This month’s item from the Imperial Archives features the story of a vintage Star Wars Kenner toy that never was, but this prototype of an unproduced rifle shows it was apparently considered for release in 1980.
This toy is a hardcopy, meaning it was hand-cast from a silicone mold using a two-part urethane (unlike production toys which are made from steel molds using injected plastic). It’s hand-painted, with a hand-applied photographic logo sticker, and it includes bespoke electronic components. Pulling the rear trigger activates a motor, creating a whining sound effect and lighting up a kaleidoscope contained in the gun’s sight. Squeezing the front trigger mechanically alters the kaleidoscopic view and decreases the motor’s speed, changing the pitch of the sound effect.
Before this item turned up, about two decades after it was made, Star Wars toy collectors didn’t know it existed. Kenner had never solicited the toy for sale, so it never appeared in a catalog or on a product list; there were no known photos of it, and no Kenner employee had been known to mention it. It doesn’t look much like any weapon in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back; the only indication that it has anything at all to do with Star Wars is the paper Empire label hand-glued to the toy.
When we bought it, the primary reason we had to believe that it was really an unproduced Star Wars toy prototype was the excellent reputation of the seller, The Earth Collectible Toy Mall in Cincinnati. As that city was the longtime home of Kenner, a stunning number of prototype toys had come to The Earth from Kenner employees over the years, so we believed that this probably was a real Star Wars toy, but we nevertheless wished we had some hard evidence.
A couple years later, Lisa was looking through an auction lot of items being sold by someone whose father had worked on the Star Wars line at Kenner. The lot consisted largely of paperwork, though Lisa was drawn to a set of photographs that wouldn’t have attracted the attention of virtually anyone else:
These photographs show the wood pattern for our mysterious gun. A wood pattern is essentially the original sculpt of a toy—a one-of-a-kind piece of original art that would then be duplicated to create the finished toy. In this case, the wood pattern would have been used to create the silicone molds that were then used to create our hardcopy. Sadly, the person who sold us the photos didn’t have the pattern, but at least we now had independent evidence connecting this rifle to Kenner’s Star Wars line.
But the best was yet to come. A while after that, we had the opportunity to purchase some artwork from former Kenner designer Steve Hodges, and among the pieces he had were these drawings from August 1978:
While none of the drawings that Steve had saved precisely match our rifle, their design style unmistakably matches that of our gun, so we asked Steve about it. He recalled that Kenner was contemplating a follow-up to their Laser Pistol (based on Han Solo’s blaster) and Laser Rifle (based on the standard-issue Stormtrooper weapon), but lacking solid reference for any other movie guns, they asked Steve to come up with a handful of original designs. And it appears that a year or two later, one such design made it all the way to hardcopy stage before being cancelled. Perhaps Lucasfilm balked at the non-movie design, or perhaps cost analysis or some other internal factor killed the project—we likely will never know, unless some bit of paperwork happens to turn up someday—but at least we have this evidence of a vintage Kenner Star Wars toy that never was.