MARK HAMILL
Ready to geek out with Luke Skywalker? Mark Hamill talks Joseph McCabe through his pop culture passions
Luke Skywalker gets his geek on with SFX. You’re gonna wish you had this stuff.
Beatles Memorabilia
One of the first things I collected was when I was in college. A girl was selling her Beatles memorabilia collection, and The Beatles had just broken up. Back in the day, all I cared about was the music. But once they’d broken up… First of all I was devastated. But all of these things that I laughed at – because I only got the records – the Beatles “Flip Your Wig” game and all these different things, they took on a whole new significance for me. She needed money for college. She had like 22 items, including the bobbing head dolls and both lunchboxes and the Soakies (they only made Ringo and Paul). I said, “How much do you think this is all worth? She said, “Well, I don’t know. At least a hundred.” I said, “I’ll give you a hundred and twelve. How about that?” She said, “Great!” Now of course any one of these items is worth more than $112.
Aurora Monster Model Kits
I had Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy. I think the last one I did was King Kong. But as an adult I bought a collection where it was nearly all the figure kits. So Aurora model kits are good for me.
Cereal Boxes
I love cereal boxes, which drives my wife crazy, because they’re really impractical. She says, “Can we open the flaps and flatten them out so I can store ’em better?” We also learned the hard way you don’t want to keep food items if you can help it. I bought these Laurel and Hardy animal cracker type things, based on the Larry Harmon cartoons – in Japan! I love the box art and I love the Japanese kanji on the outside. We put them in the attic and years later we realised the rats had chewed through the boxes and eaten the cookies. But I heard a story about a guy who had Li’l Abner Ice Cream Bars that were manufactured back in the ’40s or ’50s. They were frozen ice cream bars, and instead of taking the wrappers off and just preserving the wrappers, he had them in a freezer. When he had a power outage, he had auxiliary power just for the freezer! So it just shows you the lengths to which some collectors will go to get what they want.
Comic Books
When you realise you can’t have everything, it’s best if you narrow down the things you’re collecting. Like, I’m a big Curt Swan fan. He was my favourite Superman artist. So I thought, well, maybe I should just focus on him. I became sort of a student of comic book history. I remember thinking, “How did these things remain ten cents from the ’30s all the way to the early ’60s?” Everything else went up – phone calls and Coca-Cola and everything else. I didn’t realise of course that they were 64 pages and then they were 48 pages and then they were 38 pages etcetera. They were just cutting back on the size of the books. That’s what sort of got me interested in comic books again. I was collecting mostly Silver Age comics, from when I was a kid. Then I branched into Golden Age, and from 1938 I wanted the early runs of Superman and Batman.
Famous Monsters Of Filmland Magazine
I discovered Famous Monsters when I was probably about nine or 10. I just flipped out. Because that was concurrent with me wanting to know how they accomplished the dinosaurs in King Kong – and there was an article explaining stop-motion photography. As I grew older, I thought, “Well, these puns are a little childish, and it’s getting kind of goofy”; and I found magazines like Castle Of Frankenstein or
Cinefantastique a little more adult in their approach. But I’m really grateful to have those magazines in my life. Because I had no idea how you would get into show business, and I didn’t know anybody in show business. This made it a little bit more real for me. Because I knew early on. I tried to keep it a secret. I have
four sisters and two brothers who would have ridiculed me to no end if they knew what I wanted to do. But I did know very, very early on, and these magazines were reassuring to me, to see that there is a future out there if you want to do these kinds of things.
Stop-Motion Animation
I thought, oh my gosh, if somebody goes to work and creates a guy having a sword fight with a skeleton army, that’s the job I want. Even if I can’t do that, I can be the guy that makes his coffee. I want to be around that activity [laughs]. Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien were early heroes of mine… It’s kind of a lost art now with the CGI, isn’t it?
Cartoons
I saw a Walt Disney TV programme about how cartoons were made, and to see Clarence Nash at a microphone doing Donald Duck… The light bulb went off in my head. I was in maybe kindergarten or first grade, and I thought, “Wow, somebody goes to work and does Donald Duck as a job! [laughs]” I thought, “I wanna do that job.” I thought, even then, “Wouldn’t that be great? Because I’m sort of scared of getting in front of an audience. But this would be perfect because I do the voice and nobody would know it was me.” That was very appealing – the anonymity of it all. Of course now we have the internet and you can pretty much find out anything you want with a couple of strokes of the keypad. It’s a different world than those days. Even wanting to find out who was doing all these voices on Yogi Bear and Rocky And Bullwinkle and Tennessee
Tuxedo and so forth. It was only the record stores that would have record albums of these characters, and you could go on the back and see Daws Butler and Don Messick and John Stephenson and all these people. Nowadays you could just find out in a couple of minutes. But before the internet there was the public library, the library at school, and just by chance going through the children’s record section at the local record store.
Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives
You know, you reach a point where you have children and there are priorities – they’ve got to go to private school or you need to get them braces. I thought, “What the heck am I spending $11,000 on a ten-cent comic book for? It’s crazy.” I switched to reprints. They don’t have the ads that I love so much, and the letters pages. But if you really want to read the material, you can’t do better than the DC Archives or the Marvel Masterworks. So I eventually sort of stopped collecting comic books. I remember my accountant calling me and saying, “Did you get that Adventure
[Comics] #40 into the safe deposit box?” I thought, “Look, if you’ve reached a point where the things you’re collecting have to be stored in a bank rather than pulled out and read and passed around and so forth…” That’s the thing, because it’s all based on condition. You know, I’d get a book that was so pristine and think, “Geez, I can’t even read it now because it’s all about value. I should have bought a copy that was more beat up just to read!”