Take a Force-Ful Nostalgia Trip With the Best Vintage 'Star Wars' Toy Commercials

All the excitement over the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens toys (including the app-controlled BB8 robot, the cannon-equipped Millennium Falcon, and these awesome Dark Side toys) is taking us back to our childhoods. Specifically, we’re remembering those ads for the original Kenner Star Wars action figures and playlets, in which boys with bowl cuts enthusiastically acted out scenes from the films. High-quality commercials from the ‘70s and ‘80s can be hard to find (those VHS tracking lines are merciless), but lucky for us, a YouTube user named 12BACK has posted remastered versions of over 100 vintage commercials for toys based on Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Watch some highlights below, and buckle your seatbelt for the best nostalgia trip ever.

Dagobah Action Playset — This ad for a Return of the Jedi swamp-planet play set shows just how much fun these low-tech Star Wars toys could be: The tree-like environment included a bog for Luke to sink into, a cave for Yoda, and a place where Vader and Luke could have their hallucinatory duel. Best of all, hidden “action levers” could levitate the action figures and accessories as Luke learned to harness the power of The Force.

Hoth Wampa and R2-D2 with Sensorscope — In this gleefully inaccurate commercial for Empire Strikes Back toys, the characters from snowy Hoth frolic on a sunny beach, and the film’s growling snow monster greets his enemies by yelling, “Wampa! Wampa! WAMPA!” A separate commercial advertised the Tauntaun, which had an “open belly feature” allowing Luke to slide into its dead body for warmth.

Creature Cantina — The early Star Wars toy commercials didn’t use music from the actual films, so they all had soundalike tunes — like this ad for the Cantina playset, scored with jaunty music that appears to have been rejected from The Sting soundtrack. This New Hope toy lacks the fun details of future play sets like the Ewok Village and Dagobah (see above), but it does have moving platforms that allow the action figures to knock each other down. And yes, Han pushed first.

Lando Calrissian, Han Solo, Ugnaught, and Lobot Action Figures — This ad probably should have come with a spoiler warning, since it totally give away two major Empire Strikes Back plot points: Lando’s betrayal of the Rebels, and Han being frozen in carbonite. But it gets major props for the kids’ DIY version of Cloud City, composed of kitchen canisters and a water-glass-and-twine freezing chamber.

Boba Fett Mail-Order Action Figure — Here’s an ad that gives us a good look at some of the very first Star Wars action figures, plus the notorious mail-order Boba Fett. (It was originally advertised with a firing rocket, which had already been eliminated for “safety reasons” by the time this commercial aired.) If you had a mail-order bounty hunter in your childhood collection, your parents really loved you.

Check out a video featuring some of the most ridiculously valuable ‘Star Wars’ toys ever made below: