The World's Largest Star Wars Memorabilia Collection at Rancho Obi-Wan

hey guys it's norm from tested and i'm here with steve sansui hi norm you are a star wars fan i am a star wars maybe the star wars fan uh you know i i wouldn't put it uh anybody else can be a star wars fan and as big fandom is not how much you own it's your passion but you do own a lot i do own a lot and i have a tremendous passion enough for a lot of people yeah so we're here in your office in rancho obi-wan up in northern california where you have amassed about 30 years of collecting make that 35 36. oh yeah yeah 30 plus years of collecting star wars memorabilia how did this all begin well i grew up loving science fiction and reading some of the classic novels and then i had some of the early toys in the 50s and then i came back shortly before star wars came out and started collecting some of the old japanese robots and space toys and then they were always too expensive i wanted this robot it would be two hundred dollars you know a year later i could afford 200 and it would be 400 and star wars came out and really grabbed me and took me like so many other people to another world and then some of the stuff started coming out it was one of those really weird things when you look at toys and movies today all that stuff is out in the market six weeks eight weeks before the movie opens this was a movie where there was nothing immediately available and so it was the demand that created the goods rather than the other way around and i think that's one of the keys to how some of us who were there back then you know really got that passion for star wars 30 plus years you know this oh not so bad this collection yeah well this is just my office oh this is in the collection let's go let's go actually check out the royal collection okay come on so that was the library we have star wars books from 37 countries and 34 languages but again this was all sort of the appetizer let's go to the main course a little bit of stuff to look at in here you know every museum should have a house band so we've hired four of the biff musicians to play uh sometimes they'll do cantina songs sometimes you never know what they're going to come up with and right behind them is the actual door from the cantina that was discovered on a trip by a friend of mine to tunisia in 1995. still there still there all this years being used as the guy's door to his chicken coop the guy who rented the cantina building i hope it did yeah so these are cantina players these guys are animatronic they're animatronic they were behind the uh soda counter at fao shorts in las vegas before they went bankrupt and uh on the live bankruptcy auction site they were listed as alien mannequins so i had no idea whether they would work or we could put them together and they do and it's great fun and those are one of the kind of pieces so those are the ones each with their own story and that is the best thing so this is not just walking into a museum and looking at things and reading a little it's it's a two and a half to three hour tour by me with all of the personal stories about the the fun things behind objects how they came about how i collected them the great finds i made and the stupid mistakes i made because we all do both poor impulse control it's totally all right it's it's all about the stories now behind us here this piece that you talked about earlier was one of your favorites i think this is to me one of the most important things in my con in my collection ralph macquarie as we all know was the master of coming up with the visual look of star wars and that clearly was ralph mcquarrie's original art of starkiller the composite character that became several characters well when ralph was here six years ago he said i remember painting that and i said wait a second you hand painted the sign and he said oh yeah he said that's my logo and you know what i still like it better than theirs so there's an original probably the only the world's only ralph macquarie hand-painted star wars banner so looking around this museum and you've designed this as a museum now this is always the case you haven't seen it it was sort of it was sort of oh well this is my storage place for all of these things but but now we've turned it into a non-profit museum we can give tours we've organized it by type of object and somewhat chronologically too but you know there are crazy things that are together you'll find bootleg and fan made stuff along with the actual licensed product because it just seems to work so it's sort of in my head and and my assistant and friend ann newman who also has put all of this together so steve we're here on the front bay of the museum this is what you built out you said about over 10 years ago right and it all started off with the action figures yeah the whole collecting there was stuff out there before but everybody wanted the action figures and kenner came up with the idea to do about a three and three quarter inch scale but the first action figures weren't even ready for christmas of 1977 so they sold this basically empty box you sent away a coupon and you'd be one of the first to have the first four action figures it took a while to get them because kenner didn't sign the contract for star wars until a month before the movie opened it's amazing that there had never been a successful license for motion picture star wars changed the world when it came to that because people really wanted this stuff and so once again it was the demand that was causing the stuff to come out and the figures led to finding that scale figure led to building vehicles that fit those figures and playsets and it was a whole world excuse to start off with those original 12 figures and did you were able to collect all 12 or i bought all 12 originally from the store and just like everybody else i opened them up oh you opened them put little sticky things underneath and they were on my shelf with the other space toys and then about two years in i decided i wanted to try to get them back on the card and so i asked a toy dealer friend of mine to put together as nice as said as he could back then the figures were selling for two to three dollars each he put together a really nice set um and charged me like 175 dollars which really was sort of high for those days and then the son of a gun picked out one figure after he sold me and said uh are you interested in this and i said it looks like a standard jalapeno looks yeah except this was the standard java figure that i knew about it had a cloth cape and i said did some fan make this he said no he said it's some sort of variation the first time i heard that awful word and i said well okay well how much do you want for that i'm not that crazy about it but you said 45 and i said you know i just paid you 175 to make a long story short i decided to pass i went outside put my key in the door lock and something something grabbed me and forced me to go back it was i don't know what i was but i paid him the 45 and so today i mean we don't talk about values very much but today this may be worth 100 200 bucks in this condition two thousand dollars plus collector's intuition yes i've also had d intuition too and i've passed on some things that would have made me money but things that i didn't need you always have to figure to buy what you love because if you start buying things like oh i'm going to make a lot of money on baseball cards or comic books everybody's thinking the same thing and the market collapses buy what you love and then as we move further into the back you have something called the treasure the treasure room is go visit the treasure room and and gracing the treasure room we have the actual marquee letters from opening day on the lowe's orpheum theater from 1977 which ended up in a kid's bedroom in the bronx and then finally ended up at rancho obi-wan so it's fans preserving parts of the history and treasures of lucasfilm and star wars that otherwise wouldn't be with us and really it's a treasure hunt for you it is it's a scavenger hunt a treasure hunt it's not just me it's a lot of other fans going out there and preserving that history which is really cool so one of my favorite pieces actually wasn't originally this is an amazing millennium falcon diorama with part of the death star hallway and was done by a licensee in france named atticus and i knew from the pictures that they had made just an amazing design inside and filled it with all kinds of you know little parts and pieces of the falcon and then they sold these metal figures that you could add to it but when i got it i was very disappointed because it was clear to me that without lighting you really couldn't see and get the nature of how cool a piece this was and then i hired a local guy a guy named randy newbert who who lighted something else for me and he came in and one day transformed this into something that is now one of my favorite custom light up so it's a custom light up so it just shows that even with manufactured goods you can add so much more to them and and the the falcon diorama is proof of that and then some of the items were actually things built specifically for you by other fans yes for example over here here we have there's a guy named randy cooper in florida who makes model kits for other people but he builds individual ships and sometimes lights them paints them and so we have the the jawa sand crawler and then the amazing star destroyer which he didn't have time to light which is how i met the other randy newbert and he lighted that and and then that and i'm sure we'll be doing other things in the future for rancho obi-wan now you also have actual memorabilia from the production of star wars i do these are actually pieces from the actual these are pieces from the death star surface including hand-painted cardboard towers sort of the potemkin village of the death star so when you have all these things down and the cameras go on like a banshee you really don't the eye doesn't catch the individual pieces these are mostly the smaller scale so when something is really close up they'll have a larger scale cannon or a gun that moves or something like that so they're they're pretty amazing pieces they're all done out of extruded foam island would make the molds and then send them out and these would be produced the yoda also is from the original molds from the empire strikes back because yoda was made out of latex it wasn't meant to last and and it hasn't lasted but using the original molds the head the hands the feet the cane and the pan flute are all from the original molds of the yoda that was used in them first generation mold and then back there you have what looks like the millennium falcon that is a very unusual piece because i love behind the scenes pieces in the making of the movies and the falcon the full-size falcon that was built for empire was 60 feet in diameter weighed about 20 tons and the superstructure was so complex that they were afraid just 2d plans wouldn't be enough so ilm actually built a plastic superstructure of what the frame needed to look like sent it to the uk the full-size ship was built in a former royal navy shipyard in wales covered and then cut into sections and trucked over to the studio near london so there's a lot of behind the scenes in production as well as stuff that was made for the movie or things that looked like they were made from the movie but were actually made for fans such as this gaffy stick and this is made of an original fiji war club or totokia stick which they still make for tourists but it's the same tokyo sticks that were used to make the original gaffy sticks and they're all different based on the size of the wood the burl the quality of the sculpture and then you can see that the prop crew thought it wasn't quite dangerous enough so they added this um steel spike by the way there's a familiar name to these it's called a um skull cracker i can see why english appropriately named so in your collection how many things do you think you've collected over 35 years well you know we have a database that now has about 95 000 items in it and we don't think we're quite one-third of the way there so we're estimating about 300 000 separate pieces including you know lots of paper behind the scenes work um it's all according how you count these things but yeah at least 300 000 pieces if we ever get there in my lifetime i will be very happy but i'm not pushing it you know this is a popular culture museum and and the whole purpose of this is to inspire inspire kids inspire adults so many people were inspired by star wars to go into all kinds of creative endeavors not just the movie business but advertising science astronauts you name it and inspired by the force of imagination is what you know our key slogan is and we really mean it well this museum definitely is incredibly inspiring both in terms of star wars and your dedication to it you know we're actually not at the end of the museum there's more there's a little bit behind the red curtain you want to take a look yes of course let's see what's behind the curtain sounds like a tv show number one welcome to the tonti of four it's the blockade runner it is indeed the blockade runner it's a hallway that was built by the r2 builders for celebration four and we took it over expanded it and made it fit in here so it gives you the feel that you are actually aboard a ship and going into another galaxy wow and then there's a little bit more there's more there's another door it's sort of like one of those quiz shows you know the latest edition one more room well at least for now for now the annex yes the annex we have the art gallery so i've been collecting star wars art from the beginning now it's 3d art vader heads skateboard decks you name it we've got it thank you so much steve from rancho obi-wan and where can people find out more information you can go online to www.ranchob1.org and get all of the information about planning a visit here seeing our schedule and finding out how to sign up even just as a member of rancho obi-wan and getting a membership kit which includes all sorts of cool stuff awesome thank you so much steve as far as uh high functioning quarters go you're one of the most impressive we've met thanks we'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

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Keywords: tested, Skywalker, Luke, Star, testedcom, Toys (film), Jedi, lucas, celebration, collection, hasbro, Darth, toys, steve sansweet, Yoda, licensed, Vader, Revenge, Best Of, The Lego Group (Organization), Sith, luke skywalker, kenner, ilm, ranch obi-wan, Force, museum, Lightsaber, Episode, lego, memorabilia, star wars, Clone, lucasfilm, collectibles, Lego Star, darth vader, star wars collection, rancho obi wan, tested star wars, star wars museum, rancho obi-wan, star wars toys, star wars (film series)

Id: T-rZ528C8Ss

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2013