The force is with Sotheby's Star Wars auction
Juiced by next week's opening of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," collectors are making some astronomical bids at Sotheby's (BID) first major online auction of Star Wars toys and memorabilia.
Toys that originally sold for about $2 in the 1980s were selling for thousands of dollars, usually well above the lowest minimum estimated price and sometimes multiples of the highest estimated price.
With the genre's first new movie in a decade, collecting Star Wars toys and memorabilia has moved at warp speed lately to a galaxy far, far away because kids who started buying action figures in the 1980s are now adults who can spend whatever it takes to fill out their collection.
To a serious collector, such as Star Wars creator George Lucas himself to veteran rocker Rick Springfield, it makes perfect sense to spend $20,000 on a toy that originally cost $2.
A Luke Skywalker action figure with a dual-telescoping light saber, one of only 20 known to be in existence, sold for $20,000, plus a 25% auction house commission. That's more than twice the lowest estimated price.
A Boba Fett action figure in the original Hungarian language packaging sold for $12,000, more than twice the highest estimated price of $5,000.
"Now I want to see the movie in Hungary," quipped auctioneer Courtney Christensen, a Sotheby's vice president. "Can someone text my mother and figure out where my Star Wars figures are?"
What is it with Star Wars and Eastern Europe? A 1978 Polish-language poster for the Star Wars movie "A New Hope" sold for $3,000, more than quadruple the estimated high price.
With 175 lots of collectibles, including life-size replicas of light sabers and helmets used by Darth Vader, Boba Fett and rank-and-file Stormtroopers, the auction reaped $401,650 for the seller, avant garde Japanese fashion designer Tomoaki Nagao, known professionally as Nigo.
That doesn't include the auction house commission, plus taxes, that winning bidders paid.
A few items sold for less than the minimum price expected. Most notable: two complete sets of Star Wars coins, expected to fetch between $25,000 and $35,000 for the pair, quickly went for $22,000 after bidding started at $20,000.
But Nigo's total take was $157,000 more than the lowest estimated price for all of the lots and about $41,000 more than the highest estimated price in aggregate.
The auction went "amazingly well," said James Gallo, owner of Toy and Comics Heaven, a dealership near Philadelphia, and an outside consultant on the auction for Sotheby's.
It isn't known who the buyers were, although several serious bidders won six or more lots of merchandise.