The story goes something like this: In 1976, a young junior executive from 20th Century Fox pays a visit to Mego Toys’ New York City office. He is representing one of Fox’s newest film properties, pitching it as the basis for a line of boys action figures. And while the bigger toy companies have already turned him down (one top executive literally shoving him out of his office) the young executive feels confident enough in the quirky little film to press on.
He talks his way into a meeting with a Mego junior executive (the company’s main decision-makers Neil Kublan and Marty Abrams are both fatefully out of town). The exec listens to his pitch politely before declining. Mego already holds the rights to the biggest science fiction properties of the 1970s: Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, as well as the entire catalog of DC and Marvel Super-Heroes. Low-budget movies are left to the little guy — Mego is strictly big leagues. His meeting over, the Fox publicist adjusts his tie and heads up to the next floor, where a young toy company called Kenner has just opened its doors. Maybe they’ll be more receptive to The Star Wars.
History tells us the rest. Kenner’s Star Wars figures were a game-changer for the entire industry. The choice to produce the line in 3 3/4th scale was a winner; Kenner was able to offer the figures cheaply ($2.49 at retail) and their small size meant play sets and vehicles a’plenty. Indeed, the higher price point vehicles were the original focus for Kenner — to paraphrase The Simpsons’ Martin Prince, the figures were essentially ballast.
This approach was an unmitigated success. The property put Kenner on the map, where it remained a dominant player in the toy industry until it was acquired by Hasbro in 1991. Mego, meanwhile, went into a slow, graceless death spiral. Facing diminishing returns on evergreen properties like the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes, the company licensed C-list properties like Buck Rodgers and The Black Hole in a desperate attempt to find the next hit. Time ran out and, in 1982, Mego filed for bankruptcy, a year later closing its doors for good.
While it’s impossible to know what was in the original pitch, we know enough about Mego to have a sense of how they might have handled Star Wars. By 1976, the company’s jointed 8-inch body was the standard for toys of the type. While G.I. Joe had already done it both bigger and better, 12-inch figures of his type were becoming the exception rather than the rule. It was Mego’s 8-inch body companies like AHI, Lincoln International, and Tomland were emulating, so it stands to reason Mego would have gone this route for the Star Wars figures.
While Mego had explored Kenner’s chosen 3 3/4-inch scale before, the figures were clumsily rendered and crude. Mego was more at home adding newly sculpted heads and cloth costumes to their already existing stock bodies. While this may have worked for “normal” characters like Luke Skywalker, it was sure to be a tough fit for other, odder cosmic denizens like Chewbacca and the Stormtrooper.
While screen-printing costume details like the Penguin’s waist coat and bow-tie worked for WGSH, the same approach could not have been taken with characters as visually complex as Darth Vader or C-3PO. Seeing these “realistic” characters in Mego’s standard screen-printed polyester tights would have been laughable. And while the thought of more poseable original trilogy figures appeals to the kid in me, I can only imagine what would have to be done to the blasters and light-sabers to get them to fit in those tiny hands.
The 8-inch scale meant any vehicle bigger than a Land Speeder was out. Anything larger would push Mego past a comfortable profit. Oh, sure, there might be some rebranded Micronauts pieces calling themselves an X-Wing fighter, but we all would have known the difference. The same with playsets. Instead of Kenner’s multi-tiered Death Star extravaganza, we’d be stuck with a laminated vinyl box with off-model Stormtroopers drawn on the sides. Now I don’t want you to think I’m trashing Mego here — the company had its own aesthetic and it worked for them. But it wouldn’t have worked for Star Wars.
The original objective for the Star Wars line was to have product in stores by winter of 1977. And while that didn’t happen, 1978 saw Kenner flood the shelves with product. There were 12 characters in the first series, and 9 in the second. That’s 21 figures in a year. Mego was notoriously slow on getting new characters to market — in fact, there were only 30 characters total in their World’s Greatest Super-Heroes line, and that line included both DC and Marvel properties, and it ran for 10 years. That sort of schedule could have never met the demand for all of the aliens, ‘droids, and cosmic weirdos fans were waiting for.
Kenner was obviously willing to work with the Lucas camp when it came to package design. Both the movie and the toys sport the same stark, silver logo on the starry black background, giving Star Wars products a cohesion that was almost unseen in media at the time. Had Mego produced the toys, one gets the sense their reliance on control art for packaging and their tendency to use brightly-colored cards would have been out of step with the LucasFilm standard.
Any one of these reasons might be cited as to why Kenner deserved the license. One factor that should not be underestimated was the fact that Kenner could offer the consumer something new. By 1978, Mego was a known quantity in the business; there was a growing sense they were a one-trick pony, tied to an old and comfortable formula, while the realities of the market changed around them. Next to a Mego, Kenner’s action figures look sleek, stylish — dare I say futuristic? Their stark color palette, hard lines, and chrome surfaces make Mego appear like the charmingly antiquated offerings of the previous decade, not the retail juggernaut of recent years. And while Mego would fight on, it suffered a mortal wound that day. Not only did it lose a license, it lost the chance to play the game on its own terms. Instead of an industry leader, it was now seen as a has-been.
Years later, Mego president Marty Abrams acceded that Kenner did a better job with Star Wars than Mego could have. He also claimed that, unlike Kenner, Mego could have had product on the shelves for the ’77 Christmas season. This means that no matter what the figures looked like, they would have sold by the ton. Had this happened, Mego’s fortunes (and the entire action figure industry as we know it) would have been radically changed. Ah, but that’s another story.
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