Why a 1978 Luke Skywalker Figure Could Sell for Up to £20,000

Published 13 October 2026. Words like "tonight" or "next week" refer to that date.

A Luke Skywalker toy was expected to sell for up to £20,000 at auction on 15 October, and the reason is a tiny bit of yellow plastic. That plastic is a double telescoping lightsaber from 1978, and £20,000 isn't even the most one of these figures has sold for. Not by a long way.

I've been through the auction records and the Kenner history, and I even emailed the auction house to find out why. Later in this piece are the three figures worth looking for, the one detail on the lightsaber that turns a pocket money toy into thousands, and the three things you should never do if you find one. First, though, I want you to know where this thing actually came from, because it started life in a camera shop in London.

Luke Skywalker's lightsaber began as an old camera flash handle

The Luke lightsaber on my shelf is a replica, and it's not cheap. It's Padawan Outpost's thin neck Luke, their replica of the green one Luke builds in Return of the Jedi, with the thin neck and the black ribbed grip. It's my favorite thing on the shelf, and to me this is Luke's lightsaber. I'll come back to why.

For the original film, set decorator Roger Christian was rooting through boxes in a camera shop in London when he found an old camera flash handle. He took it back, stuck some strips around the bottom for the grip, put a little bubble strip from an old calculator in the control box, and added a D-ring so Luke could hang it off his belt. Somehow that became one of the most recognizable things in cinema.

I love that about original Star Wars. Half of it is people rummaging through old junk, deciding a camera thing looks a bit spacey, sticking some stuff on it and hoping it works, and then accidentally making film history.

The blue lightsaber was never really Luke's

This is where I get a bit pedantic. When people say Luke's lightsaber, they normally mean the blue one. That's Anakin's. Obi-Wan takes it after Mustafar, hangs on to it for nearly 20 years, and then hands it to Luke while telling him his father wanted him to have it, which is a very generous interpretation of events. Anakin did not leave a note.

Then on Bespin, Vader takes off the lightsaber and the hand holding it, and down it goes. Except obviously it isn't gone. Decades later, it's just sitting in Maz Kanata's castle. Han asks what we're all asking: how did you get that? Maz basically says good question, another time. I'm sorry, but that is a massive copout. And it's worse because they had an answer. Mark Hamill said the original opening of The Force Awakens was the lightsaber, still in Luke's hand, falling through a planet's atmosphere. The hand burns away and an alien picks the lightsaber up. They cut it, so we got another time instead. We're still waiting.

For me, Luke's green lightsaber wins

The blue one's probably the more important lightsaber. Anakin has it, Obi-Wan takes it, Luke inherits it, and Rey ends up with it. But Luke built the green one himself. The blue one's his dad's. The green one is Luke stepping out of that shadow and becoming his own Jedi, and I really like that.

The reason it ended up green is gloriously boring. It was actually meant to be blue. They filmed the fight above the Sarlacc pit, the blue blade kept disappearing into the bright blue sky, and so they just made it green. One of the most famous weapons in Star Wars is green because they needed better contrast.

And before anybody asks whether I had all the original Kenner figures: no. I wasn't born into some sort of Star Wars aristocracy. The full extent of my childhood Star Wars weaponry was the cardboard tube from the Christmas wrapping paper, usually until somebody bent it in the middle. So I haven't got a heartbreaking story about snapping the tiny saber off my 1978 Luke. I didn't have one, which, looking at what they're worth now, is probably for the best.

Kenner sold Star Wars fans an empty box for Christmas

Star Wars came out in May of 1977 and went absolutely wild. Kenner had the toy license. The slight issue was that they hadn't actually made any toys yet. Christmas was coming, parents wanted Star Wars figures for their kids, kids wanted Star Wars figures from their parents, and Kenner hadn't got any Star Wars figures.

So they came up with one of my favorite bits of toy marketing ever: they sold you an empty box. It was called the Early Bird Certificate Package. You got a display stand, some stickers, a fan club card and a certificate that you posted off, and when the figures were finally ready, Kenner mailed you Luke, Leia, Chewie and R2-D2. Picture Christmas morning. Merry Christmas, it's Star Wars. Where's Luke? You've got to wait till February, kid. And somehow it worked. The figures did turn up in the post, and in 1978, among those very first Lukes, was our ridiculously expensive little lightsaber.

The double telescoping lightsaber is valuable because it was a bad design

The brilliant bit is that it's worth a fortune because it wasn't a very good design. That first Luke had a lightsaber built into his arm. You slid the plastic blade out, and then a second, much thinner bit inside it slid out again. That's the double telescoping saber, and Kenner did the same on Darth Vader and Obi-Wan.

Look at how tiny it is. Give that to a seven year old and it's fragile. The little inner bit comes off or it snaps, and it cost more to make. So Kenner fairly quickly decided it was a bad idea and swapped it for a really simple one piece blade. Better toy, catastrophically worse investment, because now the version everybody broke, bent or lost is the one collectors are desperate for.

Slightly nerdier: Luke isn't even the rarest of the three. He was part of that early bird mail out, so there are more double telescoping Lukes out there. The Vaders and the Obi-Wans are even scarcer, which is such a collectibles thing. You found the incredibly rare one, and unfortunately there's an even more incredibly rare one.

The auction Luke is sealed, unpunched and graded AFA 80

I didn't just want to repeat what I'd read online, so I emailed the auction house. I asked how often these opportunities turn up, how you spot a fake saber, whether the important ones still come out of normal family lofts, and my favorite question: what's the worst thing someone could do if they found one tomorrow? They ignored me.

This one has been nowhere near a toy box. It's still sealed on what's called a 12 back card, one of the early cards with the original 12 figures on the back. It's unpunched, so even the little tab for hanging it on a shop peg is intact. It's graded AFA 80 near mint, and it has provenance going back to the family of a General Mills employee who helped send out those original early bird mail orders. The auction house reckons it will go for up to £20,000, which is absurd, and the hammer falls on the 15th of October.

A double telescoping Luke holds the record at $161,457.60

It gets better or worse, depending on whether you're the one who owns it. In 2022, a double telescoping Luke graded AFA 90 went for just over £100,000. Then in 2025 another AFA 90 came up, and on this one the tiny inner blade is fully extended, sitting right there inside the unopened bubble.

That one sold for $161,457.60 for a three and three quarter inch Luke Skywalker. That's the record for a production action figure. It even beat the Darth Vader that went for $130,000 a few months earlier, which feels about right.

I'd keep a double telescoping Luke rather than sell it

So if I found the exact figure tomorrow, would I sell it? No, I would not. I know that's financially ridiculous, but I am an absolute sucker for nostalgia. The stuff we had as kids, games, toys, films, all of it, takes you straight back to who you were when you first loved it. Whether it was any good hardly matters. It's why an old Zelda game can mean more to me than a technically better new one, and why old Warhammer stuff takes me somewhere immediately.

I didn't need a $160,000 Luke Skywalker. I had a wrapping paper tube. So if I somehow found one now, I'm keeping Luke. And I think toys becoming investments is a bit weird anyway. They were made to be opened and smashed together on the carpet.

Three things to check before you throw out old Star Wars toys

Before you tip that box of old Star Wars stuff into a skip, three things. One: who is it? If you're after a double telescoping saber, you want an early Luke, Darth Vader or Obi-Wan.

Two: look at the lightsaber. Is it just one blade, or is there a tiny thinner bit sliding out of it? If there is, stop playing with it. You've had nearly 50 years. "Don't be the person who snaps it today."

Three: the packaging. If by some miracle it's still sealed, especially on one of those early 12 back cards, do not open it. Don't clean it, don't straighten it, and don't check if the saber still moves. Put it somewhere safe and get someone who knows vintage Star Wars to look at it. Fakes exist, and collectors care about everything: the card, the bubble, the saber, where it came from, all of it.

That's my favorite thing about this whole story. It started as a camera flash someone found in a box in London. That became Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, which became a tiny yellow bit of plastic sticking out of a figure a few inches tall. Kenner decided that tiny bit of plastic wasn't very good and stopped making it, and now one of them has gone for over $160,000. "Collecting is completely ridiculous. And I absolutely love it."

Do you have any original Kenner Star Wars figures tucked away, and would you keep one or sell it?