Since I can’t edit the damned Birthday Thread title anymore, and since there’s only one thing that annually trumps New Year’s in the Star Wars collecting community, especially this year, it’s time we start a thread honoring the momentous occasion of the 40th anniversary of the birth of the creator of ICMG, the architect of Hoth Han’s blue jacket (or is it brown?), the discoverer of Greg(g); and celebrating our love affair with one Ol’ Cocky Bastard, JD’s heart and soul, 4 decades of OCB, and the official welcoming of Scott to the OLD fart’s club (pka “The Canadians”)...



Happy 40th Birthday, Scott!  Without getting too sappy, thanks for the friendship, memories, laughter, knowledge, generosity and fun for the past… oh hell, however long it’s been now.  But most of all, thanks for two of my all-time favorite Star Wars figures.  My collection would be forever incomplete without you being the beacon of light guiding Hasbro through their oft gloomy tunnel of darkness.

Now hopefully Dale or Nathan can dig up the dancing monkets, llamas, bananas, etc for the special occasion...

JD Uber Troll is having yet another challenging dilemma, so I’ve decided to help him out here and start a thread on his behalf, to hopefully help alleviate some of his continuously "unusual" anxiety regarding others people’s collecting habits.  Force Guy brings up an interesting conundrum though, as he is currently confounded as to why people (like me) who dislike the Prequels would still collect prequel figures and toys.  Similary, we should probably nip it in the bud and also address why folks would buy any of the EU figures if they didn't like the book or game from which the characters came, or haven’t even read or played it for that matter.

Any takers?  As for me, as I've previously posted, I do it for the sake of maintaining a complete 4” collection, on top of the fact that I just like most of the figures regardless of movie or source of origin.  In all of the other Star Wars lines I collect (GG, etc), I’ve always gone OT-only though.  But since I've dug the 4” line since 1978, and it's relatively cheap (current distribution issues aside), I’ve decided to grab the prequel stuff along the way too, even if their inspiration comes from 2.5 movies that I don’t particularly care for.  As for EU, other than the Thrawn trilogy and SOTE, I’ve never read any Star Wars EU, and I’ve only played a handful of the SW video games, but I really dig the vast majority of EU figures.  I guess I look at the Hasbro line as part of the overall SW "toy saga" which I enjoy in it's entirety, but a somewhat separate entity from the movie saga (which I only enjoy 58.3% of the time), so I collect the prequel (and EU) stuff almost as happily as the OT swag.

[Tangent]Regarding collecting in general, on a broader level, I’ll occasionally purchase stuff I don’t necessarily love for my movie and music collections, just to make them more well-rounded.  I’ve taken to trying to “collect” each Blu-ray from BOM’s Top 200 adjusted list, though there’s actually a small handful that I’m struggling with that I may wind up passing on.  I'll grab random Jazz and Classical CDs from time to time too, even though I don't love those genres, and have to be in exactly the right mood to listen to them.  I also collect U.S. and Int'l coins, including some from countries that I didn't particularly enjoy, and many that have some ridiculously lame designs on them.  I guess my point is that to me, well-rounded and interesting collections should contain a wide array of items within them: Bizarre, cool, ugly, unusual, popular, random, despised, etc.[tangent/]

So, who else is in the boat of disliking the Prequels (or EU), but collecting their respective figures/toys, and how come?  Also, folks who have ditched the PT figures somewhere along the way should feel free to chime in too since you were obviously at one point in this club as well, before “seeing the light” (or just running out of space, as the more frequent case may be).

Forgive me if I missed a thread/post on this somewhere (and for my lack of interest in doing the research myself), but does anyone have a list of the remaining carded updates still needed in the TVC collection to complete the entire vintage "92" figure run?  I'm not talking every vintage carded variant, just the debut cards for each respective figure.  I've completely lost track, and am interested in how close Hasbro is to finishing them all up, and whether it's plausible to do so during TVCs next run in a year or two.

Thanks!