Insane Star Wars Collectibles From the Cold War Era — The Saga Vault Episode 4

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Tonight, on the SAGA Vault, we're sneaking behind the Iron Curtain, back to the Cold War years when a global phenomenon slipped past the gates and landed on the other side. This is Star Wars: Reshaped for Comrades in a world of shortages, state control, and bootleg ingenuity. And today, Ford Collectors are bringing out pre-Perestroika relics that feel like they came from an alternate universe. So dust off your propaganda posters and get ready to duck and cover, because tonight, the Vault opens on the most unlikely front in the Star Wars galaxy. Four Collectors, four artifacts, only one slot. Let's open the Vault. Welcome to the SAGA Vault, where the world's most passionate Star Wars collectors bring their most important artifacts to our table. And today, we'll be taking a deep dive into Star Wars: Behind the Iron Curtain. But first, let's meet our Collectors. Comrades, let's welcome Lisa Stevens, an American capitalist who exploited the labor of the working class into a glittering class into a glittering hoard of imperialistic toys. Yes! Gus Lopez, a Cuban exile who abandoned the revolution of his forefathers in favor of pursuing the capitalistic doctrine of acquiring rare plastic at any cost. [00:01:34] Speaker 2: Thanks, Comrade. [00:01:35] Speaker 1: Duncan Jenkins, a man with the gaze of Rasputin and the shopping habits of the Tsar. And if he gazes at an artifact too long, you'll soon agree it was destined for his collection. That's why it's so large. And finally, Anne, the commissar of propaganda celebrating the Star Wars, who has harnessed the decadence of the West to promote her consumer ideals and called it a true enemy of the revolution. [00:02:12] Speaker 3: You better believe it. [00:02:13] Speaker 1: All right. Let's move on. Anne, what do you got? Anne, what do you got? All right. Here we go. [00:02:19] Speaker ?: Anne, what do we have here? [00:02:25] Speaker 1: All right. [00:02:28] Speaker 3: This is a Soviet-era propaganda poster, circa 1984. Okay. And it says space for peace. The USSR proposes to stop the deployment of weapons of any kind into space. Two ways of life, two policies. The USA, Star Wars. And then you see the space shuttle and other familiar Star Wars ships. [00:03:00] Speaker 1: This is a very unusual way to promote Star Wars in Russia. [00:03:04] Speaker 3: Oh, if only it were so exciting. We know that the upper echelon of the Soviet government saw some of the Star Wars movies. [00:03:17] Speaker 1: I'm sure they loved it. [00:03:18] Speaker 3: But the public did not. So I like to wonder, did the general public think that these are actual ships that the United States had created? [00:03:30] Speaker 1: I would think there's got to be some that did. When did Star Wars eventually go into Russia? 1990 was the first mass release. So the Iron Curtain was still up when it was released there and it fell a year after Star Wars released. [00:03:46] Speaker 3: This poster provides an incredible teaching moment using Star Wars to talk about real history in the real world. [00:03:55] Speaker 4: We take our understanding of the movies and instantly see the evil empire. The death star is actually in front of the space shuttle. The Death Star is actually in front of the space shuttle. [00:04:14] Speaker 5: It overlaps the bottom of the space shuttle, so it's actually smaller than the space shuttle. I mean, come on. [00:04:24] Speaker 2: It's also a testament to the quality of the special effects from Star Wars, right? That they can overlay the Star Destroyer, TIE Fighters, the Death Star, and they mix it with the shuttle Columbia and it all looks pretty seamless like they're all flying together. Yeah. [00:04:39] Speaker 1: All right. This is a really unique piece, Duncan. What are you going to follow up with this? [00:04:45] Speaker 4: I'm going to keep it in a similar vein. We'll see what happens. All right. [00:04:48] Speaker 1: Sounds good. What do we got here? [00:04:51] Speaker 4: Well, we have a Star Wars novelization. Very ubiquitous item throughout the world and it was translated into many, many languages. This is actually a Slovenian language. Of course, the interesting thing about this one is the cover. It does not look like the cover that you're probably familiar with for the normal Star Wars novel. This one is well as they could do to convey what Star Wars really was, was to take a real-world cosmonaut and use that imagery on the cover. [00:05:26] Speaker 1: When was it published? [00:05:27] Speaker 4: This is a '78 novel. Wow. [00:05:29] Speaker 3: Okay. Released in Yugoslavia in '78? [00:05:32] Speaker 4: Yep. It was kind of this buffer zone where a lot of the people that were in the Soviet Union that were high-ups could actually go to vacation. [00:05:40] Speaker 5: That's where a lot of the black market and the Soviet Union came from in some of these other countries. They would bring stuff in. [00:05:45] Speaker 3: I've never seen this. Oh, interesting. Yeah, this is great. [00:05:49] Speaker 4: You know, if you think about like music or films, there's always going to be this kind of underground group of people that are going to get the bootleg copies and start sharing it around with their friends. [00:06:03] Speaker 1: But in this case, at least semi-officially, right? [00:06:06] Speaker 3: Yes. I think that if they got their hands on a copy of the novel, that they would have used the same cover. [00:06:14] Speaker 4: They may have just felt like nobody's going to be able to relate to this cover. I want to convey that this is a space thing, but I can't be too fantastic with Darth Vader and all this type of thing. So we'll go with something that maybe they'll be able to... People are familiar with. Yeah, just conjecturing. Have you read it? The English version, yes. [00:06:37] Speaker 1: Great piece. Let's move on to see what the next one is. Who's next? It's Gus. Who wants to go? Gus? I'll go. Yeah. I will do it. [00:06:49] Speaker 2: Well, Gus, what'd you bring? This is the preliminary artwork to a Hungarian board game. There are bootleg board games that were made for Star Wars, and this is an example of one of them. And it actually had some pretty decent art. Even in the preliminary art, you see it was fairly faithful. The final box design, which is very close to this, the layout's almost exactly the same. The logo is in the upper left corner. The Stormtroopers and Luke and all of that are consistent. And it almost looks like a licensed board game from the quality of it. [00:07:19] Speaker 1: Do you have the board game as well? [00:07:20] Speaker 2: I do have the board game as well. I didn't bring it with me. But that's the thing. The quality of it was amazing for bootlegs of that time. That's wild. Yeah. [00:07:29] Speaker 1: It's wild. When do you think the board game was released? [00:07:32] Speaker 2: You know, I would put it around 1983. It's attributed to Return of the Jedi. There's no, as far as I can tell, there's no specific Return of the Jedi imagery on it. It had to have at least been 1980 or later, because it has some Empire Strikes Back imagery. You have, like, Luke and Vespin outfit. You have, the cover has the falcon going through an asteroid field. [00:07:52] Speaker 1: Is the game itself just a standard type of board game you'd have in the U.S., or is it more of a Slovenia kind of board game with weird rules? [00:08:01] Speaker 2: I don't know. I can't read Hungarian, so I don't know the rules of the game. You can't read Hungarian either? [00:08:08] Speaker 1: It's actually one of the hardest languages to learn. The Vader itself feels very familiar to that photo of Vader where he's got the lightsaber up in front of him. From the Factors poster. Yes. [00:08:19] Speaker 2: Yes. I had that in my bedroom when I was a kid. Yeah, so did I. Yeah. So did I. [00:08:24] Speaker 1: Great piece. Very cool. Let's move on. Let's see what you've got, Lisa. Sounds good. And Lisa, what do we have here? [00:08:33] Speaker 5: What we have here is a Russian movie poster from 1990 when Star Wars finally got released in Russia. So this is right near the end of the official Soviet Union and they finally are allowing Star Wars to come in. And they had a lot on their books at the time. You couldn't have any advertising or promotional items that used artwork that wasn't created inside the Soviet Union. What they did is they ended up hiring two artists to do four posters. And this is one of Alexander Chanceff's posters. He said basically that he had never got to see the movie and so he had to use his imagination. He heard about the cantina scene and this was his thoughts of what the cantina aliens might look like. It was in the late 90s, I think somewhere in the mid to late 90s when I first heard about these posters. And I found a guy who was selling Russian posters on eBay. We haggled, negotiated, and then I, you know, he wanted me to pay him. You know, once we had the price and I was like, well, you know, I don't want to just send money to some guy I just met in Russia. You know, that's like probably a good way to lose money. Turns out he had a friend who was an Aeroflot pilot that flew into Seattle on a fairly regular basis. And so we set it up where his pilot friend would meet me in a parking lot near Sea-Tac Airport. So we set up an old Soviet-era, you know, spy meet in the middle of a parking lot. Give him a lot of cash in an envelope and he, you know, said goodbye and off he drove. And that's how I got this Russian-era poster. [00:10:12] Speaker 3: I like how it looks like it's pastel, real, you know, arty. It's chalk. Very simple. Chalk, yeah. I also like the four dots coming out of that guy's nose. You know, it's pretty creepy. [00:10:28] Speaker 1: This particular piece feels more foreign than Star Wars itself. [00:10:34] Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, it's an entirely fun area to delve into to see what they had to do to get Star Wars into these countries. [00:10:43] Speaker 1: I think we've got a great piece here, a very confusing piece, but a great example of cultural differences. And I think ultimately we're going to have to make a decision. Let's dive into it. Sounds good. Yeah, let's do it. Behind the Iron Curtain, it shows how Star Wars went everywhere, even in places where it was not legal to be seen. You know, we start with a government propaganda poster using Star Wars. We have a novel with a cosmonaut on the front of it with George Lucas' name. Original piece of artwork from a Hungarian bullet game. Yes. And then we have a Russian movie poster that is unrecognizable as Star Wars. Let's dive into it. [00:11:29] Speaker 3: Well, I really like Lisa's because if there's anything that's going to turn a head or catch an eye, it's going to be that poster because it's just so odd. I think that's the most visually striking piece. Yours didn't have any outwardly Eastern blocky kind of elements to it. [00:11:51] Speaker 2: I think to yours, I do like the abstract art on the poster, but I would actually go differently. I think the ones with the cosmonauts in many ways evokes more of the East block and the Russian space program. [00:12:03] Speaker 4: I really like the Russian poster, the theatrical poster, just because of the art. It's so fantastic and very unique to be pedantic. The official description we were given on items behind the Iron Curtain was pre-1990, and that has a 1991 copyright on it. So that may influence my vote. [00:12:24] Speaker 1: Ah, I understand. Yes. Yes. [00:12:28] Speaker 5: I read it as before the Iron Curtain fell, which was on December 25th, 1991. [00:12:35] Speaker 3: I do like the Yuri Gagarin on the Soviet propaganda poster because even, you know, kids in the United States would probably recognize that image. [00:12:45] Speaker 5: You know, we lived through that whole threat of nuclear holocaust. And so, you know, to me, I see that and I see that Cold War right in my face. You know, that Star Wars being drawn into that conflict. Pretty cool. [00:13:00] Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I tend to lean towards the two pieces that have the cosmonauts on there because it does, to me, scream Russia. Probably the weakest one, I hate to say it, is your piece, Gus. The original art piece. The original art piece, yeah. But I have to say, I have to say it is beautiful and I love the artwork. Yeah. I would probably feel it would be stronger with the board game. We're only going to know what we're going to choose until we vote. That's true. [00:13:29] Speaker 3: I haven't made up my line yet. [00:13:33] Speaker 1: All right, let's start with the waterfall. [00:13:58] Speaker 3: So I think all the pieces are really wonderful, but I did vote for my own, which was the SDI propaganda poster. When I found it, I just, I was blown away by it. And I learned so much researching the poster that it really represents what we as a museum want to do. We want to teach about worldly, earthly things through Star Wars. And I think it does that. [00:14:29] Speaker 1: Yeah. Great description. Okay. I'll just say ditto. [00:14:33] Speaker 4: All right. [00:14:34] Speaker 1: Bingo. Gus. [00:14:36] Speaker 4: I also had Russian propaganda poster. [00:14:39] Speaker 2: Wow. [00:14:40] Speaker 5: Wow. [00:14:41] Speaker 2: Wow. [00:14:42] Speaker 5: I also went propaganda poster because I really do believe it just captures this moment where Star Wars got pulled into two superpowers trying to out-propagandize each other. And we have unanimous. [00:14:56] Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. But even though we've all voted for that one piece, it doesn't mean the audience is also going to vote for that piece. So please vote for the piece that you think should win in the comments below. [00:15:11] Speaker ?: We appreciate it. [00:15:12] Speaker 1: Thanks for everybody for being here. Thank you. We'll see you next time.