Hopefully you’re getting your Christmas shopping wrapped up. The stores are being picked bare! I was listening to some friends recently lamenting the state of the market on the Xbox 360, and the fact that so many of the consoles – which Microsoft doesn’t seem to have made enough of – are winding up in the hands of scalpers. I also mentioned recently that I had gotten back into the Star Wars action-figure-collecting swing of things, and all of this stuff combined reminded me of a really funny and amazingly bold fellow we saw at the first “midnight run” for Phantom Menace toys in May, 1999 in Green Bay. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this event was a circus compared to a similar “midnight run” I experienced in 2002, when the Attack Of The Clones toys hit the shelves; on that occasion, it was about seven fully grown men waiting behind a rope at Wal-Mart to get a look (and yes, I was one of ’em). But the 1999 midnight run was such a cross-section of every extreme of fandom – including, again, the fellow in Jedi robes who roller-skated through the store, buying nothing and blasting John Williams tunes from his enormous jam box – that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
There was another slice of fandom in attendance at that event: the Opportunist.
This smartly-dressed fellow – well, as smartly-dressed as one would expect someone in Green Bay to be at midnight on a weeknight – snatched up the rather slim supply of 12-inch Darth Maul dolls very quickly. He then stood between the registers and the store aisles, offering them to anyone within just-above-a-whisper range for $20 a pop.
Understand: he hadn’t bought them. He wasn’t selling them to you for $20. He was asking $20 to let go of them so you could take one and go through the register and actually pay for it there. Unfortunately, having balls the size of the Death Star didn’t prevent this guy from being relieved of his handful of Maul and escorted out of the store. That wasn’t chutzpah. Watto had chutzpah. This was just stupid. Just the fact that he was pitching his wares – which, after all, weren’t even his wares to pitch – at a conspiratorial whisper was just so instantly suspicious and yet uproariously funny. He might as well have been selling death sticks. I half expected him to wave two fingers in the air to convince people to “buy” them.
Hey, little girl, you want a Sith Lord?
Hopefully you’re getting your Christmas shopping wrapped up. The stores are being picked bare! I was listening to some friends recently lamenting the state of the market on the Xbox 360, and the fact that so many of the consoles – which Microsoft doesn’t seem to have made enough of – are winding up in the hands of scalpers. I also mentioned recently that I had gotten back into the Star Wars action-figure-collecting swing of things, and all of this stuff combined reminded me of a really funny and amazingly bold fellow we saw at the first “midnight run” for Phantom Menace toys in May, 1999 in Green Bay. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this event was a circus compared to a similar “midnight run” I experienced in 2002, when the Attack Of The Clones toys hit the shelves; on that occasion, it was about seven fully grown men waiting behind a rope at Wal-Mart to get a look (and yes, I was one of ’em). But the 1999 midnight run was such a cross-section of every extreme of fandom – including, again, the fellow in Jedi robes who roller-skated through the store, buying nothing and blasting John Williams tunes from his enormous jam box – that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
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