A to Z Challenge Topic Revealed!

 Out of boredom more than anything I think I'll amuse myself a little by doing an A to Z Challenge.  I spent a lot of time in 2019 writing the MST3K/Rifftrax entries (and then adding to them until 2020) but as I'm writing this it's mid-January I don't really have months and months.

Inspired by the "Action Figures I Like" or "Don't Like" entries, I thought of something pretty easy:  Star Wars figures!  

Original 1977 Figure Promotion

For Star Wars figures there are 3 periods for the most part.  The first figures were made by Kenner starting in 1978.  Since no one expected the movie to be a success, Hasbro, Mattel, and other big companies had passed on it and Kenner hadn't really planned much until the movie was a huge hit.

Because there wasn't time to get figures out by XMas in 1977, they arranged a promotion where you could buy an empty playset and then the figures would be shipped to you later.  The line was really popular through the first three movies but after 1983 they started to run out of stuff to make, so the line pretty much folded in 1985.

Late 90s Figure

In the mid-90s Kenner, by then owned by Hasbro, started a new line called Power of the Force.  The first ones they made looked really weird because the male characters had really huge muscles more like He-Man figures.  After that first batch they started to make them look more normal.  They ran through the popular characters and even some characters from comic books and novels like Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade.  That line had pretty much ended by 1999 as the prequels came out.

2010s Black Series Figure

After Disney bought the rights to Star Wars in 2012, Hasbro created The Black Series, which is a premium mostly six-inch line of figures like their Marvel Legends line.  The Black Series has covered all nine main movies, plus the spinoffs, and also the TV series and video games.

For purposes of my A to Z Challenge I'm focusing on the newer Black Series 6-inch figures.  There were a couple of letters that were tough, though maybe not the ones you'd think.

Weirdly N was a hard letter for me to find.  You'd think they would have made Lando's co-pilot in the larger Black Series by now, but nope.  Maybe that will be in a future series.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing.  Deal with it.