MPC Star Wars Story
MPC Star Wars models will always remind me of a funny story, well if you’re my dad, you wouldn’t laugh.
You see in third grade, this cool kid named Andrew (that’s his real name, cause I doubt he’s a reader) brought in his fully assembled C3-PO model and somehow, i became “salesman of the year” and got Andrew to lend me the model for the evening.
So of course, i broke the elastic that held the damned thing together instantly when I got home. I panicked, it’s in my nature and my folks offered to help.
My fleeting memory of this is my father in his undershirt mumbling “sonovabitch” toiling with C3-PO until the wee hours. I awoke to a fully assembled kit and a warning not to borrow other kid’s toys. I was saved!
I didn’t learn my lesson and when Andrew traded me for my “Incredible Hulk” treasury edition for his hardbound editions of “Superman and Batman: From the 30’s to the 70’s” I just let it go until the eight grade. I realized Andrew was just not that interested in his material possessions.
Pssst Andrew, I still have your books…
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Assembling C-3PO was one of those things that allowed dads of a certain era to win the respect and admiration of their sons. This was especially true for younger boys because the unbuilt kit looked nothing so much like a loose suit of armour.
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That's a much more impressive achivement considering our host's dad didn't have the instructions. In this Anon's case, my dad had the plans and even then it was no joke.
Here are the original instructions, in case anyone's curious.
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https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/-NkAAOSwcSxaUW6x/s-l1600.jpg
My dad didn't use a rubber-band, either. We visited a fabric shoppe and bought a package of stretch-fabric ribbon which is designed to last for the life of the garment. He improved on the basic rubber-band connection and used two separate hand-tied "stretch-fabric rubber bands". Final assembly involved several custom-built wire hooks (from a clothes-hanger stock) and a great deal of cursing.
To my dad's credit, C-3PO never broke no matter how much I posed him, My protocol droid was tight and frisky when I traded him to a classmate for his (dad's) mint copy of the November 1985 issue of National Geographic which had an incredible skull hologram on the cover.
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From 1977-78 to 1985, we're talking about eight years (and counting) of regular play *cough* "posing" of the model. No rubber band could have ever lasted that long.
A great big, big thank you to our host for these spectacular catalog scans!
My mom used S&H Green Stamps to get me the Darth Vader TIE (now known as the TIE advanced.) I put it together and immediately put it in the rotation with my star wars toys. It was resilient for a model kit, but alas, it met the same grim fate of so many of my childhood toys.