My favorite Doctor Who is the Fourth Doctor, portrayed by Tom Baker, but the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi Doctors aren’t too bad. Regardless of the era, the TARDIS is always bigger on the inside. Here’s some renditions of the TARDIS and recent Doctors and villians–LEGO 21304 Doctor Who and 71204 and 71238 Dimensions sets.
When I was working at Mindspring in Atlanta in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I had to move on short notice. The only apartment that I could find quickly and at a low price that I could afford was a two-bedroom at the historic Bolton Apartments near downtown Atlanta.
Living alone, I didn’t need a two-bedroom apartment, but it was advantageous in two regards. First, I was able to shelter my grandparents, uncle, and dad during Hurricane Floyd, and second, it gave me room to rebuild a Star Wars collection.
When I was a child, my Star Wars toys were the Cadillacs of my toy collection. They gave me many hours of enjoyment and they survived better than they might have elsewhere. Despite how much I loved them, I sold them off just before going to college at Georgia Tech–thinking that I needed to part with youthful things to attain a more serious mindset in my pursuit of a Physics degree.
I had kept a few dear Star Wars action figures–especially an R2-D2 with Sensorscope from The Empire Strikes Back (1980) that my grandmother had driven to Savannah to find for me. I also had a complete Yoda with orange snake action figure that I had purchased at Comics Plus in Macon. And a few vehicles include the Power of the Force 2 (POTF2) Millennium Falcon and Slave I.
From those humble beginnings, I began to acquire more Star Wars paraphernalia, merchandise, and toys. A lot of this rejuvenated interest came from the release of The Phantom Menace (1999) and the onslaught of new action figures, dolls, and LEGO sets (the latter’s licensing began in 1999).
On my days off from Mindspring, my hobby involved driving around to department stores, comic book shops, and flea markets looking for Star Wars collectibles. While my rent was low, it was in retrospect unwise of me to invest so much money and time in the collection. It brought me enjoyment at the time, but it eventually caused me a lot of stress and headache. It was both ends of madness–euphoria and the crash.
The work at Mindspring, after the Earthlink merger, became less fun. Others in the call center decided to play the numbers game and win–leading to more call backs and angrier customers–and left the rest of us the job of fulfilling our original mission to support our customers and lose. I decided to pack it in and move back to Brunswick to regroup. I’m glad that I did, because I eventually got back into Georgia Tech and made my way to where I am now at City Tech.
Here are some highlights shown in the photos of the collection above from left to right.
| Photo 1 | Photo 2 | Photo 3 | Photo 4 |
| Rebel Command Center Adventure Set with original 3 figures. Mail-in Display Stand with complete set of original Kenner Star Wars action figures. Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer Action Playset. First LEGO sets including Y-Wing, Darth Vader’s Advanced TIE Fighter, Snowspeeder, and Anakin’s Pod Racer. Dagobah Playset. | POTF2 TIE Fighter. Carded Kenner ROTJ Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker (Jedi Knight) action figures. Vehicle Energizer in box. Lots of boxed and carded POTF2 action figures and playsets. Kenner Yodas with brown and orange snakes. Pewter Boba Fett figurine. Near complete set of Star Wars and Empire Kenner action figures. POTF2 X-Wing (small), Slave I, Jabba, Millennium Falcon. | POTF2 Millennium Falcon and X-Wing (large). Multipack action figure sets and carded Comtech Reader. | More Episode 1 action figures and toys than you can shake a stick at. |
In Fall 2001, I flew out to Seattle to visit friends and go to two shows–Tori Amos at the Paramount and Weezer at Key Arena.
After I returned home, I built this LEGO MOC (my own creation) of the Weezer stage. At that point, I only had some Star Wars LEGO sets, so I had to pick up some additional bricks and minifigures to create this model. Notably, I purchased the cheapest Harry Potter set (for the bespectacled Rivers Cuomo) and a large brick assortment set for the stage base and back.
I based the stage arrangement on Weezer’s stage design at the Key Arena performance. They had a backdrop covered with equally distant squares. Lights behind the black squares illuminated and played lights on the backdrop. In front of the stage back was a large stylized “W” that descended from above when the band began playing.
To mount the stage back at 90 degrees to the stage base, I used stub-and-fork friction joint bricks.
For the backdrop lights, I used battery-powered Christmas lights.
For the stylized “W,” I cut it out from card stock.
Also, I used card sock to cut out guitar and bass shapes that I taped to rods that the minifigures held.
Apologies for the quality of the photos. I took the photos with my second digital camera. The first was a Sony Mavica with 3.5″ floppy disk. I sold it and purchased a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P3 (I think). I’m lucky to have these photos as I think I took them more to experiment with the camera than to memorialize the LEGO model!
While Rogue One (2016) comes in second to my love of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the former film is more real in terms of foregrounding real people who want to fight back against the oppression of the Empire at all costs. The characters realize the stakes are high, but they fight on anyways. There is minimal space wizardry and instead people working together to support each other in the face of overwhelming odds.
Rogue One also signaled an inclusive-focused shift in Star Wars storytelling–a long needed correction to the franchise. Hopefully this trend will continue both in front of and behind the camera. And, with the new Andor (2022-) series, this corner of the Star Wars universe has new stories unfolding.
While Rogue One is far from perfect, it does a lot of things perfectly. One aspect of its perfection that’s important to me are its merchandising with LEGO. It had a large number of sets, which LEGO mercilessly divided main character minifigures between (as it did for The Hobbit, too). Nevertheless, the overall design of the U-Wing Fighter, Krennic’s Imperial Shuttle, Battle on Scarif (above), and AT-ST (which I currently have on my desk). These sets tied into the imaginative world of the film quite well and I certainly enjoyed building them.
Thinking about the composite image of the Bandai 1/144 scale Millennium Falcon in space that I created using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) led me to imagine creating a different composite of the LEGO 21108 Ghostbusters set from 2014 in front of the filming location of the Ghostbuster’s headquarters, Hook and Ladder Company 8 in Manhattan.
I started with these photos that I had taken in 2015:
On the left is a photo that I took of the Ghostbusters LEGO 21108 set on my desk at City Tech. All of the elements that I needed are here, but I realized that I would have to break it down into parts to create the composite image–ghost, Ecto-1, Ray, Ego, Peter, and Winston. On the right above is a photo that I took of the Hook and Ladder Company 8 building in Manhattan. Due to the time of day that the photo was taken, the front of the building is in shadow and there are sightseers in front of the firetruck door that need to be removed.
I setup my work document in GIMP in the following way.
First, I pasted the hook and ladder photo as the bottom-most layer. I adjusted the colors and reduced the shadows to help the firehouse pop in the center of the photo. I used the lasso tool (creating irregular shapes instead of squares or circles helps with blending later) and clone tool to copy material over the sightseers in the front of the firehouse and to remove a light reflection on the road surface in front of the pedestrian walking line in the lower left. I smoothed out these fixes with the smudge tool.
Then, I cut out the ghost, Ecto-1, and four Ghostbusters and pasted each into its own independent layer and adjusted colors appropriately. Because the Ghostbusters are obscuring part of Ecto-1 in the original photo, I needed to arrange the composition so that they hid the back of the vehicle. But, I had to use the clone tool to repair some aspects of the car (e.g., the clear 1×1 round studs that had supported the ghost needed to be removed and the white surface of the hood restored), and some of the exterior windows and side panels peeked through gaps between the Ghostbusters (I used the clone tool and lasso tool to create the rear windows and side panels). Also, I wanted to arrange them so that it appeared more like a group shot instead of a line as in the display for the original set. To achieve this, I flipped horizontally Winston and Peter’s images to that they are turned toward Ray and Egon to their right. Unfortunately, this flips their name tags, but maybe no one will notice! Also, I increased their size by 120% to make them appear further away from Ecto-1 and closer to the viewer. I’ll return to the ghost below.
Next, I added a layer between the firehouse image and Ecto-1 (being the lowest layer of the LEGO images). I used the paintbrush with a large brush to paint black “shadow” under Ecto-1 and falling from right to left on each Ghostbuster member. I reduced the opacity of the layer to lighten its appearance so that the shadow wasn’t too harsh.
Finally, I transformed the ghost layer and rotated it to about 60 degrees. I adjusted its colors to give it a neon green hue. I then duplicated the layer. On the lower ghost layer, I applied a linear blur to give it a flowing, streak effect, which I positioned under the ghost to give it implied ethereal movement.
The final product isn’t perfect, but it was fun to make and it helped me learn/reinforce workflow practices in GIMP.
Don’t let perfection hold you back from using tools to make things that bring you joy. Each time you make something, you learn new things and get better at doing the things you’ve learned before. If you have the time, energy, and material, you can always take another stab at the thing you did before to make a better iteration. Though, I recommend starting fresh each time instead of making adjustments to something you’ve already made. The process of building and making from start to finish can yield wildly divergent and better outcomes that can be surprising and unexpected. Tweaking what you’ve already done might yield something interesting, but the constraints of the original project might limit what is ultimately possible.
