When a toy doesn’t make it past the prototype stage, documentation of that prototype becomes the only proof that it ever existed. Any longtime action figure collector has seen their share of the catalogue scans and blurry black and white photos depicting characters, playsets, and whole toy lines that never made it to shelves. Within collector circles, few unproduced figures are as coveted as Galoob’s lost toy line for 1984’s The Last Starfighter.
More often than not, blurry pictures are all that survive: the prototypes are destroyed as a part of the manufacturer’s contract (as with MEGO’s walking V.I.N.C.E.N.T. from The Black Hole), or they vanish like Kenner’s lost wave of Super Powers, leaving it in doubt if they were even made. If a prototype is salvaged, it’s often the work of one employee with the foresight and the determination to sometimes literally fish these items out of the trash. This week on eBay, that’s apparently just what happened, as six of Galoob’s never-produced Last Starfighter line are up for sale.
What Happened to Galoob’s Last Starfighter Figures?
It’s among the most common stories about toy collecting, and about Star Wars in general: before the first film’s release, every toy manufacturer George Lucas approached passed on the license before Bernie Loomis at Kenner Toys decided to take a risk. When the film smashed box office records in 1977, Kenner had such a hit on their hands that they were able to sell rabid Star Wars fans an empty box with an affidavit promising toys later. Hoping lightning would strike twice, Kenner’s competitors licensed virtually any and every science fiction film or series they were approached with.
The high-profile failure of several sci-fi movie toy lines made manufacturers and retailers increasingly gun-shy as they entered the eighties. Mego’s failed big-budget gambles on The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture had helped bankrupt them in 1980. When Galoob approached retailers in 1984 with a toy line for the soon-to-be-released film, The Last Starfighter, figures from Black Hole and Star Trek could still be found on store shelves.
Galoob presented a dozen figures to retailers at the 1984 New York Toy Fair. These one-of-a-kind prototypes were hand-made and painted using parts from existing figures taken from Tristar Toys’ M*A*S*H and Remco’s Sgt. Rock lines. This is a common approach in the industry, even taken by Kenner when pitching their Star Wars line to George Lucas. It’s intended to minimize development costs by ensuring time and money aren’t spent on designing and sculpting figures that might not see production to return on investment. It also means that the prototypes are the only ones made.
Why Are The Last Starfighter Toys So Valuable?
When retailers passed on The Last Starfighter, the prototypes went into an archive, forgotten until a catalogue shot of them surfaced online in the early 2000s. A perennial feature in articles about the coolest unreleased toy lines, nobody ever expected the real figures to surface, which is just what they did in 2018, when a collector discovered the six figures now on eBay at the home of a special effects artist who worked on the film.
They’re now being resold with an asking price of $100k, the listing’s very title declares them “the only ones known to exist,” and the description explains how the six figures were literally salvaged from a dumpster after Galoob shuttered its San Francisco headquarters in 1998. Per the seller, “the original sculptor found out the figures were thrown in the dumpster, so he searched and was only able to find 6 of the 12 figures; these are those figures.” Since passing into the seller’s hands, they’ve been authenticated by David Galoob (son of Galoob founder Louis Galoob) and by toy historian Blake Wright, whose 2019 book The Toys that Time Forgot featured a chapter on the Galoob Last Starfighter line.
This may very well be the rarest item on eBay right now – even grail items like Kenner’s rocket-firing Boba Fett make it to auction more often than these figures. The bizarre and miraculous circumstances of their reappearance give hope that other lost prototypes and unproduced items might still be found collecting dust on a shelf, their owners oblivious to the value and incredible rarity of what they have.
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