A worldwide Star Wars unboxing: may the merch be with you in 18-hour event

Star Wars was a breakout success for many well-discussed reasons, but one powerful factor was how it easily lent itself to creative backyard play. Kids of all stripes swung imaginary lightsabers, fired imaginary blasters and, when The Phantom Menace came along, engaged in complex imaginary trade negotiations. Luckily, George Lucas had the foresight to license his creation to toy companies, so children could harass their parents to buy them officially branded gewgaws. (He also took a lower salary on the first film to retain the toy rights, the first of a number of shrewd moves that made him the most successful independent film-maker in history.)

The suits at Disney (the parent company that currently owns everything Star Wars and keeps Lucas at a benevolent elder statesman’s distance) have been licking their chops not just about this December’s Episode VII – The Force Awakens, but also all the ancillary products kids will feel strangely hollow, unfulfilled and possibly unloved if they don’t get to own. And while there have been weird Star Wars toys in the past, everything about this new regime seems buttoned-up for maximum desirability and profitability.

To that end, and in keeping with the global nature of the brand, Star Wars has initiated #ForceFriday, a big bonanza in which stores will get new inventory of tie-in materials from a movie no one has seen. Leading to this Friday’s hullabaloo was a YouTube round-the-world event – which ends on Thursday night – where the new toys were unboxed live in 15 different cities over an 18-hour span.

It only really takes 60 seconds to reveal a new trinket, so the live stream makes for a lot of vamping. I missed the kick-off in Sydney, in which Star Wars cross-pollinated a bit with Lego to present Bladebuilders. Riffing on the new scary looking red lightsaber with the cruciform-like base the Bladebuilders are a system where you can mix, match and bend lightsabers to create your own combinations. And while you may have detected a hint of snark in some of this report prior to this paragraph, the time has come to drop the facade of irony and admit that this does, indeed, look like quite a great deal of fun.

Later the simulcast went back over to homebase in Los Angeles, where we saw Poe Dameron’s X-Wing. If you haven’t been scrounging the internet for Star Wars news, then you don’t know that Poe Dameron is Oscar Isaac’s character in The Force Awakens, who is thought to be a Han Solo-ish rogue. The X-Wings are, of course, the scrappy space fighters that the good guys destroy Death Stars in. (Their wings form an X, hence the name). You may recall that in the original series there was a notch in the back just the right size for our pal R2-D2. Well, this toy comes complete not just with a small Poe Dameron action figure (which I guess you can repurpose for any Inside Llewyn Davis or A Most Violent Year games as well) but the cute li’l robot beach ball you may have seen in the trailers, named BB-8.

Admittedly, I didn’t see those two moments of unboxing live, and that’s an issue I’ll have to deal with until my dying day. But I was at my laptop when the Star Wars YouTube Channel’s anchors, the peppy Anthony Carboni and Andi Gutierrez, went live to a studio in Tokyo. They introduced a Japanese toy enthusiast, citing his YouTube follower count, and he (and another host) showed us three models. One was a large stormtrooper that said movie lines when you pushed a button, and next to him was a smaller version.

Also in the smaller size is the presumed villain of The Force Awakens, the masked, cloaked figure Kylo Ren, played by Adam Driver. Yanking the cloth away from Kylo Ren’s head, one of the announcers noted that “we’ve never seen Kylo Ren without his cloak before.” “We’ve never seen Kylo Ren at all because the movie isn’t out yet!” I shouted back at my screen, forcing my wife to finally come by and ask what the heck I was watching.

The global unboxing event (which sounds like something out of a Don DeLillo novel) was having an unintended effect on me. I love Star Wars, I really do. But how is it that I’m already behind on it, when it isn’t out yet? I feel like this franchise, and its 21st-century way of promoting itself, is leaving me choking in the dust. There was Star Wars Celebration, there was San Diego Comic-Con and then Disney’s D23 event in Anaheim. If I just go to the movies on 18 December, am I even engaged with this thing at all?

The next hour (11pm EST) brought another unboxing in Seoul. A noted Korean-American YouTube toy reviewer from New Hampshire by the name of Dollastic was flown all the way across the globe to stand in the middle of traffic and show off a Lego version of the Poe Dameron’s X-Wing that we’d already seen in non-Lego form. A young woman translated her English into Korean for the live crowd. Neither Dollastic nor the team from Tokyo ever mentioned what any of these items would actually cost.