Cardboard and Plastic: Cheap Star Wars Playsets

Though it may be difficult for the children of today to understand, there was a time when kids were happy with a piece of colorful plastic that was slotted into a plastic base. While many toy lines — including such popular lines of the eighties as G.I. Joe and Transformers — had cardboard and plastic playsets, the one toy series that I always think of when I remember those old cardboard backdrops has to be Kenner’s Star Wars line.

I can remember five Star Wars cardboard and plastic playsets from my childhood; three I owned and two I could only ever dream of as I stared at the pages of the Sears book at Christmas time. In the order I remember them, here are five Star Wars cardboard and plastic playsets.

1. Creature Cantina Playset

The very first time I ever encountered this playset was in the Sears catalog. The photo in the catalog made this look like the greatest Star Wars toy ever; a table for the figures to gather around, the band playing in the background, and levers that move the figures! A few months later, at a birthday party for a friend, I actually got to play with this awesome toy since it was one of his gifts. I never owned this and the closest I’ve ever come to a cantina playset is the 1990s cardboard cantina that was released as a mail-away set. (Which was later released to stores as the Power of the Froce Cantina At Mos Eilsley Diorama.)

This is always the very first playset I think of whenever I end up talking about cardboard and plastic playsets. It’s also very possible that I’ve made a mistake and this isn’t the playset I saw in the Sears catalog. As a a post at Dartman’s World of Wonder says:

“Sears had a weird deal with the Star Wars franchise where they would release cardboard playsets that featured a set of figures that came with it. Mine was the Mos Eisley Spaceport playset. It was basically just a piece of cardboard that stood as a backdrop for the figures to play in front of. I think it lasted about a week before it started to tear. The cool thing about this particular play set is that it featured a figure of Snaggletooth that was twice the size of the regular carded snaggletooth. At the time I felt like I was screwed out of the “real” Snaggletooth figure. Now, I realize that I had the cooler one. “

This sounds closer to what I remember, but for some reason any images I look at make me think that the box cover above is the correct playset. Still, the fact that they released two cardboard cantina playsets shows just how much Kenner loved cardboard.

Update: Yeah, I absolutely got this all wrong. The Sears playset — the one I thought I was thinking of — isn’t even the same as the one I pictured above. The playset I saw is definitely the one shown above while the Sears cardboard set can be seen at Action Figure of the Day. And the Sears set is so awesome it’s all cardboard! Sears doesn’t need any crappy plastic!

2. Cloud City Playset

After Empire was released, and before I even got a chance to see the movie (we were living in Turkey when Empire was released and I didn’t get to see it until the next summer after we moved back to the US; I remember my parents buying the novel for me to read during the flight back to the US), I spotted this cardboard playset in the Sears catalog. (Sears, when did you lose all of your awesome toy exclusives?) A Cloud City playset, with figures, looked like just the sort of thing I needed. Unfortunately, to this day I have never seen this playset in person and all I can do is drool over photos.

At least today, with the internet, I can drool over photos any time that I feel like it. And one of the best collections of photos I’ve found online has to be this post at Action Figure of the Day. In that post the author writes:

“Cloud City was another one of the Sears exclusives (see Rebel Command Adventure Set, Cantina Adventure Set, and The Jabba the Hutt Dungeon) and, like the other playsets, a very cheap toy. Cheap as in quality. The playset was nothing more than a 3-D backdrop with depictions of Han’s torture chair, a Cloud City-scape, and the Carbonite chamber.”

Yeah, cheap is definitely the word for these cardboard and plastic playsets. Unfortunately, what was once cheap is now quite expensive; the price of this playset today basically guarantees that I’ll never own one.

3. Hoth Ice Planet Playset

And now we get to the first of the Star Wars cardboard and plastic playsets that I owned as a child. Where other kids might have owned the full-scale AT-AT, I owned a cardboard AT-AT backdrop and a plastic base. I didn’t even own the laser cannon that came with the set since mine was bought used at the base thrift store! The plastic base that the cardboard slotted into was a cheap, solid chunk with levers that allowed you to move the figures (a standard feature on Star Wars playsets at the time) and shortly after getting this set (which I was given as a reward for sitting through a visit to the dentist) I soon found myself the proud owner of . . .

4. Land of the Jawas Playset

Wait a minute. Even as a kid I immediately noticed that the chunk of plastic that this piece of cardboard fit into was — except for the color — identical to the cardboard AT-AT playset that I already owned. Another find at the base thrift store (if only I could go back 25 years and raid every thrift store and garage sale on that base), this one actually came with the escape pod. An egg-like piece that even as a kid I knew was drastically out-of-scale, the escape pod served me well for a few years as a container for launching figures through the air. Hey, it was almost shaped like a football.

Yes, I know there’s a remote control sandcrawler out there, but this cardboard sandcrawler is still the one I think of.

Action Figure of the Day has even more thoughts on this playset.

5. Rebel Command Center

I think it’s almost certain that the reason I owned all three of these playsets that used the exact same plastic base design is because the toys were so cheap that other kids quickly abandoned them. But not me! With this and the AT-AT playset I ran several battles both inside and outside of the Rebel Base on Hoth. Another thrift store find — I remember paying $1 in quarters for this — the cardboard on mine was torn so I kept it mended with tape (usually masking tape all over the back, since that was what was readily available in our house, but sometimes we would have clear tape so I could tape up the front side of the cardboard).

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a Sears exclusive item so I was very lucky to find it. I have no idea where the base went, but I can remember the day when the cardboard finally completely died and tape would no longer save it. I kept the cardboard for weeks, in pieces, until it was finally abandoned to the trash. A sad day, indeed.

Action Figure of the Day has more photos of the playset.

Honorable Mention: Death Star Playset

No, I never owned this Death Star and, in fact, I didn’t even know that it existed until in the early 90s when I ran across a photo of it in a book. I can say without a doubt, though, that if I had known of this when I was younger I would have been begging for it. While the Death Star playset I do remember was okay, this one is at least the right shape! Yes, I know it’s a giant chunk of cardboard, but I don’t care. It still looks better to me than the plastic tower Death Star that you can see in this commercial on YouTube.