Toltoys Kid

An unusual Star Wars Toltoys find!

Flipping the card over reveals a metric conversion sticker of a type used by Toltoys Australia. These stickers were applied to foreign card-backs to comply with local sales laws requiring the use of metric measurements over imperial. These stickers have been previously found on Toltoys printed cards, but to my knowledge they have never been found on a Kenner card-back.

These are tough enough to find on Toltoys card-backs, but this discovery opens up a whole new variation for collectors to search for! Speculating on where these figures fit into the chronological release of Star Wars figures in Australia is tough to do, were they late release items dumped here at the change-over to Empire Strikes Back figures? Or were they in fact the very first Star Wars figures sold in Australia, before Toltoys managed to print their own card-backs. All suggestions and ideas are welcome!

Special thanks for this discovery goes to Toltoys collector Pat O’Brien, who also provided the photos.

Cheers,

Will

More Star Wars from the 1982 Waltons Wishbook

$60 was a lot for a toy in 1982, hell it’s a lot for a toy today. Just as well then that you received one of the all-time great play-sets for your cash back in ’82, the Kenner Millennium Falcon.

Walton’s caption writers went off the deep end in this one, declaring the Falcon to be ‘faithful’, as opposed to all those other lousy cheating spacecraft one presumes. Dig the “Simulate Space Chess” – is the simulate really necessary? I mean even slow Darren from down the road gets that we’re not actually playing real space chess here.

The keen-eyed among you will have already noticed the uber-cool Empire Strikes Back Electric Toothbrush labeled as a Star Wars one, a tough item to locate for collectors today. They were one of the earliest Star Wars toys so it’s good to see them still around in 1982.

The last little reveals of this particular page are the fantastic AT-AT, still sold in the modern Hasbro line today, and the short lived but much admired Micro Collection, represented here by the Bespin environments. Comparing the prices of the Micro stuff with the creature / figure combos to their right gives some insight I think into why the line did not last. What would you have preferred as a kid? Micro Rob don’t answer that 🙂

Finally we have the whole page on show, and what a treasure trove it has proved to be, solving the mysteries of the not one but three Toltoys Special Offer items, and throwing in rare ads for 3-Packs and ESB Toothbrushes just for fun.

I’ll be continuing the Wishbook posts soon, but stay tuned for some other vintage toy coolness this week.

Cheers!

Will