into the second and, for the first time probably in my whole history of gaming, the skills (not just thumb-skills; thinkin’-skills!) I learned in HZD actually carried over. Both games are still hilariously problematic as fuck, starting with all the cultural appropriation and trailing right down to (spoiler!) the lesbian turning out all duplicitous back-stabby. And yet in my admittedly very limited gaming experience, I’ve rarely had as much fun exploring a wildly open world.
- Plus also, Aloy is gay as fuck. Like, hilariously gay as fuck. (I also enjoyed the trans tribe, and wore their colours right up till the end.) Aloy topping Alva in Horizon 3 please
- Meanwhile, Picard is not, to coin a phrase, “useful right now.” I ranted about it here. Discovery and Picard are now the second and third Star Trek franchises I’ve given up on, and to have them happen so close together makes me think that maybe live-action NuTrek is just not worth my time. Time matters! Q would agree! DS9 still rules, watch that!