Kenner’s Star Warsline wasn’t just a hit with fans of the franchise. In the line’s lifetime, Kenner sold between an estimated 250 and 300 million Star Warsaction figures, vehicles, and playsets. The line had two factors working in its favor: the late seventies and early eighties were a golden age for kid-driven action figure lines, with robust sales supporting vast, inventive line-ups. The overwhelming pop cultural force that was the Star Warstrilogy meant that these toys were everywhere from 1978 to 1983, with the self-perpetuating hype around the continuing saga keeping the toys flying off shelves. And then Return of the Jedi came out. It wasn’t that people didn’t like it. It was just that it was the end: with no new Star Warsfilms on the horizon, casual public interest in the franchise waned. Kids moved on to G.I. Joeand Masters of the Universe toys, and retail orders followed suit. But Kenner wasn’t quite ready to give up on their company-making success story, even without new media to support it.
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Kenner relaunched its Star Warsline in 1985 under new “Power of the Force” branding, a trilogy-spanning line that would expand their 1983-1984 Return of the Jedi line and even fill in a few gaps from A New Hope. Seventeen characters were made, along with several new vehicles, and more were on the way before the line was cancelled due to lack of interest. In the decades that followed, the Power of the Forcefigures became collector grails, much rarer and worth significantly more than any of Kenner’s standard 1978-1983 releases. Good condition, loose Power of the Forcefigures can be worth hundreds to fans; carded, some are worth thousands – with an eye to almost-unreleased Yakface in particular. Later this month, Hakes is holding a dedicated auction devoted to the Power of the Forceline, with the bid for some of the one-of-a-kind, grail items starting at $2k, $5k, or even $7.5k.
Why Kenner’s Least-Popular Star WarsAction Figures Were Also Their Best
The Power of the Forcefigures benefitted from coming at the end of Kenner’s Star Wars line, with their sculpts more movie-accurate and detailed than the company’s earliest efforts. As an example, compare the Power of the ForceGeneral Lando Calrissian to the Empire Strikes BackLando from four years prior: not only does the headsculpt sport a better likeness of actor Billy Dee Williams, but the costume is more detailed and screen-accurate, and the figure has a cloth cape, rather than the vinyl trenchcoat used on Kenner’s Darth Vader, Ben Kenobi, and others. This is also a by-product of increased competition; by 1985, Kenner understood they were competing at retail with lines like Hasbro’s G.I. Joe, whose sculpts, articulation, and accessories made Kenner’s early Star Warsfigures look downright antiquated. Unfortunately, these improvements to the figures did little to resolve the underlying issue: Star Warswas fading from the memory of children, its fickle target audience.
Of the seventeen figures newly produced for Power of the Force, sixteen were taken from Return of the Jedi(making it the most well-covered of the original trilogy in the Kenner line by far). The odd outlier is a Luke Skywalker in Stormtrooper disguise, the first and only time Kenner would produce a character that wasn’t from the most recent Star Warsfilm. The other sixteen filled out several key sequences, giving fans more Ewoks (Romba and Warok), an Endor-specific Luke Skywalker, Jabba’s palace characters (Amanaman, Barada, EV-99, Han in Carbonite, Yakface), Rebel forces (Lando and an A-Wing pilot), Imperials (Death Star Gunner and the massively-unpopular Imperial Dignitary). My personal favorite is an R2-D2 with pop-up lightsaber, enabling kids to recreate his pivotal rescue of Luke Skywalker at the Pit of Carkoon.
Yakface is the most well-known figure to come from this line, as well as one of the rarest Star Warsfigures ever produced. Yakface was the last character made for the line, already in production as it was cancelled. Production was stopped, and the initial production run was shipped to Canada and parts of continental Europe (a common practice in the era, resultant from a quirk of how these countries’ partner manufacturers paid for product). Besides Yakface, the most notorious figure is Anakin Skywalker’s Ghost, as its likeness is based on actor Sebastian Shaw, who was removed from the film in 2004 and replaced with Hayden Christianson. In addition to the seventeen new figures, Kenner repacked twenty-two existing Star Warsfigures on Power of the Forcecards with collector coins. Although the same figure once taken out of the box, these packaging variants are extremely rare, and worth thousands to in-box collectors – in the case of Return of the Jedi repacks, several times their price on an original-issue cardback.
What’s Included With The Hakes Power of the ForceAuction
Mint-on-card samples of Yakface and Anakin Skywalker are the most expensive items up for auction, with a starting bid of $7.5k and $5k respectively. Hakes’ own estimates (which tend to be fairly conservative) have the finish at between $15-30k for Yakface and $10-20k for Anakin. This is helped by their condition: both figures are AFA (Action Figure Authority) graded at Near-Mint, with Yakface the highest-grade Canadian cardback sample in existence. Other highlights are soft and hard-cast prototypes for many of the collector coins, including several unproduced variants and alternate designs. High-grade carded samples of virtually every new and re-released Power of the Forcefigure make up the bulk of the auction, the most notable of these is an error card AT-AT Driver with the coin from Ewok Warok. Also exciting to Kenner collectors should be the presence of the elusive Jabba’s Skiff, the most sought-after of the vehicles produced for Power of the Force.
The auction comes just a few short months after the conclusuon of Hakes’ years-long, multi-part auction of the Jeff Jacob collection, which shattered virtually every record for Kenner Star Warsprices. Though the Power of the Forceauction is, for the most part, unlikely to surpass the Jacob collection’s result, items like the Near-Mint Yakface may break previous records – especially if Hakes’ estimates are correct. An AFA-graded 80 Near-Mint Canadian card Yakface sold for just shy of $20k in 2022; this sample is graded at a 90. Factoring in those record-breaking prices Hakes helped set, and it looks as if this auction could make action figure history, redefining the value of what is already Kenner’s rarest Star Warsaction figure line.
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