Let’s discuss what went into renewing the power of the Force. You see, Kenner had a sweet deal. In 1977, they negotiated a license with Lucasfilm to make Star Wars toys for a $100,000 advance and an ongoing 5% royalty. All they had to do to keep that deal alive—forever—was to pay Lucasfilm $10,000 per year. That was no problem at all for the first few years, as Kenner shipped over 300 million Star Wars products between 1977 and 1985. After Tonka purchased Kenner in 1987, even though they were no longer making Star Wars toys, and there were no new Star Wars movies on the horizon, Tonka believed it was still worthwhile to send Lucasfilm enough money every year to keep the contract going.
But in 1991, Hasbro purchased Tonka, and—whether by intent or accident—didn’t make the required payment, so their contract with Lucasfilm expired. And in 1992, George Lucas started letting people know that he was working on Star Wars movies again. Of course, Hasbro was interested in making the toys, but now they had to compete against other toy companies for a new license, and that meant they had to show Lucasfilm what they could do.
These kit-bashed toys, currently residing in the Imperial Archives, were made as part of Hasbro’s 1993 license pitch to Lucasfilm. They didn’t represent items that they necessarily planned to release; rather, the point was to show the types of toys they could possibly make.
This Endor display is housed in a styrene plastic frame, with two background images mounted on foam core: a Ralph McQuarrie painting behind the Ewok treehouse, and a Return of the Jedi movie still behind the Imperial bunker.
The treehouse is a heavily modified and repainted 1983 Kenner Ewok Village toy taken from Kenner’s own in-house toy museum; it was cut apart and augmented with handmade styrene elements as well as sticks, plastic plants, and bits of twine. Hasbro kept the elevator and capture net features of the vintage toy and added a new log thrower and a levitation effect for C-3PO’s chair. One of the vintage Ewok figures has been given a spring-loaded crossbow.
The Endor bunker is made largely of styrene, and it includes spring-loaded doors—both inner and outer pairs, just like the movie—and an “exploding” door control.
The AT-AT is a repainted vintage toy, again taken from the Kenner museum; there are a few hand-crafted improvements, most visibly the side guns. The troop loading platform is almost entirely hand-crafted from styrene, and it features a working elevator. Like the previous toys, these were originally presented with a foam core background image, but that’s not known to have survived.
Thanks in part to the presentation that featured these items, Hasbro was able to secure the license, signing a new deal on May 1, 1993. The terms were far less favorable for them this time around: their royalty rate was now 18%, meaning Hasbro’s failure to send Lucas a $10,000 check ended up costing them an additional 13 cents out of every dollar they made under this new contract and its subsequent extensions and additions—to date, that’s on tens of billions of dollars of Hasbro Star Wars toys.