Star Wars Figures
538 sixth-scale figures across 7 manufacturers
Every Star Wars sixth-scale figure catalogued: Hot Toys, Sideshow and Medicom Toy, from the 2005 RAH originals to the newest preorders.
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STAR WARS & THE SIXTH SCALE
Marvel may explain the modern hobby, but Star Wars explains the modern toy business. Every license, every collector edition, every mail-away exclusive and army-builder variant descends from one film nobody believed in and one contract clause nobody wanted. This is the Archive's record of that story at twelve inches tall, told with our own shelves as the receipts.
Fair warning: this is a love letter. The dates are sourced and the numbers are ours, but if you hear a faint orchestral swell building behind the prose, that is working as intended.
THE FILM NOBODY WANTED
Before it was the biggest franchise on Earth, Star Wars was a hard sell. United Artists passed. Universal passed. It took Alan Ladd Jr. at 20th Century-Fox, betting on the strength of American Graffiti, to greenlight the thing, and even then the studio hedged: exhibitors who wanted Fox's sure-thing summer drama were told they had to book the space movie with it. Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977 in all of 32 American theaters. What happened next did not require a large sample size.
The deal behind the film mattered more than anyone knew. George Lucas skipped a pay raise, reportedly keeping his $150,000 directing fee, and asked instead for the sequel rights and the merchandising. Fox had lost money on movie merchandise before and considered the rights close to worthless. "At the time, merchandising meant nothing at all," Ladd remembered years later. "So we said, let's give him the merchandising." That sentence built Lucasfilm, funded the prequels, and is the reason every studio contract since has had a toy clause read by someone with a very steady pulse.
THE EMPTY BOX
The toy industry passed on Star Wars too. Mego, then the king of licensed figures, famously declined. Kenner of Cincinnati signed the license in the spring of 1977, weeks before the premiere and far too late to manufacture anything for Christmas. Their solution has entered legend: the Early Bird Certificate Package, an envelope holding a cardboard display stand, a sheet of stickers, and a mail-in certificate promising that Luke, Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2 would arrive by post early the next year. Roughly half a million families bought one. The best-selling Star Wars toy of Christmas 1977 was, quite literally, a promise.
Kenner made good on it, and then some: more than 40 million figures sold in 1978 alone, around a hundred million dollars in revenue, and the 3.75-inch action figure installed as the default shape of a toy for a generation. Every collector who has ever preordered an unmade figure on faith is re-enacting the Early Bird envelope, whether they know it or not.
TWELVE INCHES, TAKE ONE
Here is the part most histories skip: Star Wars went large immediately. Kenner's Large Size line arrived in 1978 with Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, C-3PO and R2-D2 at roughly twelve inches, and grew to a dozen characters, Boba Fett among them, before the line died in 1980. The killer was not indifference; it was Kenner's own 3.75-inch line eating the market from below. The last new sculpt was the bounty hunter droid IG-88, which is a fittingly obscure hill to die on.
The format hibernated for fifteen years. When Kenner, by then part of Hasbro, tested a 12-inch Collector Series in 1996 with Luke, Han, Obi-Wan and Vader, it sold well enough to run into the turn of the millennium, and a short-packed Obi-Wan promptly commanded multiples of its shelf price on the secondary market. The lesson everyone learned that year, that a twelve-inch Star Wars figure could be a collectible and not a toy, is the lesson this entire archive is built on.
THE PREMIUM AWAKENING
Premium sixth scale crept in from Japan. In the late 1990s Marmit sold semi-assembled vinyl Stormtrooper kits to a small devoted audience, and by 2005 Medicom Toy was interpreting the saga through its Real Action Heroes line, fabric costumes over articulated bodies. This Archive's three earliest Star Wars entries are exactly that moment: Medicom's 2005 RAH Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Stormtrooper, the premium era's opening chords preserved on our own shelves.
The definitive move came from California. Sideshow, already making quarter-scale Star Wars under a 2004 agreement with Lucasfilm, announced a 1:6 figure line at Comic-Con in 2005, stepping into the gap Hasbro's departing 12-inch line was leaving behind. The first figure told you everything about the ambition: Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, under a banner called Order of the Jedi. Pre-orders opened in November 2005 and sold out at record pace; the figure shipped in March 2006 with an exclusive run of just 1,250 pieces. Sideshow never let go of the saga after that. Of everything the company has ever put in this Archive, nearly half is Star Wars: 105 figures of 226. No devotion number in these records says more with less.
THE LICENSE AWAKENS
On October 30, 2012 Disney bought Lucasfilm for 4.05 billion dollars and announced new films, and the hobby's biggest player moved fast. Hot Toys announced its Star Wars license in July 2014 with Episode VII already on the slate, and revealed Han Solo and Chewbacca that September. Strictly speaking, though, Hot Toys had already been here: its first Star Wars figure was the 2012 DX07 Luke Skywalker in his Bespin outfit, made in collaboration under Sideshow's license, with rolling eyes and a light-up Weathervane base at $299.99.
Then The Force Awakens opened in December 2015 to a $248 million weekend, and the floodgates opened with it. The numbers in our Archive read like a second Marvel: 395 Star Wars figures from Hot Toys alone, roughly one of every four figures the company has ever placed in these records. A decade into the license the pace has never dropped, and the preorder calendar here already reaches 2027.
THE ARMY BUILDS ITSELF
Every franchise has its most collected character, and in Star Wars it is nobody. The top character in this Archive is not Han Solo or Darth Maul, not even Luke or Vader. It is the Stormtrooper, 34 figures strong, a face nobody has ever seen. Count every trooper and Clone Trooper variant and 113 of our 538 Star Wars figures, roughly one in five, wear a helmet with no famous name underneath.
That is not an accident; it is a product strategy the hobby formalized around this franchise. Sideshow ran an entire banner called Militaries of Star Wars and sold the same clone body in shiny, veteran and legion paint schemes, reviewed at the time in exactly these terms: buy several, vary the battle damage, build the army. Star Wars did not invent the faceless soldier, but it taught sixth scale that the background of the shot is worth collecting too.
THIS IS THE WAY
On November 12, 2019, the day Disney+ switched on, The Mandalorian premiered and gave the saga its second toy-story legend. Jon Favreau kept Grogu out of every marketing plan because the merchandise pipeline is where secrets leak, so the most merchandisable character since the droids launched with no merchandise at all. Bootlegs beat the official product to market, and by 2020 Star Wars toy sales were up around seventy percent with no film in theaters. The Early Bird envelope works in reverse too, it turns out: sometimes the toy the whole world wants is the one that does not exist yet.
The show also handed sixth scale a new generation of shelf-toppers. The Mandalorian and the Child arrived from Hot Toys as the era's signature set, Obi-Wan Kenobi returned by way of his own series, and the wave keeps coming, with figures from the 2026 film already in the catalogue. The creed fits this hobby better than it knows: this is the way.
STAR WARS IN THE ARCHIVE
All told: 538 Star Wars figures from 7 manufacturers, from Medicom's 2005 trio to twenty preorders already dated 2027. Hot Toys carries the crown, Sideshow carries the history, Medicom carries the accent, and newcomers like Honō Studio are already logging their first entries, proof the license still has gravity. It is the second most collected franchise in Kollectorium, and the one with the deepest roots.
This entry grows as the Archive does. Somewhere a certificate is always in the mail: figures promised, not yet made, faithfully preordered. That has been the Star Wars collecting experience since Christmas 1977, and honestly, we would not have it any other way. The Force will be with us. Always.