Get a Holda Yoda: Baby Yoda & the Great Yoda Drought of '80

The Baby Yoda that's supposedly coming sometime next year.

 Ron writes:

 How hard are you crying right now because you can't buy Baby Yoda* toys?

 Admit it: you love Baby Yoda so much that you haven't even noticed that he's a rip-off of Gizmo from Gremlins.

Well, you've noticed; it's pretty hard not to notice. But you've made an agreement with the discriminating part of your conscience to accept it and move on.

It's similar to the agreement you and your conscience have worked out regarding the titular character of The Mandalorian. Both you and your conscience know that he's just the Diet Coke version of Boba Fett, but you're gonna ignore that and act like you're seeing something really novel. If this show was called Boba Fett, and featured Boba Fett, it'd be the same darn show, and you'd love it just as much as you love The Mandalorian. Perhaps you'd love it more, because you have Boba Fett Underoos.

Mind you, this is all just my personal opinion and not an attempt to critique your fandom. I, too, am keeping up with the show, but only because I like Apollo Creed.

Anyway, The Mandalorian has been streaming for several weeks, but there are no Baby Yoda toys. Apparently there won't be any Baby Yoda toys until May of next year, no matter how hard you cry.

The situation has been compared to the one that prevailed in the fall and winter of 1977, when there were no Star Wars toys available to the movie's rabid fanbase. As explained here, toy licensee Kenner had jumped onto the Star Wars bandwagon only a month or two prior to the movie's release. Since it takes about a year to bring plastic toys to market, consumers were forced to wait until spring of 1978 to buy plastic Star Wars toys.

But I think there's a better analog to the Great Baby Yoda Drought of '19.

That would be the Great Adult Yoda Drought of '80.

That's right: in May of 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back was released, there were no Yoda toys on store shelves. Hoping to keep the character secret, Lucasfilm imposed an embargo on the little guy, which prevented his use in publicity and merchandising.

If you're thinking, "Gee, I didn't know that," you're not giving yourself enough credit. Of course you knew that. The Yoda delay is the reason there are 31-back and 32-back blister cards.

The 31-back blister card.

The first ESB blister card featured 31 figures on its reverse, none of which were Yoda. This card debuted in the spring of 1980, just as Empire was hitting theaters.

From Kenner's perspective, this must have been something of a bummer. Yoda was surely the most marketable character in the movie!

Fortunately, the Yoda action figure was in the hopper; by late summer, it was in stores, ready to be purchased for Christmas. Of course, this necessitated a blister-card change, resulting in the 32-back blister card, which showed Yoda tucked -- somewhat amusingly -- into the available space in the upper left corner.

The 32-back blister card.

Kenner was certainly conscious of Yoda's appeal.

In this fall 1980 edition of a company newsletter, trumpeting the early success of their Empire line, Kenner gave pride of place to Yoda, at that time their newest action figure. The key portion reads:

The biggest item is probably the smallest toy ever to sweep the toy industry. It's barely two inches tall, but with the potential impact of a giant. We speak, of course, of the newest mini figure to add to your collection. He's Yoda, the 800 year old Jedi master to whom Luke goes to learn all the secrets of the Force. The 26 inch Muppet with the curious speech, the expressive eyes, and those incredible ears was an instant hero, and Kenner was right there to answer the demand for Yoda.

Geez, ease up on the coffee, Mortimer.

But you can sort of understand the excitement. Kenner was gonna sell the heck out of Yoda!

Because the Yoda action figure wasn't featured in Kenner's 1980 Toy Fair catalog, this sales sheet -- basically a one-page supplement to the catalog -- was issued to retailers to ensure their awareness of the impending release of Yoda.

In order to meet demand, cases of Yoda were available to interested retailers, each packed solid with 24 Yoda figures. It was a lucky kid who walked into his local department store and was greeted with a wall of freshly unpacked Yodas!

Likely intending to offset the figure's slight stature with added value, Kenner gave Yoda a softgoods robe and three accessories. At the time of its release, it was the most complex action figure in the line.

(By the way, the Yoda figure pictured in this sales sheet, as well as on the Kenner newsletter, is likely the hardcopy prototype seen here.)

This ad, from retailer Mervyn's, shows that the Yoda action figure was available by late July.

Kenner was fortunate to have begun work on the Yoda figure in 1979. Their early work paid off, allowing them to release the figure after the end of Lucasfilm's embargo but before the holiday shopping rush.

As were most of the figures in the vintage line, Yoda was sculpted in wax by Kenner's in-house craftsmen. Each part -- six in all -- was lovingly detailed over many hours of work to yield the now-familiar figure -- surely one of the best in the line.

Fortunately, the sculpt still exists. That's it on the left side of the above photo. I'm sorry the quality of the photo isn't better. It was taken some time ago. Thanks to an anonymous friend of mine for allowing me to use it.

Unfortunately, this photo, taken by collector Chris Georgoulias, isn't much better. It's interesting, though. It shows the figure in the state in which it was found in the possession of a former sculptor. He took pretty good care of it, separately wrapping each piece in plastic.

Okay, so Kenner succeeded in getting the Yoda action figure to market for the 1980 holiday season. What other Yoda-related products did they serve up to a Yoda-starved public?

None.

Where Yoda toys were concerned, the action figure was the only game in town. Additional Yoda toys wouldn't hit until 1981.

I think it's fair to speculate that Kenner was probably a little surprised by the popularity of Yoda. As I wrote a few weeks ago, The Empire Strikes Back was far from a guaranteed success. And within this still-speculative blockbuster, Yoda was just a single character. An unknown character, too -- a speculative character in a speculative blockbuster. Kenner had no way of knowing that Yoda would turn out to be, well, Yoda.

So in 1980 Kenner had to get to work. The mission: bring more Yoda stuff to market.

They succeeded: 1981 saw the release (or near-release) of several toys with a Yoda focus. I'm only going to deal with three of them here: the Yoda Hand Puppet, Yoda, the Jedi Master, and the notorious Talking Yoda.

Let's start with the Hand Puppet.

Judging by the number of Yoda Hand Puppets out there in loose collections, Kenner sold a lot of them. And it's easy to understand why: It was attractive, nicely sculpted, and large. In fact, it was so large that some collectors treat it as a de facto part of the large-size figure range.

Sculpting aside, the product's killer app was its flexibility. Because it was made of vinyl, a child could use his hand to bend it into a variety of poses. And by "variety" I mean exactly three poses -- the three you see highlighted in the above advertisement.

The toy has an interesting history. It appears to have started out as a product that combined a sewn cloth body with a vinyl head. A child whose hand was inserted into the body would be capable of manipulating the flexible vinyl mouth.

We know this because, around 20 years ago, the above prototype surfaced bearing a tag identifying it as a puppet.

The date on this quote sample is April of 1980.

Prior to that discovery, prototypes of this kind were thought to be early versions of the Talking Yoda toy, to be discussed a little later in this piece. It was quite a surprise when one turned up clearly labelled as a puppet.

Why the change to an all-vinyl Yoda Hand Puppet?

Short with his creation, circa 1981 (Used with the permission of Robert Short)

Evidence suggests that Kenner committed to the vinyl puppet, and abandoned the cloth version of the product, when Empire producer Gary Kurtz brought an all-latex prototype to the company. The prototype had been created by Lucasfilm employee Robert Short, who was at that time working on costumes and playing the part of C-3PO in television commercials.

The prototype as it appeared in 2014 (Used with the permission of Robert Short)

According to the details posted by Short on Facebook in 2014, he created the prototype "on a whim," Kurtz took note of it, and presented it to Kenner -- a very unusual series of events!

The puppet prototype as featured in an Australian advertisement.

Prior to Short's Facebook revelation, the prototype puppet was known only through a limited number of appearances in advertising materials. I would've bet good money that it had disintegrated or been thrown out years ago!

Yoda Hand Puppet at Toy Fair 1981.

When you think about it, Kenner's decision to abandon a multi-part product in favor of one that was comprised of an integrated sheath of vinyl made a lot of sense. Whereas the former necessitated a complicated production process, the latter could be pulled quickly out of molds such as the one seen here. Painting and hair rooting were the only secondary processes necessary to generate a finished product.

An unfinished example of the early puppet head.

And let's be honest: the cloth prototypes of the Puppet just plain looked weird. That head says "blowup doll" rather than "Jedi Master."

There's no mistaking the second Yoda figural product released in 1981 for anything but a Jedi Master -- it was even called Yoda, the Jedi Master.

For all intents and purposes it was a rip-off of the Magic 8-Ball toy, which had been providing children with bogus prophecies since 1950.

Believe it or not, Kenner's engineers reportedly had a huge amount of trouble getting the plastic die inside the product's liquid-filled cavity to function correctly. It was apparently a lot harder than you'd think to ensure that, when shaken, one of its sides would emerge flush against the clear plastic embedded in the toy's base.

Although the finished product boasted a very nice -- and very child-friendly -- sculpt, the early prototypes were rather crude. Above you see the product as it was featured in the 1981 catalog produced by the Australian Toltoys company. I know sculptors in kindergarten who would be ashamed of that.

At least one of these conceptual prototypes has surfaced over the years, though it wasn't painted.

Yoda, the Jedi Master featured in a November 1981 advertisement.

My general sense, based on familiarity with the collector market, is that the Yoda Hand Puppet sold well while Yoda, the Jedi Master did not. The former product is common while the latter is more scarce than you might think. Regardless, both were out of Kenner's product line come 1982.

That's a better run than the one enjoyed by the final product we'll be discussing. That product never made it into any Kenner product line.

I refer, of course, to Talking Yoda, one of the most famous of Kenner's unreleased Star Wars products.

This example lacks hair and has replica hands.

I think it's indisputable that, had it been released, Talking Yoda would have been the best Yoda toy available during the vintage years. It was large, it was cute, and it talked. The talking was accomplished with a traditional pull-string mechanism sewn into the toy's cloth body. It was designed to say eight phrases.

The pull-string Talking Yoda seems to have developed out of a concept that involved audio tapes and read-along stories. The idea was probably derived from Mego's 2-XL, then a popular product.

So why wasn't it made? We don't know for sure, but I think it's reasonable to assume that cost was a major factor in its cancellation. All things considered, the Yoda Hand Puppet and Yoda, the Jedi Master were fairly cheap to produce, and Talking Yoda wasn't. Ultimately, the better (but more expensive) toy was axed.

I had originally thought that Talking Yoda evolved into Yoda, the Jedi Master. After all, the latter toy sort of talks, though it does so via the die floating in its liquid innards rather than through speech.

You can almost understand how, through the quasi-Darwinian agency of cost-cutting, a pull-string talking doll might develop into a figure that provides mute fortunes.

But the above photo proved to me that all three of the 1981 Yoda toys were planned for a concurrent release. The photo clearly shows the Yoda Hand Puppet, Talking Yoda, and Yoda, the Jedi Master displayed within inches of each other on a plan-o-gram setup.

I don't think this shot, which shows some prototype displays as well as a never-released ESB version of Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, derives from Toy Fair. It doesn't match known Toy Fair setups from 1981. Also, as far as I know, Talking Yoda wasn't shown at Toy Fair in 1981. It's more likely that it shows either a setup done internally within Kenner or some other industry show.

Well, I hope this article has eased your mind and convinced you that you aren't the first person to eagerly await the arrival of Yoda toys. Take deep breaths and focus. You have only a few months to wait for Baby Yoda. In the meantime, go play with a porg.

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*As all real Star Wars fans know, the proper name is Baby Yoda, and anyone who calls it The Child is obviously far too willing to subscribe to fake news and conspiracy theories.