When the toys for 'Star Wars The Phantom Menace' were released not long after the film the prices were a little too high for me to warrant collecting them. Coupled with this was the fact that my favorite character, Darth Maul, was harder to find than rocking horse dung.

Several years after the release of Episode One and sufficiently long enought before the hype for Episode Two starts it is now possible to by the Phantom Menace toys for sencible prices.

Today I bough an eight inch tall Darth Maul figure, a four inch tall Darth Maul figure and a four inch battledroid figure. We also bought a green light saber for Seth.

To make the photographing of the figures, and any other small objects, cleaner I have bought some brightly coloured A3 paper which works nicely as backing to the figures and could easily be replaced with a backdrop using an art package on the computer if needed.

This is a collection of the bounty hunter figures from 'The Empire Strikes Back'. The collection of old figures was made up by my brother and I around the time that these figures were first available in the late 70's and early 80's. We've never purposefully bought any Star Wars toys for collecting only, hence the figures are well played with. Thought none of the figures are on their original cards most still have their correct weapons.

The first Star Wars toys which my brother and I got were a couple of power droids. Initially we did not know what these were. Having been bought up on the film 'Silent Running' we thought the robots looked a little like Huey an Dewie.

The next set of figures was bought as part of the Cantina set. Though there were four characters in this set initially we swapped 'walrus man' for an additional storm trooper in later years. For the sake of completing the set I've now just put a bid on a 'walrus man' figure on e-bay.

I can't remember where we got this from though I don't believe we bought it from new. This cardboard death star play set has a trash compactor, a vent for the characters to swing across and lots of painted storm troopers to make the imperail army look a little larger when you only have one or two storm trooper figures.