Put away those broom handles and baseball bats.  With Kenner’s real lightsabers, you can recreate your favorite lightsaber battles like never before, starting with the classic Luke Skywalker lightsaber.  It even lights up, truly state of the art technology for 1978.  If only the Star Wars kid has a toy of this quality.  It might have improved his performance.

Years of withdrawal after my parents threw out my action figures inspired me, after I ran away from home (to college), to begin collecting again. I started collecting at the early stages of Toy Biz’s Marvel Legends and the already churning DC Direct line. Every few months, about a dozen new and awesome figures earned a place on my shelves (yes, I open them…and play with them). And this went on for a few years until now I have a modest 300 or so figures.

But recently, the wind has left my plastic shell. DC Direct has shrunk their action figure lines to four characters instead of the previous five. When one or two of these figures is Superman and/or Batman, it doesn’t leave room for much variety. And Marvel Legends now under Hasbro have plummeted in quality, loosing most of their articulation and featuring cheap looking sculpts with plain paint jobs.

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