Occasionally I’ll go off on a tangent and start collecting some random sub-collection of Star Wars “things.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when I began collecting Star Wars masks and helmets.

Like most kids, my early Star Wars Halloween costumes consisted of cheap or homemade (or both) costumes combined with plastic masks from the store. I think the year I went as Chewbacca was the only time I ever went as a “good guy” — most of them time, I preferred the Empire. I remember loving this Stormtrooper costume my mom put together for me to death.

Around the time I was in third grade, an uncle of mine gifted me a plastic Darth Vader helmet. It was the kind that came apart in two pieces — one that covered the front half of your face and the helmet part that covered the top and back of your head. The top was held on by a strip of Velcro. Other than the fact that someone had poked out the eye lenses before I got it, the mask was in pretty good shape. I wore it around the house from time to time with sunglasses on under the helmet to hide my eyes. I had a stand for it and eventually I found a couple of rubber eyeballs that I stuffed into its eye sockets. They bulged out and made Vader look like he had been eternally kicked in the nads.

In the late 90s I began purchasing Don Post masks, the cheap ones. Over the span of a few months I had a Biker Scout, Boba Fett, and this Stormtrooper helmet. When The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, I began buying latex masks to go with the helmets. I filled empty three-liter bottles up with water and hung the masks and helmets on top of them. By 2002, this is what my collection looked like:

These masks and helmets looked good out of the box, but weren’t designed to last long (or for rough play). The kids dropped and broke the Biker Scout and Pod Racing helmets. I stored all of the latex masks in my closet on summer and every one of them melted together, looking like the last scene from The Fly. Of all the masks in that picture, the only ones I have left are my Boba Fett helmet, the C-3P0 one (which, despite it’s claims of “one size fits all,” doesn’t), and two Stormtrooper masks, both of which have pretty large cracks in them.

And for some reason, one of them has the eye lenses poked out. Full circle.