Overcoming My Crippling Star Wars Toy Addiction

So…uh, where was I?

That’s right, I was a hopeless nerd, addicted to Star Wars action figures. Happily, in the summer of 1999, I had two rude awakenings that got me off the junk:

1) The Phantom Menace
2) Getting dumped

To this day, I’m not sure what hurt me more. Sure, the high school sweetheart I had loved for six years left me for some random boys (oh, the plural is no mistake) she met on the internet, leaving me brokenhearted and pretty much sobbing uncontrollably for about a year. But The Phantom Menace stung.

Of course, I really wanted to like the movie. And I still do, actually. Every six months or so after watching it, I can somehow convince myself that it wasn’t that bad. It had a great lightsaber duel at the end. The podracing was fun and exciting. Jar-Jar wasn’t that nauseatingly awful. Right? And then, at some point, I re-watch The Phantom Menace, and my childhood love of Star Wars is brutally sodomized yet again.

Jar-Jar, of course, is that annoying, as are the rest of the Gungans, as are the terrible Chinese aliens of the Trade Federation, and as is Anakin (“Are you an angel?” “No. Are you retarded?”). The podracing is neither fun nor exciting, and lasts about 25 minutes longer than you remember. The lightsaber duel is cool, except that it makes no real sense: so Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon can only run fast and jump high when they are actually fighting? What the fuck are those stupid force fields that block Obi-Wan from saving Qui-Gon, and what possible purpose could they have, even in the goofball Star Wars universe? Why does Qui-Gon suck out loud at lightsabering, and why does Darth Maul rock right up to the point where Obi-Wan executes a lengthy, highly telegraphed attack?

There’s no one to root for in the whole damn movie. Anakin is a learning disabled child (who never exhibits any Force powers, incidentally), and Qui-Gon and the rest of the jedi are dicks – Qui-Gon could easily save Anakin’s slave mom, but he doesn’t give a shit. I honestly thought that was going to be a point later on – that the Jedi had lost their way, hence the need for the Force to make Anakin to kill ‘em all so the Jedi could be rebuilt the correct way – thus bringing balance to the Force. I had thought midichlorians were evidence of this, and later it would be revealed that the Jedi were looking at the Force too scientifically, which is why they were losing their powers, and not detecting Sith. (It should be noted also that I often lie awake nights, concocting new prequels in my head that don’t suck.)

I know many have made these points before, but I’m still so mad at the damn thing. These scars haven’t healed at all, because I’m still genuinely disappointed.

So, having bought The Phantom Menace action figures in the flush of excitement about a month before the movie’s premiere, it was pretty easy to break the emotional bond between me and Star Wars figures a month later. This was assisted by my semi-new status as a single man, along with my desire to touch a woman again. Having a crippling Star Wars figure addiction – along with in-package figures actually on my walls (it was the Princess Leia collection, which had cloth outfits – classy, right?) – was kind of mutually exclusive to that.

So since 1999, I’ve been more or less Star Wars toy free (although I’ve certainly been addicted to other, smaller and more manageable action figure lines, which are thus more socially acceptable). But like any recovering addict, I am not and never will be fully cured. If I bought a single figure, perhaps because it was one of my favorite characters (Bespin Luke, I’m looking at you), I would inevitably justify buying one more. And another. And another, forever.

I know this to be true, because of Attack of the Clones in 2002, which also sucked roundly but had a few cool parts in it. I love Christopher Lee, and ignored my better judgment to buy a Count Dooku action figure. Within a month, I over 20 new Star Wars figures, an empty bank account, and was huddled in the corner of my apartment, sweating, swearing, and carefully labeling their accessories.

With the help of friends and family, I finally gained the willpower to take the money I would have spent on action figures, and spent it on booze instead. And I found a woman, a good one, who I managed to hide my Star Wars toy collection from until after we got married. Am I a triumph of the human spirit? Maybe so.

I Would Crawl Through a Filthy Scottish Toilet for a Princess Leia Action Figure

The reason most people would consider me a nerd – that is to say, when pressed for a reason as to what makes me a nerd – is my debilitating addiction to Star Wars toys. I estimate I spent maybe two thousand dollars on Star Wars action figures and vehicles in those four years, when I was theoretically borrowing student loans and somehow paying rent. I also bought Star Wars toys so frequently – and was so consumed by finding them, purchasing them, pouring them over my naked body – that from 1995 to 1999, it might actually have become my sole defining characteristic. One that has lingered, even though I’ve not bought a Star Wars toy since 2003.

If people always will think of me as a Star Wars toy nerd, I can’t really begrudge them that, since I have no defense. I have little recollection of what I did during those four years, besides a hazy memory of college itself. I quite vividly remember, however, waking up most Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to drive to Toys R Us and wait in line for three and a half fucking hours in the mere hopes of there being new toys to buy. It blows my mind now to think of how many times I chose to wake up and wait in line for several hours without actually buying any toys. And it’s worth noting that for several of these toy-hunting years that I had a girlfriend (miracle of miracles!) who would stay Friday nights…meaning I would leave a real, flesh-and-blood woman, who was in my bed, to stand in front of a Toys R Us for several hours with a small crowd of likewise clearly desperate men. It might also be worth noting that I used her car for all of these trips.

What did I do with these toys, once I found them? I am not that proud to say I did not make huge Star Wars dioramas using the figures, that my apartment did not have huge piles of Momaw Nadons and blaster accessories scattered about. I did not take thin thread and hang an X-Wing and Millennium Falcon from my ceiling in an awesome, elaborate recreation of a space dogfight, although I thought about it probably five or so times a week.

I say not proud, because I can’t imagine any extra dignity in what I did, which was to put them in boxes and keep them in my closet. To do nothing, really. I just bought them and put them immediately away. I had no plans for them. But I loved knowing they were there, ready and waiting, if the time came.

Oh, thanks to a combination of the many accessories that Star Wars toys came with and my mild obsessive-compulsive disorder which made me fearful I would either lose those accessories or forget which doodads went with which, I bought small plastic bags for them that were specially bought for that purpose. I also bought small labels, and wrote the character to which they belonged, and the name of the weapons - didn't want to get a blaster rifle confused with a blaster pistol, right? ....right?

I am pretty sure this is how I got my job at ToyFare.

Now, I did collect Star Wars toys, very much so. But I always opened them, immediately ruining whatever possible worth they might have had in the future. I remember feeling very strongly that the people who didn’t open them were losers, which makes me laugh in a vomiting-kind-of-way now. I didn’t play with them, because that was beyond childish, and even in my most crazed moments, I had a small shred of dignity that kept me from imagining scenes from the movies, or god forbid expanding on them.

So I collected them in a way that sucked out all the potential of monetary gain – and hoarded them. In a box. In my closet. They sat there, only to be taken out when I had new figures to add to the fold. With its corresponding, carefully labeled bag of accessories. Evey once in awhile, I would take the box out, dump them on the floor, and just marvel at them, picking each one up, feeling a diminished version of the high I originally felt when I found and bought it.

There were, sadly, a few exceptions; none more shameful than the four special Leia two-packs that were sold in 96 or 97; they were notable only for including Princess Leia in then-new costumes, made with real cloth. I hung these on my wall – these and these alone – because they were kind of classy (needless to say, when I became single, they came down).

I won’t go into the shame and degradation of waiting I line at Toys R Us every Saturday morning, but let it be clear evidence of how addicted I was to Star Wars toys. As the title says, I would have crawled into a toilet, Ewan MacGregor-style, to find a Leia in Boussh Disguise, although I’m grateful I didn’t have to. I went to the mall, for god’s sake, to visit the KB Toys there. Whenever I took a trip somewhere, I tried to hit a local toy store hoping for an undiscovered stash. I spent thirty minute in one toy aisle on several occasions, searching through all the pegs, looking on the top row, peeking behind other toys, just in case one had gotten misplaced (I actually found a small haul that way – I’m pretty sure Bib Fortuna was in there – which kept me doing this for years after, although it was profoundly useless).

I was addicted, because I was constantly looking for new figures. And it really was like nerd heroin. Because when I’d gone a long time without a fix, I settled for lesser substitutes, lesser highs – which is how I ended up with a shit-ton of terrible Marvel action figures. Cases in point:



















I have never had much interest in X-Men in general, and zero interest in Jubilee specifically. And yet I felt this figure was “cool,” and bought it on its own merits - perhaps the large hand accessory, or the awkward, uncomfortable pose of the heroine. Clearly, this was a horrible idea on my part. Also:




















This one I’m especially ashamed of, because I bought this horrible, horrible toy – which was a repaint of an equally awful Psylocke figure, by the way – because I had read in toy mags like ToyFare that it was rare and worth money. So I bought this little nightmare as an investment. What I was too stupid to realize is that 1) if I had found it, it clearly wasn’t rare any more, and 2) it was certainly going to be worth more money in 1997 than in 2005, when it was obvious to everyone that this was a terrible figure.

This has gone on long enough. But I will explain how I overcame my crippling addiction to Star Wars figures next time.

Before we get started...

...let me just muck about with Blogger for a bit. For a nerd planning on blogging about nerds, nerdery and my own nerd history, I know so very little about the internet. My brain kind of got full of shitty fantasy novels back in high school, and never really let it go to learn about computers, despite a state education So while I have little idea how to attach an image in this blog post, I do know that Drizzt Do'Urden was a Dark Elf Ranger that wielded scimitars in both hands.



Ugh. So my joy in successfully uploading the picture is mitigated by my first thought when seeing the picture, which was that the swords don't look like the scimitars from the covers of the first six Drizzt-starring Forgotten Realms books by R.A. Salvatore. Second thought: Bleagh.

So yeah, clearly I need a place to confess my nerdiness.

Update: And that armor - which I have every reason to believe is scale mail - looks way too heavy for a Ranger. I think scale mail was allowed for Rangers in D&D just barely, but I have no idea how Drizzt would possibly Hide In Shadows wearing that kind of get-up.

Update #2: Bleagh.