Since 1999, there have been collectors talking about collecting at Star Wars Celebration. This section of the event has become known as the Collecting Track, and is one of the most beloved Star Wars fandom institutions. I talked to Gus Lopez, legendary collector who has been part of the Collecting Track since day one, on my podcast last year. We talked about the entire history of the collecting panels at Celebration, but CIII stood out for one notable addition.
Back in April 2005, the track was ready for CIII with a new set of panels, including “Fast Food Collectibles” and “Preserving and Storing Your Collection”. By that point, said Gus, “We’re starting to get word out about the collecting track, we’re starting to kind of build a community around it.” He saw an opportunity to add a new level of participation to the experience.
“CIII is where we introduced swag,” Gus told me. Swag, often understood to stand for “Stuff We All Get”, is items freely given or traded throughout Celebration. Now, if you’re familiar at all with the Collecting Track, you undoubtedly have heard about the swag that’s attached to them. It has become a quintessential part of the Collecting Track experience. But twenty years ago, back at CIII, it was a new idea. “One of the concepts I came up with was, let’s do a trading card set, and give out a trading card at every panel,” Gus said, “and then have a checklist trading card also that we give out, and you have to go to every panel to get the full set.”
According to the Star Wars Collectors Archive database, there were 21 cards in total if you include the checklist. Each card represented a different area of collecting, including “Action Figures”, “International Toys”, “Lunch Boxes”, “Humorous Items”, and more. “It was relatively easy to put together,” Gus said. This added an innovative level to the Collecting Track, and obviously, what would be more irresistible to a collector than the idea of an exclusive item to collect?
The Collecting Track has really leveled up their giveaways since then, including collectible coins, Star Tots (that’s a whole other blog post, lol), themed cereal boxes, and more. But it was a big deal to start this tradition. “Now it sounds trivial to have a trading card set but at the time, nobody had anything like that,” said Gus. “It was a Lucasfilm approved collectible, we had to go through Lucasfilm approvals for it. It was cool to have something that the Collecting Track did that’s actually an official item.”
But the trading card set wasn’t the only thing given away at Celebration III. Whether you were at the Collector’s Social on Saturday, April 23, 2005, or if you attended one of the panels later that weekend, you might have had a chance to dig for something even wilder. “The folks at Lucasfilm told me that they had found all these Droids and Ewoks animation cels, just boxes and boxes of them,” Gus recalled. “They said, ‘Can you give them away at your panels?’ And I said yeah, we can totally do that.” There was more than enough for everyone, too. “We finally did give all of them out but it got to the point where people were just taking bundles. There were so many cels.”
Shane Turgeon, collector and fan who brought Star Wars tattoos and the tattoo competition to Celebration that same year, remembered this with a laugh when I brought it up to him on my podcast last month. “There were boxes and boxes and boxes of cels and everybody was trying to dig through them,” he said, admitting that most of them were pretty lousy, but there were a few good ones if you looked hard enough.
The Archive’s CIII page remembers it similarly. “Collectors sifted through thousands of cels looking for particularly good ones, or in some cases, especially bad ones,” the site says. “Images of one Ewok eye, or small unidentified lines in the middle of a cel, were pulled from the boxes along with full character cels, and internal paperwork.”
These giveaways set the foundation for what is still an important tradition, twenty years later. It was also some of the first evidence of freely given swag at Celebration, which is now at unprecedented levels between fans. And the Collecting Track continues on with panels at every event, including this April in Japan. Make sure to stop by and get one of this year’s collectibles!
Head to the Star Wars Collectors Archive’s CIII page HERE to find a full list of the CIII panels AND to see the PowerPoint presentations that went along with them! And follow along with the Collecting Track on Facebook and YouTube as well as on their website.
the celebration database 