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That just triggered some automatic stop on some new manager’s bureaucratic system, and so there were a lot of times when they desperately needed an influx of new cash. And there was a loan with Bank of America, but that loan was suspended when Lucasfilm payroll hit a million dollars a week. It was all his winnings from Star Wars, and he was just basically doubling down by doing Empire Strikes Back. “There were definitely a lot of points during Empire Strikes Back when Lucas was basically running out of money, because he’d put up the collateral himself. So for Christmas you’d run downstairs, tear open the wrapping paper, and you’d get a piece of cardboard.”Ĭhris Taylor on funding The Empire Strikes Back:

It was called the Early Bird Certificate Package, and you got an empty cardboard envelope, and in it was a little certificate you could mail away, and then Kenner would send you the figures when they were ready, which turned out to be around February or March. Star Wars came out in May, it’s only a few months away, so what they did was-it’s kind of the brilliance of a guy named Ed Schifman, who pitched this idea to Kenner and to the president Bernie Loomis-which was, what if we release a ‘redemption kit’? Essentially an empty box.

They realized they’d never make it in time for Christmas. Well, at the time it took about a year to get a toy onto the stands. And when they saw how successful Star Wars was, pretty quickly they realized they had to have toys. So Kenner approached the whole thing with easy-to-produce, inexpensive-to-produce objects like games, paper products, things that were cheap.

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They didn’t last very long, and unlike a TV show, which gives you an advertisement for that toy every week, every time it airs, once the movie’s gone there’s nothing in theory to compel you to go buy the toys.

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“The thing about movies, you didn’t license with them because they were there and gone pretty quickly. Listen to our complete interview with Chris Taylor and Brian Stillman in Episode 126 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.īrian Stillman on the Early Bird Certificate Package: “He was a smart businessman, George Lucas,” says Stillman. Though controversial among fans, the special editions did help fund the prequel trilogy, which in turn grew the Star Wars brand into a multibillion-dollar franchise which seems set to continue indefinitely. The eventual success of Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire proved that there was still an audience for Star Wars, which helped motivate Lucas to release the special editions. “He should have dropped a few more hints that the Clone Wars just basically cloned every character in the Kenner line,” Taylor jokes.

As a boy Taylor resorted to imagining that the Emperor had been cloned, a plot twist that Lucas might have used to boost sales. After the Emperor was vanquished in Return of the Jedi, toy sales fell dramatically. Taylor’s book explores many of the financial concerns that shaped Star Wars, as well as some of the strategies that helped it succeed. “All he saw when he was first thinking about products that might emerge from Star Wars was an R2-D2 cookie jar.” “He didn’t even imagine action figures would be a big thing,” says Chris Taylor, author of the new book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. Even Lucas himself had no inkling about the public demand for Star Wars. The demand caught fledgling toymaker Kenner completely off guard, and they resorted to selling empty boxes stuffed with promissory notes in lieu of actual Christmas merchandise. But as with Star Wars itself, no one expected the toys to be popular. Those toys played a major role in the film’s success, and helped bankroll its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. “It feels like an indie flick that just happens to have the most amazing, eye-popping stuff in it,” says Brian Stillman, who recently directed a feature-length documentary about Star Wars toys called Plastic Galaxy.