Bloggin' On: Even More Odds and Ends (Star Wars Collectors' Edition)

Hey, there! Hello and welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, a recurring feature here in A Certain Point of View in which I step out of my usual role of a writer of reviews or political essays and just talk about...stuff.

On this first weekend in November, I decided to take a pause from the usual Review of the Day routine; I am juggling several books that I will be writing about in the near future, and I did watch John Carpenter's Christine last night, but I don't feel quite ready to review any of them either today or tomorrow. I hope that by Monday I'll have the Christine review done for you, but we'll have to see what develops.

So...what else is going on in my little corner of Florida?

Well, my Star Wars collection will soon see a new addition: the Disney Parks exclusive Droid Factory Sandcrawler Playset for the 3.75-inch scale Star Wars action figures line by Hasbro.

Now, I've been collecting Star Wars action figures and their assorted vehicles/playsets since I was 15 years old. My first two figures were the original 1978 versions of C-3PO (See Threepio) and R2-D2 (Artoo Detoo) from Kenner, along with that same year's Landspeeder vehicle. They were given to me as a birthday present by family friends who lived in our former neighborhood in Westchester, and even though I no longer have my Landspeeder, C-3PO and R2-D2 are still in my possession, albeit not in mint condition.

When I was younger, I tried my best to get as many of the Star Wars vehicles and action figures as my budget permitted. I eventually bought (or received as gifts) most of the Rebel and Imperial spacecraft produced by Kenner between 1978 and 1985, but a few were beyond my capacity to acquire.

One of the Star Wars vehicles that I failed to add to my collection was Kenner's Remote Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler. I knew it existed because Kenner often featured it in the little Star Wars collection booklets that came with its playsets and vehicles, but if it was ever on the shelves in the stores that I frequented, I never saw it.

According to Rebelscum.com, the Radio Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler was part of the same product wave that included many collectibles I did get when I was still in junior high:

Released in 1979 along with the Millennium Falcon Spaceship, the Land of the Jawas playset, the Darth Vader TIE Fighter Vehicle, the Creature Cantina playset, the Droid Factory playset, the Patrol Dewback, and the Imperial Troop Transporter, Kenner’s Remote Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler is still one of the most sought after pieces in the vintage collection.

Even though it was not overly expensive (Rebelscum.com says that Kenner's manufacturer's suggested retail price, or MSRP, was $29.99 in 1979 dollars [$106.06 in 2019]), the Remote Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler was nearly impossible to find. So if I wanted to recreate the misadventures of Artoo and Threepio in the desert wastes of Tatooine and their fateful acquisition by Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen, I had to settle for Kenner's Land of the Jawas playset instead.

The Land of the Jawas was, in my view, one of those collectibles to which the phrase "Half a loaf is better than none" can be applied. It didn't include any action figures; back in those days when Kenner (then a division of General Mills) was the main source of Star Wars figures in the U.S. and Canada, when you bought either a vehicle or an "action playset," the packaging always featured a "Figures Sold Separately" blurb (as did the TV adverts). However, in addition to a woefully disproportionately small "Jawa Sandcrawler" cardboard backdrop, The Land of the Jawas came with a replica of the escape pod in which Artoo and Threepio escaped from Princess Leia's captured Rebel Blockade Runner.

For six years (perhaps more), I displayed my Land of the Jawas playset on a floating shelf in my old bedroom back in Miami before I decided to box it up and store it in the downstairs storage closet adjacent to the staircase. Bad move, because sometime between the mid-1980s and 2015, rodents (probably rats) chewed their way into the box and ate huge chunks of the cardboard Sandcrawler. (I still have the plastic "desert" base and the escape pod, but I had to discard the Sandcrawler.

I didn't think I'd ever find a nice Sandcrawler vehicle that was compatible with the 3.75-inch scale action figures I own, but last night I saw a Google advert on my blog touting the Disney Store's latest Star Wars offerings. Atop a quartet of action figures and other products that are exclusive to Disney Parks was the Disney Droid Factory Sandcrawler Playset, which is featured in the Jedi Temple Archives YouTube video highlighted at the beginning of this blog post.

I didn't buy it right away; I do have adult responsibilities and obligations, and I wasn't sure that spending $121 on a Star Wars collectible was a good idea. Besides, it's not like I have a lot of room to display a Sandcrawler; it's not exactly a small vehicle, even though it's not exactly accurately scaled to match the "real" movie vehicle's proportions.

But this morning I realized that I would probably regret not buying it, especially since I missed out on the 1979 Remote Controlled Jawa Sandcrawler 40 years ago, and its cheaper counterpart (made of cardboard and plastic) was chewed on by rodents while it was in a closet and I had to throw it away.

So, even though the $99.99 price tag (before sales tax) gave me some sticker shock, I ordered it a few hours ago.