I'd say it more likely went to fueling George Lucas' impressive dewlap.

Do you really think any of the stars saw a penny from the merchandising?

Ya I suppose you're right.. don't actors get at least some cut when their likeness is bought and sold though? Some shows, like Archer for example found a way to weasel around this through contracts, but since Lucas was sort of assuming that Star Wars would be a flop I doubt if he thought so far ahead.

(or lack of contracts in Archer's case rahter..)

You'll notice the figures bore no physical resemblance to the actors who played the characters and the use of stills from the movies on the packaging likely didn't count as use of their image.

Heh yeah. I also didn't notice the knockoff music.

Yeah me as well. It was weird too. The movies themselves were pretty inaccessible to the general public so I don't think I got around to actually seeing A New Hope until I was like 15 or so, to give me context for the toys I was playing with. I actually thought Han Solo was the bad guy.

I had about a quarter of these.

I was born in 76, way too young to enjoy the original release of ANH. My mom took me to see the re-release in the early eighties when Empire came out. Shortly after, my dad and I lined up to see the ANH/ESB double bill they had going, and we waited in line for like 2 hours. No luck though. I actually ended up seeing ROTJ before ESB, although my schoolyard chums had long ago filled in all the plot points, so it didn't really matter. Wacky!

Yeah my older brother was born in '77, which means at best my brother and his friends would have had 6 year-old memories at best, and passed them on to me. In retrospect it's kinda weird. I was super obsessed with Darth Vader, so most of my school supplies were Dark Side based, but if I had known that he blew up a whole planet.. it was like walking around with a science fiction swastika tattooed on my forehead.

I never knew any kids who played with the toys/playsets the way they were intended. We'd just go in the sandbox and smash them against each other and find out years later that we could've probably never needed to work when looking up the prices for the exact same good-condition models on ebay :(