With Blue Snaggletooth Coming, The Vintage Grail Subset Is Nearly Complete

I know you were expecting another Revenge of the Sith review today, but instead you're getting an article from your cartoon pal, Pete Chris. Bret was getting writer's cramp, so he needed a day off. I keep telling him to stop hand writing his reviews with a stylus, but he won't listen. He thinks typing them out it too cold and impersonal. He's a weird guy, but his penmanship is exquisite. Okay, that's enough jibber jabber to loosen you up. Let's get down to business.

The vintage Kenner collection is still legendary today. I'm bewildered by the fact that high grade loose samples of some fairly common Kenner figures fetch three figures today. I'm also filled with regret over that. I feel like it wasn't even ten years ago that they could be scooped up for $20 to $25 dollars. I wouldn't be me if I didn't watch opportunities streak right by. I'm like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life. I don't want to get in on the ground floor of plastics no matter what that Sam Wainright says. But even in a world where almost everything vintage + Kenner + Star Wars is sought after, there are items that stand out head and shoulders above the rest. And Hasbro has been slowly plunking off the modern counterparts to these grails. To date we've gotten the following:

Rocket Firing Boba Fett
"Desert Card" Boba Fett
Droids Boba Fett
POTF carded Yak Face

Another big Kenner grail, Blue Snaggletooth, comes off the list with the recently announced Cantina Adventure 4-pack:


I love this oxymoronic "modern vintage grail" series because I simply have no interest in owning the real things. They're too expensive, and for the carded ones, it's near impossible to find them with clear bubbles. I much prefer collecting these modern winks to those vintage scarcities, but the list of viable candidates is winding down. In fact, I think there may only be one truly doable option left: Anakin Skywalker. As my buddy Tim from Bossk's Bounty pointed out in his most recent Weekly Q&A, it sure seems like the upcoming Ben "Obi-Wan" Kenobi tooling could be leveraged to make a counterpart to the Kenner Anakin, and that's a critical component to this grail series. Aside from VC186, they shouldn't require much new tooling. Significant money shouldn't come out of the tooling budget to indulge these type of things, but there are a couple of rubs with a proposed "modern vintage grail" Anakin Skywalker:

• It must come with a Sebastian Shaw head
• It must come on a POTF card

With respect to the latter, the vintage Anakin Skywalker figure itself is not rare by any stretch of the imagination. Prior to being released on the POTF card in the US, it was a mail away figure. Supply of the loose figure is plentiful on the secondary market and can be had for around $50. The coin, which was exclusive to that POTF release will fetch you nearly ten times that. So to check this off as part of the unofficial grail collection, it must come on a reproduction POTF card with the collector coin (like the Barge Yak Face):


I don't care how inconvenient Hasbro makes it for me to get my hands on this. Make it exclusive to a convention I'll never attend and have it sell out inside of 60 seconds on Pulse. Include it with a set of replacement windows for my house. Make it the toy I can choose at the doctor's office if I'm a good boy during my annual prostate exam. I don't care how difficult it is to acquire. I won't complain (this time). I just want to see that vintage Kenner grail come to TVC. But please don't make it a Target exclusive.

As far as the other grails after Anakin, there's not much I can think of that is very viable. There's the vinyl caped Jawa, but that's really better suited for the Retro Collection (which the rocket firing Fett technically was). There's the Droids Vlix, but that would require new tooling, and has limited appeal. It too is probably better suited for Retro if Hasbro ever gets bold and dabbles in the Droids line. I guess you could argue that the regular 21-back Boba Fett is now entering grail status, but that's a subject for a different day (because it's not the Episode V Fett in the film out).

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