Kenner sold kids an empty box for Christmas 1977, and it worked

Star Wars opened in May 1977 and promptly took over the planet. Kenner had the toy license. What Kenner did not have, with Christmas coming, was toys.

Nobody expected the movie to blow up the way it did, and toy production runs on long lead times. Sculpting, tooling and manufacturing action figures takes many months. There was no way to get a full line of figures onto shelves for the 1977 holidays.

The fix: sell a promise

Kenner's answer was the Early Bird Certificate Package. It was an envelope, basically. Inside was a certificate a kid could mail in to receive the first four figures once they were made: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2 and Chewbacca.

The package also came with a cardboard display stand for the figures, some stickers and a Star Wars fan club membership card. So on Christmas morning, a kid unwrapped a picture of the toys and a promise that the real ones were on the way.

It gets remembered as the "empty box" Christmas. It sounds like a recipe for a lot of crying kids. Instead, it became one of the most famous moves in toy history, because demand was so high that people bought the promise anyway.

Waiting by the mailbox

The figures shipped by mail in 1978. For a kid, that meant weeks of checking the mailbox after school. When they finally arrived, they set the pattern for everything that followed.

Kenner went with a 3.75-inch scale, much smaller than the 8- and 12-inch figures that were common at the time. Kenner president Bernard Loomis is widely credited with pushing that smaller size. The logic was simple: small figures meant Kenner could sell vehicles and playsets that kids could actually afford and parents could actually fit in the house. The Millennium Falcon only works if Han Solo is small.

That scale became the standard. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero adopted the same size a few years later, and a huge chunk of the '80s action figure aisle followed.

Early production oddities

Collectors love the first-run stuff from this era. The best known is the early telescoping lightsaber on Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, which had an extra thin piece that slid out of the arm. Kenner simplified it quickly, which is why those early versions are now sought after and heavily faked. If someone is selling one cheap, assume there's a reason.

Complete, unused Early Bird packages also show up in the collector market, and they command serious money because almost every kid who got one did exactly what Kenner wanted and mailed in the certificate.

Why it still matters

The Early Bird package proved something toy companies have relied on ever since: if kids care enough about a property, they'll buy into it before the product even exists. Preorders, mail-in exclusives and every "coming soon" campaign you see today owe something to an envelope Kenner had to sell because it ran out of time.

And if your parents bought you one, they deserve a thank-you. They paid for a toy that was, at the moment, a sheet of paper.