Ron writes:
This article was written for It Came From the Loft, the fanzine of our friends at the Vintage Rebellion podcast. Check out their publications for more great content focused on vintage Star Wars collecting.
Part I: Corrupted Transmission
Above you see an ad for Kenner action figures and related toys. It ran on behalf of the retailer Mervyn's. Year: 1981.
If you're wondering why it depicts a character who has a suppository for a head, fear not: you surely aren't the first. Thousands of kids likely saw the ad and wondered something similar. I mean, it's not like Kenner shied away from releasing figures of characters scarcely seen in the movies. Maybe this guy represented some powerful yet obscure alien race, one unashamed of the stigma attached to carrying a murse?
But of course it was no such thing: it was actually everyone's favorite killer robot, IG-88.
Obviously, the artist who drew the ad translated the figure into a simplified form that belied its hard mechanical details. That's what happens when human vagary intrudes upon an otherwise mechanical process. You get interpretations, translations, inventions.
It's kind of like the Telephone Game: One kid whispers a message to the next kid, and the message moves on down the line, until, by the time it gets to the last kid it's just a lot of nonsense, like the plot of Ahsoka.
By the way, did you know that in the UK the Telephone Game is known as Chinese Whispers? I mean, it sounds more poetic than "Careless Whisper." George Michael should have gone with that instead.
In summary, humans have a tendency to corrupt information through the process of transmission. It's just one of those things we do.
It was partially to counteract this tendency that Kenner issued press photos like the one seen above, which shows IG-88 in all his photo-accurate glory. These photos could be reproduced in print media, thereby ensuring that Kenner's products looked exactly as the company intended.
Alas, though the technology to reproduce photos in newspapers existed in the '70s and '80s, it was infrequently done in advertising. Expense was likely one factor limiting the use of photography; another was surely the difficulty of rendering detail in small halftone images. Remember, most newspaper ads were quite small; even if they took up an entire page, the products depicted in them often measured less than an inch in length.
This 1979 ad from JC Penney is a good example of a photographic ad that just didn't work out. The images are so washed out that, when prepping them for reproduction, someone went over them with black marker to ensure they'd be legible when printed in the paper.
So, when it came to newspaper advertising, photos were problematic. If you were a retailer advertising toys, it was best to avoid photos.
Line drawings were a much better starting point for newspaper images. A crisp line rendering is easy to reproduce; it's also capable of effectively communicating the idea of even the smallest of details.
By the way, keep the above two ads in mind. We'll return to them later.
Part II: Accuracy Through Standardization
Earlier I mentioned that Kenner provided photos to retailers and publishers who desired to feature the company's products in print, whether for the purpose of advertising or news reporting. Well, they did something similar in the realm of line art. Not via single sheets, but rather via entire honking compendiums filled with line-art reproductions.
Above you see the covers of Kenner's line-art compendiums spanning the years of the company's involvement with the Star Wars license, 1978 to 1986. As you've no doubt gleaned from the photo, they were called Repro Art Books, because they provided art that users of the book could reproduce.
Repro. . . Art. Get it?
These days, finding an intact Kenner Repro Art Book is pretty difficult, and obtaining the entire set of nine is just about impossible. But if you do decide to head down that road, be advised that the books corresponding to 1983 and 1984 are significantly smaller than their counterparts, as is illustrated by the above photo.
Inside the covers of the Repro Art Books were page upon page of line renderings, all approved by Kenner, and printed on a single side to enable easy clipping. Retailers wishing to assemble an ad could clip out the graphical and textual elements, assemble them to their liking on a sheet of paper using paste or some other adhesive, and submit their handiwork to the local newspaper for reproduction.
With the repro art page available as a reference, I think the source of the figures in our Children's Palace ad becomes pretty obvious.
Ditto the Jedi figures in our other ad (which is from the retailer Harts).
In fact, all of the images of Kenner products featured in the Children's Palace and Harts ads derive from repro art -- the X-Wing, Land Speeder, Falcon, etc. The non-Kenner products, like the lunchbox, surely derive from repro art provided by the producers of those products -- in the case of the lunchbox, King Seeley.
Star Wars first appeared in a Repro Art Book in 1978, the year in which the first 12 action figures debuted.
But the earliest pieces of Star Wars repro art released by Kenner are surely the individual sheets, or "slicks," that you see above.
Corresponding to the first official catalog of Star Wars product that Kenner made available to retailers in 1977, the slicks represented the following products: the Early Bird Certificate Package, Escape from Death Star Game, Playnts, Dip Dots, and the first series of puzzles. As discussed here, these were the only Star Wars products released by Kenner in 1977.
You can see the influence of these slicks in the above ad, from Copps. The Kenner and Star Wars logos, product title, and imagery are all drawn directly from the slick representing the Certificate Package.
The descriptive text, however, must have been interpolated by someone at Copps, as it differs from the text on the slick. And of course it contains an error. Specifically, the ad copy refers to the four figures as "possible" rather than "posable," thereby implying that you might actually not get four figures.
Like, maybe you'd get just one figure plus that crummy sticker sheet.
Now maybe you understand why Kenner wanted to take this sh*t out of the hands of retailers!
By the way, I wrote about the Early Bird repro art slick, and speculated about its inclusion in an introductory packet tied to the Certificate Package, here. Check it out if you're interested in learning more.
I'm not going to delve into the contents of each Repro Art Book. This article is merely an overview of the topic. But I think the 1978 issue deserves special mention.
For one thing, it's the only Repro Art Book containing Star Wars content to feature photographic as well as line-art reproductions of Kenner products. It's due to this that the '78 book contains considerably more pages than its successors.
This resulted in some great content, like the page you see above, which shows the original conceptual models for the Chewbacca and Darth Vader large-size action figures. Famously, the Chewbacca was a modified example of the Bionic Bigfoot figure from Kenner's line based on the Six Million Dollar Man.
As you'd expect, the line art representing these products also depicted the conceptual models.
Another interesting inclusion in the '78 Repro Art Book is this page, which contains what is likely one of the earliest group photos of the first 12 action figures (the original plan was to launch the line with a mere nine figures). Note that the description of the Jawa mentions that it came with a "molded cape and hood," whereas all of the other figures featuring vinyl capes are advertised as including a "removable cape." It's likely that the confusing language concerning the Jawa is a relic of the figure's original design, which included no cape at all, vinyl or cloth. The character's robe and hood were intended to be represented by the molded parts of the figure itself.
And, yes, those are proof cards you see lying below the Stormtrooper 12-back in the photo on the right side of the page.
Speaking of interesting inclusions, the 1979 Repro Art Book contained line art based on the early conceptual model of the Boba Fett large-size action figure. At the time the model was created, the product was planned to incorporate a host of features, including electronics.
The depiction of prototypes in Repro Art Books mostly ceased in later years, though occasionally an interesting item made an appearance. For example, see the unproduced coloring book mentioned here. Additionally, line-art representations of several never-released Droids and Ewoks products appeared in the 1985 Repro Art Book, but, then, they also appeared in Kenner's retailer catalog of that year. So that's not really surprising.
As we close out this section, it should be noted that Kenner sources of repro art weren't limited to the Repro Art Books: As Kenner did in 1977, they occasionally issued collections of repro art pages, or "ad slicks," to retailers in combination with specialized promotions.
For example, see the rebate promotion that I wrote about here.
Above you see an additional example. As the envelope makes clear, these unbound slicks were provided to retailers in the spring of 1983. As far as I can tell, updated assortment numbers aside, they're identical to those in the 1983 Repro Art Book.
Also apparently authorized by Kenner were compendiums like this. Published by Kwikee Systems, the volume includes Star Wars repro art that is identical to that included in Kenner's 1985 Repro Art Book, along with repro art representing the products of several other companies. It's unknown how many of these Kwikee volumes contain Kenner repro art.
By the way, Kwikee appears to continue to operate as a third-party supplier of "up-to-date, manufacturer-approved product images and data." Now, of course, you download the images rather than clip them out of a book.
How does it feel to be living in the future?
Part III: Fringe Benefits
We've mostly focused on newspaper advertising, because, well, that was the whole point of repro art: It was art specifically designed to read well when printed in a newspaper.
But repro art was used on other items during the vintage era, and this wouldn't be a comprehensive review of the topic unless we covered some of them.
One such item is the above shopping bag. It was issued by Circus World, a toy store that was typically located in malls. Clearly, someone at the store made good use of Kenner's 1980 Repro Art Book when designing the Empire Strikes Back side of the bag. Circus World seems to have used repro art to produce a series of these bags in the early '80s. I own another example that focuses on the Atari 2600 gaming system.
You may ask yourself: What is a more unlikely platform for toy advertising than a shopping bag?
Do paper movie-theater cups qualify?
As friend and Archive blogger Jonathan McElwain reminded me, Coca-Cola's 1985 theater promotion, which had a Kenner tie-in, utilized repro art in its depictions of Power of the Force action figures, then newly released. The figures were visible in the upper reaches of the cups, right below their rims. The depiction of a space battle occupying the central portion of the cups, however, wasn't drawn from repro art; rather, it appears to have been rudely reworked from of one of Kenner's 1984 store displays.
Repro art even turned up on a few pieces of vintage packaging, as the above box, for Kenner's Jabba the Hutt Action Playset, demonstrates. Often described as a catalog mailer, the actual use of these boxes remains somewhat obscure. I don't think I've ever seen one with a number indicating that it came from the catalog division of Sears, JC Penney, or a similar retailer.
One item that was definitely available through catalog retailer was the above action figure multi-pack. Three different catalog mailers bearing line art are known to have been produced, all by Sears in 1980. (See here for another example.) Let's face it: the boxes of the catalog mailer packs tended to pretty bland. So the repro art decorating these Sears mailer packs, rudimentary though it is, comes off as pretty sexy when considered in context!
And of course there were the blister cards that Kenner's Mexican sublicensee Lili Ledy used to package Return of the Jedi action figures. As a sublicensee, Lili Ledy surely had access to official Kenner photography. But the use of repro art allowed them to cut costs by eschewing photographic reproductions on the reverse of their cards.
Part IV: Nonstandardization and its Advantages
The intent of repro art was standardization. By standardizing the imagery used by advertisers, Kenner hoped to eliminate inaccuracies and thereby ensure a consistent idea of their products in the great collective mind of the public.
But standardization is inherently limiting. It's meant to be limiting. And as someone who enjoys the infinite wonkiness of human expression, I can't help but find the limits imposed by repro art a little depressing. After all, prefabrication often isn't very aesthetically or culturally inspiring.
With that sentiment in mind, I've assembled the above collage of ads with the intent of demonstrating the joys of nonstandardization. The images in these ads, drawn by people unbeholden to Kenner or any other authority other than perhaps the retailer who paid for them, are to my mind more interesting, and more redolent of the era to which they belong, than their more official-looking counterparts.
But, then, collectors aren't concerned with selling a commercial product. We don't necessarily care about accuracy. Our interests are naturally more sympathetic to the novelty the Repro Art Books were intended to thwart.
Thanks to Chris Georgoulias for providing photos of a couple of Repro Art Books, to Mike Press for providing the scans of the 1977 ad slicks, and to Jonathan McElwain for providing the photo of the Coca-Cola cups (and for reminding me that they utilized repro art).
