The gap is mostly cardboard.
In Turkey, around 1988, a Hoth snowtrooper came out of the mould blue. Loud blue, with silver-grey trim laid on past its edges by a hand working at speed. SB Products called it Blue Stars. In September 2020, a carded example took $19,211.70 at Hake’s, buyer’s premium included. The figure is four inches of blue plastic. Most of the value is cardboard.
Roughly the price of a steel chronograph, paid for a figure made for a market-stall economy that never got the licensed version. A strange thing to defend. I intend to defend it.
Image / distance
What the copy records.
A bootleg records how far an image travelled and what it lost. A film, a smuggled tape, a sculptor with no sample to hold, whatever pigment the factory had that week. Hong Kong had already built the manufacturing capacity: about 1,100 toy factories and 40,000 workers by 1970, and the world export lead by 1972. Contract production for Western toy companies had made the tooling and techniques portable. The tooling that makes an authorised figure can make an unauthorised one on the night shift, or five years after the contract lapses.
Sources 06
Mould / economy
Tool steel costs more than fiction.
Polish collectors have reconstructed at least eight vintage series. The first generation runs to twenty characters on one generic card showing a Y-wing and an explosion; one carries the stamp of a Gdynia cooperative and a price of 140 złoty. Sixteen of the twenty share limbs lifted from the Biker Scout. Heroes, droids and aliens turn out to be cousins, because tool steel costs more than fiction does. Jakub Burzyński and his collaborators catalogued around 1,200 of these for a book called Far Far Away. There are no factory records. There rarely are, for things made for children.
Sixteen of the twenty share limbs lifted from the Biker Scout. Tool steel costs more than fiction does.
Copy / material
The copy changes material.
Elsewhere the copy changes material entirely. Propstore catalogued a mid-eighties Brazilian series attributed to Model Trem whose 2-1B is 14 centimetres of cast metal, cold and heavy in a way the character never was; the one they sold had a Kenner leg fitted by someone who wanted it whole. In Argentina, Plásticos Pedro Luca built its astronauts on the Fisher-Price Adventure People body and gave them heads that gesture at Bossk, at Han Solo, at Luke, at nobody much, then sold them as Robot General. A generic name is cheaper than a licence, and it frees the object. Robot General is Darth Vader described down a telephone line to someone who has never seen the film.
Polymer / time
The blister is eating it.
Any watch reader knows the next part. We pay for tropical dials and faded inserts because time did something unrepeatable to them, and we call it romance when it is chemistry. Same here, with worse chemistry. A recent study of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs collection found objects made from the 1960s to the early 1990s among its most vulnerable plastics: PVC yellowing, plasticiser creeping to the surface, polyurethane going tacky. The Canadian Conservation Institute is blunt about what migrating additives and sticky surfaces can do to adjacent material. But the blister that makes Blue Stars worth twenty thousand dollars is also the thing eating it.
Don’t clean it. Don’t tape it.
If an object is actively tacky, cracking or staining its card, isolate it from pressure and seek a plastics conservator; treatment depends on the polymer and condition.
Card / theatre
A calculator. A heap of gourds.
Uzay’s cards are a genre of their own: an Imperial Gunner posed beside a pocket calculator, a Chewbacca in a heap of gourds. The best object in the field is theirs too. Head Man, a Royal Guard head on an AT-ST Driver body, issued with spear and shield, a character assembled from somebody else’s parts and given a job.
Scarcity / accident
The hierarchy flips.
The licensed figure survived because people looked after it. The copy survived by accident, at the back of a drawer, and is now the scarce one. Tai Fong’s mid-eighties Robotic Radio unfolds into a working radio. I like that one best. It keeps the franchise’s promise more honestly than the franchise did: an ordinary machine with a robot inside, tuner and dial and all.
Sources 18
Contemporary artists now cast bootlegs on purpose, preserving bad seams, wrong colours and borrowed parts as the point of the object. Deliberate error is a different animal from error under duress. Nobody at SB Products was making a joke.
There was a spray gun, a quota, and blue.
Notes on sources
Production records rarely survive for unlicensed toys. Where no factory archive is known, names, dates and variants follow established collector documentation, cross-checked against auction catalogues and the references below.
Hake’s auction page titles the Blue Stars example “AFA 50 Q-VG,” while its description records “AFA 60 Q-VG.” The grade is therefore omitted from the article; the sale price and date are consistent across the listing.
Sources
- 01Hake’s — ‘Blue Stars Uzay’ Turkish auction result
- 02Star Wars Collectors Archive — Uzay
- 03Comprehensive Guide to Uzay Carded Figures
- 04Collector documentation — Polish first-generation articulated bootlegs
- 05SWCA — Polish Figures and Jakub Burzyński’s Far Far Away
- 06Hong Kong toy manufacturing history
- 07Canadian Conservation Institute — Caring for plastics and rubbers
- 08Jedi News — Blue Stars photograph © Zach Tann
- 09Fantha Tracks — Head Man from the Paul Chu collection
- 10StarsWar — Uzay Blue Stars / Collection of Martijn E.
- 11StarsWar — Uzay Imperial Gunner / Collection of Martijn E.
- 12StarsWar — Model Trem 2-1B / Collection of Martijn E.
- 13StarsWar — Uzay Chewbacca / Collection of Martijn E.
- 14Propstore — Loose Polish Luke and Leia bootleg figures
- 15Propstore — Galaxy Empire packaged bootleg figures
- 16Propstore — Mexican Luke bootleg with red sword
- 17Heritage Science — Degradation atlas of plastics at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
- 18Astro Magnum — Tai Fong Radio Robots, 1984–87