After Star Wars it’s Fortnite for avid collector
A KEEN collector of Star Wars memorabilia is one of millions of people who are looking forward to seeing the film that marks the climax of what has become known as The Skywalker Saga.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker has started showing at the Mallard Cinema and hundreds of fans will have attended the midnight screenings early on Thursday, eager to see how the 42-year-old story ends.
But one person who was not among them was Martin Campbell, who is waiting for a fellow fan to return from holiday before going to see it with him.
Mr Campbell, meanwhile, can take comfort in his huge collection of Star Wars toys, amassed since he became a fan of the franchise in the early 1980s.
He was too young to see the first Star Wars when it was released in 1977, and his first experience of the films at the cinema was when Return of the Jedi, the third part of the story, was released in 1983.
He caught up with the previous episodes soon after and he was keen to start collecting the many toys that had come out since the late ’70s.
‘I wasn’t allowed to get them,’ he said. ‘I was an Action Force collector as a child.’
His mum thought he should carry on adding to his Action Force collection rather than start a new one.
But once he left home he more than made up for this.
As well as continuing to collect his childhood favourites, he started getting all the Star Wars figures and vehicles too.
He has never stopped, and while his collection boasts a large number of figures and vehicles standing loose or in dioramas, many of them are still factory-sealed in their original boxes. One or two are worth thousands of pounds.
‘A piece like one in my collection sold for £16,500 earlier this year,’ he said, holding up a radio-controlled sandcrawler model.
He said he was excited to see how the film saga concluded and had his own theories about the relationships of the key characters.
But unlike those original movies, there are nowhere near as many collectibles being released, which he said probably reflects the fact that youngsters today are more interested in buying videogames and game-related products.
Mr Campbell is not letting this pass him by, though, and he has already invested in figures based on characters from the game Fortnite.
