The name Bernard Loomis may not be the first to come to mind when one thinks about the amazing success of Star Wars collectibles, but it should be. Mr. Loomis helped start what has for many blossomed into a lifestyle.

From the American Toy Institute 1992 Hall of Fame:
"During a career spanning five decades, Bernard Loomis served as president of Kenner, group vice president of General Mills, partner in a joint venture with Hasbro, consultant to Tyco and head of his own toy design company. He brought to market an incomparable portfolio of blockbusters, once selling empty boxes at Christmas with the promise of a hit toy to be delivered later. An extraordinary marketer, he proved that breaking rules was often the best rule of all."

Mr. Loomis's protracted career in the toy industry enables him to not only speak on the origins of our favorite toy line, but give some interesting insights into the toy licensing business in general.

How difficult was it to work with Lucasfilm back in the day? Were they strict and secretive, or open to new ideas and relaxed? How involved were they in the process of creating a figure?

It was never particularly "difficult" to work with Lucasfilm but you have to understand the separate roles that each of us played. We never "designed" anything for the Star Wars films. None of the characters, hardware, or weapons were created by anyone but George [Lucas] and his people. Our job was to execute the items, and add the most we could in children's play value to each product; Package them, merchandise them and advertise them.

It was also [our concern] to be certain that quality and safety standards were beyond question and they always were. I do believe that George gives us the highest marks on all of this. All of our executions were subject to Lucas approval but I am not aware of any problems on this score. Whatever problems we had with George came after the fact and related to the original contract, which was at a lower-than-might-have-been royalty rate, covered all crafts, games and toys, included future pictures and the right of approval of all other licenses.

To understand this you have to put it in the context of the mid 1970's. Prior to Star Wars, with only minor exceptions, movies were not a sound basis for toy or any other kind of licensing. Movies would come and go too quickly for sustained sales to build.

Prior to Star Wars the general feeling about a license was that the royalty was a substitute for advertising and when you thought about licensing, it was a lot of Disney and a little bit of Schultz (Snoopy) with the licensor licensing items and not lines.

We changed the licensing business first with the Six Million Dollar Man, then with Star Wars, and ultimately with Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears where we were both licensee and licensor in a partnership with American Greetings and integrated the total project including production of TV specials and a Motion Picture.

When I first saw the Six Million Dollar Man in the early seventies, it was already on the air. I contacted Universal, went to California, and said "I want a world wide toy exclusive on the Six Million Dollar Man". Made the deal for the General Mills Group and we were off a running - but that's another story.

How did the Star Wars license come about?

I had one of the few subscriptions in Cincinnati, Ohio to the Daily Hollywood Reporter, and one day I saw an item about a new picture from Twentieth Century Fox called Star Wars and I called in one of my marketing people, Craig Stokely, and asked him to find out about it. Some time later he reported back and we got some very limited information that [the film] included robots - and I liked the idea.

We didn't need it though, we had the leading boys' toy in the world, the Six Million Dollar Man and we had a deal on a new TV series, The Man From Atlantis, which was being called a sure-fire hit but I liked the name Star Wars, I liked the robots, and I said "The picture will come and go, and the following year we'll take a shot at space with Star Wars".

Well, the picture came but it wouldn't go and the world went crazy. Where are the toys? My former associate Ray Wagner, now President of Mattel, and I both remembered the relatively recent failure of a Mattel space line call Matt Mason; he remembered it more strongly than I did.

Mark Pevers, [the person] in charge of licensing for Fox, came to see me in Cincinnati and I expressed the terms on which we would license Star Wars, and ultimately with no one else

"George says, "if you do Star Wars, you can't go Close Encounters." That was the first time we heard George's name.

interested, he came back and agreed to the terms we offered. The royalty rate was 5% and would go to 6% if Star Wars became a TV series. The following year we volunteered the increase to 6%. Mark added one condition: "George says, "if you do Star Wars, you can't go Close Encounters." That was the first time we heard George's name.

When someone tells me I can't have something, I want to know why. We made a date to sign the Star Wars deal at the Century Plaza Hotel In Los Angeles, a few minutes away from the Fox Studio, on a Saturday morning and out of curiosity made a date for first thing in the morning earlier in the week to go to Columbia and meet Julia Phillips the Producer of Close Encounters and the Director Steven Spielberg.

Steven told us the story of Close Encounters and when he was through I remarked that it sounded like a great movie but it didn't seem "toyetic" to which he said " What is "toyetic" and I said "The property of being expressible in playable figures and hardware" To which he said "well it's not Star Wars” I asked him what he knew about Star Wars and he said he had seen it and agreed that it was quite "toyetic' he also said that he wasn't too upset, "George was his best friend, and they had traded pieces" In other words George owned a piece of Steven's share of Close Encounters and Steven a piece of Star Wars, which I believe for quite a while were the number one and number three grossing motion pictures of all times. When the toys went into production George had us send one of each new toy directly to Steven.

You were responsible for the Star Wars early bird set, weren’t you? Where did the idea come from?

One of the two lonesome decisions I ever made… Baby Alive was the other one. I still don't understand why people had such difficulty seeing its merit from the beginning. First you have to understand the gift giving reality of Christmas. To an enormous number of people nothing is more important than the giving of gifts at Christmas time, and at the top of that list is giving to children, but how many times have you heard "they are through playing with their toys before the day is over?”

Second, television advertising of toys has created a situation where the "normal" pricing of items is out the window. "Normal" pricing of an item was if a retailer bought an item for $5 he sold it for $10 and that is still the rule if what you are buying is not exactly the same item from one store to another. Mattel's Chatty Cathy started it all in the early sixties. Mattel’s price to it's direct customers was $9 and the original TV commercial properly said it was an $18 doll. Fortunately, but confusingly, for the consumer the actual price to the consumer was more likely to be from $9.99 to $16.99 and the FTC ruled that we couldn't put a price on a TV Commercial unless it was the price generally asked for by the retailer. So the consumer had no idea of what an item cost until she saw it in a retailer’s ad… the child never knew or cared much.

"Here we were with an extraordinary demand and no product to fill it with."

Here we were with an extraordinary demand and no product to fill it with. The normal time period from design to production of a properly designed, engineered, tooled and finally in production toy line is eighteen months to two years. The market was being flooded with unsafe plastic tubes that were supposed to be light sabers and I had to do something about it.