I’m not entirely sure how to go about this, as, to me, this is a topic worthy of its own Netflix series and not a hastily written article from a minor player in the drama. So I’ll simply discuss the Star Wars Collectors Archive in regards to my favorite topic: me.
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas there was an age undreamed of. When the earth was young and monstrous beasts yet roamed its arid hills, searching for deals on pop culture collectibles. And it was in that primordial soup of gods and monsters, sometime in 1994 or 1995, that I first discovered the SWCA. Back in those days the web was new and America was just learning the horrors of hyperlinks, thanks to Sandra Bullock’s documentary The Net. And the SWCA was birthed into the world, like the protagonist of its own Hero’s Journey tale.
(Cue Goodfellas flashback, complete with period music and a nostalgic camera filter. The part of 12-year-old Tommy will be played by Elijah Wood, circa TheGood Son, but in nerd glasses.)
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a collector. At that time I had only been collecting Star Wars for a year or two, having recently gone to a flea market and found a bootleg VHS copy of the Trilogy, taped off of HBO onto three different cassettes. (Oh, we were class in the '90s, let me tell you. And, to me, you haven’t really watched ANH unless it was followed immediately by a blurry taped-off-TV version of D.C. Cab recorded over the end credits.) As it turned out, the next weekend there was, of all things, a Beatles convention in town, and my cousin dragged me along with her to check it out -- and the place was packed with vintage Star Wars, for some reason. And I was hooked. (On SW collecting, not the Beatles. The Beatles are overrated, and I blame them for my habit of humming "Love Me Do" whenever I so much as think of the ESB Dagobah playset, because at that convention 29 years ago, I was talking with the dealer about the Dagobah set he had, and the song was apparently the only one the Beatles tribute band at the event knew, as they played it several times in a row while I was shopping, forever associating the playset with the song in my head.)
Where was I before I got distracted by that pointless memory and an unnecessarily long run-on sentence? Oh, yeah...
Sometime later, I was exploring that new internet thing that everyone was talking about (it’s a fad, it’ll never last), pushing Netscape Navigator to its limits (so much better than Prodigy, let me tell you). Back in the '90s, if you searched Star Wars toys online, you got very few hits. There were some conversations on Usenet (a topic for another day), and... that’s about it. Maybe some Action Masters things? Star Tours souvenirs? Micro Machines? Literally, aside from the collecting newsgroups, there wasn’t much else to see. This was the Dark Times, and Star Wars was at its lowest point... well, before Rian Johnson arrived, anyway. IIRC, at the time I was looking at... I want to say custom toys, for some reason? I don’t collect or make those and never have, but for some reason that’s what I was looking at.
And that’s how I found the SWCA.
Now, back in the days when “social media” meant an overly gregarious reporter and we all rode dinosaurs to school, the SWCA looked different. It still had all those little frames and link boxes leading to each individual category of collectible. And given that my connection speed at the time was somewhere around the speed of ancient Persian scribes recording it all in cuneiform onto clay tablets, that meant it took a long time to load. And if you wanted to visit a site, it was best to click the link and then go see a movie or something, as it would take at least that long to fully load a single image -- which had the resolution of a Polaroid as seen through wax paper. Still, somehow, I’d found the customs section. So I checked that out for a while, and then continued my search for other things on Netscape Navigator’s then revolutionary “search” feature. (Seriously, the internet used to be so small yet baffling that you could go to the grocery store and buy phonebook-like directories filled with web addresses to random sites, because everything was basically the dark web at the time, and it all had “.edu” address suffix. If you were overcome with the sudden desire for a Cheech & Chong fan page, you needed that specific address. And, yes, that was printed in the phonebook of web addresses I had, although there was only one Star Wars fan page listed and the site was “forbidden” if you actually typed the address into your browser. At the time that warning made me think the cops would show up at any moment to arrest me for visiting the site and my parents and grandparents would weep as I was dragged from my home by the internet police.)
Anyway, I had just read Steve Sansweet’s From Concept to Screen to Collectible. (If you haven’t read that yet, go do it right now! No, I’m serious, you need to read it. The rest of us will wait right here for you to finish and then we’ll continue the article. Okay, you back now? Told you it was amazing, right? Now we can go on since you’ve finally done the required reading.) And I was like, “Hey... let’s look for some prototypes online.” I was previously aware of prototypes thanks to some unproduced figures from Toy Biz’s X-Men line I knew about, so I was interested in the topic. And lo and behold... the SWCA also had those. (Star Wars prototypes, not Toy Biz, obviously. Although it’d be cool if they did have those, and technically, both franchises do belong to Disney now.) In fact, the SWCA had images of prototypes which were mentioned in From Concept to Screen to Collectible, but not shown. And my mind was blown. Like, to the point I made this the topic of conversation with everyone I knew, despite the fact that no one cared. (This is a common habit with me. See: this article.) I spent that entire night looking through the listings in the preproduction sections, absorbing it all.
I had found where my collecting journey was headed. And my life was changed as a result.
Since this was a new technology (to me, at least) I did the only logical thing: I printed out most of the site on a canon printer -- in color; no more B&W dot matrix printers for me, thanks, we’re in 1995 and this is the future -- and happily organized it all into binders. And I studied that multivolume tome religiously. I added new pages to my files as the site was updated, and after each, I carefully catalogued any of those “email” things that people were using (what a time to be alive, right?) which related to the pieces. I made the site my computer’s homepage (despite the fact it was technically my parent’s computer, but whatever). I started to recognize the names of the SWCA’s editors in the newsgroups in which I was lurking. And I spent a few years watching quietly from the shadows as the site and hobby grew bigger than I could have imagined. I wasn't stalking; it was completely innocent -- somewhere between Kathy Bates in Misery and that reporter on The Incredible Hulk who collected stories about the Hulk and followed him around the country. Soon, when you searched “Star Wars toys” online, the new Hasbro toys started to crowd the results, and the SWCA was one of the first places I can remember seeing images of some of those new figures as well. [I'm pretty sure we were the first site to have them. -- Ed.]
In 2000, the SWCA began the Collector Connection, a forum for collectors. So, I started posting there, and it was the home for the hobby's discussion for the briefest of moments... before everyone went back to the newsgroups. [We didn't have the money to pay for pro forum software, and the free service we were using became swamped with ads, so we left it for dead. -- Ed.] There was also a chat room on the site, and most nights you could go in there and chat with the same dozen or so collectors, complaining about the prequels, the latest scammer in the hobby, and how the upcoming Lord of the Rings films were likely to be terrible. I spent so much time in there that friends in the real world noticed that both my typing speed and ability to quickly think up sarcastic quips and pointless pop culture references increased exponentially. And then there was that time the site got shutdown by Toys 'R' Us because the SWCA’s address was toysrgus.com, and TRU thought that infringed on their copyright. That was quite the event, although as it turned out... we’re still here and they aren’t. Just sayin’.
Then a few years after that, I was named an editor of the site. Which to me is about the biggest honor you can receive in this hobby. And I genuinely mean that, whether or not I personally was worthy of it. [He was. -- Ed.]
So, thank you, SWCA, for helping to make me the collector I am today... and for teaching me how to use FTP.
Seriously, I got added to the staff here, and was clicking around in the site's source files, and I wrote John Alvarez an email, and I was like, “I don’t get it, I keep clicking on stuff and nothing seems to happen? Am I supposed to like... I don’t know, try to change things or delete them there and then re-upload a new version?” And two seconds later I got a phone call from John, and without even saying hello, he was like, “Whatever you’re doing right now, STOP! For the love of God, DON’T CLICK OR DELETE ANYTHING! Why are you clicking things in our files if you don’t know what will happen!?! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU!?!" (string of expletives deleted).
But you know what? I learned. Mostly I learned to fear FTP. And John’s phone calls.
But I learned.
I feel like, through the years, the SWCA has tried to represent the best in this hobby: its ethics, its awesome contributors, and its focus on knowledge. It has provided me hundreds of free hours of entertainment. It was basically a college-level course which taught me how to collect what I wanted to collect and showed me dozens of other collecting avenues I could choose to pursue. Like a virtual museum, it showed me pieces I’d otherwise never get the opportunity to see. It introduced me to hundreds of other collectors around the world, many of whom I’m lucky enough to count as great friends (and honorary family members) to this day. To put it bluntly: this site changed my life.
The SWCA is, quite simply, the best thing I ever found on Netscape Navigator. And the hour it took me to load the page in 1995 was well worth it.
So here’s to thirty years, SWCA! And to all the years to come.
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