I have never been a comic book guy, neither as a kid nor as an adult. I can easily count on one hand all my childhood memories involving comic books. My great Grandma Brown had a small stack of them in her living room that I used to flip through each time we visited. One time, at a garage sale, my mom bought me a stack of horror-themed comic books. My dad had a collection of Star Wars comic books that he kept in his bedroom. That’s pretty much it. Many years ago, my dad bequeathed his collection of Star… (read more)

The first electronic version of Chess I ever saw was Video Chess, released for the Atari 2600 in 1979. It still amazes me that the code to Video Chess program was 4 kilobytes in size — that’s less characters than this post contains, and that includes all the graphics and eight difficulty levels contained within the cartridge. On the easiest setting, the console was limited to ten seconds of thinking between moves. On the most difficult level, the Atari could spend up to ten hours between moves. You could almost smell the smoke at that point. As computers began invading… (read more)

I don’t own many autographed items. I have one Atari 2600 cartridge signed by the programmer (Yars’ Revenge, by Howard Scott Warshaw), a show brochure I had autographed by David Copperfield in the mid-1980s, and three books signed by their respective authors: hacker Kevin Mitnick, magicians Penn and Teller, and my writing professor, Deborah Chester. The only other autographs that I have belong to people who appeared in Star Wars films. I have five action figures autographed by the people who played them in the films: David Prowse (Darth Vader), Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Anthony Daniels (C-3P0),… (read more)

Every time the word “Commodore” appears on my local Craigslist, I receive an email alert. Sometimes the alerts link to people selling cars or boats, but most of the time, it’s the computer. I received one such alert last Friday night, informing me about a computer for sale at a garage sale. I need another Commodore 64 like I need a hole in the head, and the one pictured in the ad looked pretty sad (incomplete and with a few mismatched parts), but where there’s smoke, as they say, there’s often fire. Sometimes literally. I didn’t make it down to… (read more)

I have lots and lots of books in my Star Wars collection, both fiction and non-fiction for young and adult readers alike. Star Wars: The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot was published by Random House in 1979. I remember checking his book out from our school’s library. This copy also came from a school library, although not my school. Unsurprisingly the story begins with Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca and R2-D2 playing Planetary Poker, and C-3P0 running around like a maniac. First it’s R2-D2 that begins acting rebellious, although soon many of the droids, robots and machines down… (read more)

Happy Star Wars Day, everyone — May the Fourth Be With You! I’m pretty sure I stated that my 1977 Bradley Watch was the first Star Wars thing I ever owned. If it was, this was a close second. The Star Wars Storybook was a Scholastic Book that I purchased through my school’s book club when I was in kindergarten. The school didn’t traditionally bring the Scholastic handouts to kindergartners because most of them couldn’t read, but I could, and someone must have provided me with one. On the first page, readers are treated to a “who’s who” of the… (read more)

During the late 70s, there was no such thing as “rarity” when it came to Kenner action figures on the shelves. By 1978, Kenner was manufacturing 3 3/4″ action figures just as quickly as they could. If Walmart didn’t have the figure you were looking for, chances were Service Merchandise, TG&Y, or some other local retailer did. Despite that, there were rarities, or at least figures that not everybody had. Most of these were figures that came bundled with playsets. The Blue Snaggletooth (included in the early Cantina playset) is the most well-known early rarity, but another one that few… (read more)