Some of you, who have been reading FigureFan a while, may know that I liquidated the bulk of my massive Star Wars collection four or five years back. That’s why I publish so few Star Wars features here. It was a money-sucking monkey that I worked long and hard to get off my back. Sure, I kept some prominent pieces, but I tried to let as much go as possible, which amounted to hundreds of figures and dozens of vehicles and playsets. Fast forward to now and I’ve been making weekly sojourns to my remote storage and going through totes only to find that I still have a ridiculous amount of Star Wars odds and ends. Going through this stuff was a big mistake because it’s really bringing me back into the glory days of my Star Wars toys as a kid and my collection as an adult. I can’t say as I regret selling off all that stuff. At the time I needed space and money and my Star Wars collection was getting so unwieldy and sprawling that I had figures based on characters that I didn’t even know.
Anywho… one of the things I found, in particular, was my Jabba’s Skiff Guards Cinema Scene 3-pack and it got me thinking about one of my long time toy grails. Every collector has their grails. They’re the figure or toy that they always wanted, but never got. Most people’s grails are insanely hard to find and expensive. That’s why they don’t own them and that’s what makes them grails. I’ve got a few things like that on my list, but one of my grails isn’t expensive or hard to get, it’s just something I never owned and always wanted to. It’s the Tattooine Skiff from Return of the Jedi.
Why the Skiff? Well, for starters it’s my favorite scene in that movie and one of my favorites in all the Star Wars films. It was such a great Flash Gordon-y concept to make a bunch of space adventurers walk the plank of a ship hovering in the middle of a desert. It was a great action scene too, with people being tossed over the sides left and right and falling to their doom, and we even get to see the legendary captain of cool himself, Boba Fett, in action for a few short moments before he screams like a girl and falls to his death. (or what might have been his death if you have the good taste to discount the events of a certain very shitty Marvel comic). I also just love the look of the Skiffs. They’re vaguely nautical looking, vaguely steam punk, and they look like they’d be fun to skim across the desert in. Not to forget the fact that they were manned by aliens that looked like pirates and toted around vibro-axes. Fantastic!
For a lot of Star Wars collectors, I’m sure the Tattooine Skiff is a grail piece, specifically the original release, issued as part of the first Power of the Force line in 1985. That was the year that failed to keep the Star Wars license afloat and as such the original release of the Skiff has become both rare and pricey. Fortunately, all I wanted was the toy, and the Skiff has been re-released to offer more affordable options. It was first re-issued as part of the Power of the Force 2 collection (the one we’re looking at this weekend) and again sometime around 2008 as part of an Ultimate Battle Pack, complete with a plastic Sarlacc.
So, needless to say, I finally hunted one down and bought it, and we’ll look at it tomorrow in all its glory. But first, I’ll be back later today to open up and take a look at my Skiff Guards so I have some figures to display on it.
FigureFan Zero 