Action Figures · Star Wars, vintage Kenner · SW-10

Jawa — the vinyl-cape one

1978, one of the first twelve figures Kenner sold, and at two and a quarter inches the smallest of them by a good margin. Every figure in that first wave cost the same $1.99, which is where this little figure's troubles started — and where its whole story comes from.

This page is SW-10, the Jawa in the vinyl cape. There's a second Jawa record right behind it, SW-10.1, for the cloth-robed version that replaced it. Same sculpt, same blaster; different thing on its back, so a different number. Kenner made that decision for us in 1978, we just write it down.

The photographs further down belong to one seller, samseventy, who said yes when we asked. His figure is why the page can show its work instead of describing it.

How a cape became the whole story

The usual telling goes: the Jawa came with a vinyl cape, Kenner thought it looked cheap, cloth replaced it. The paperwork says the vinyl cape wasn't even the first idea. Kenner's internal change notices — dug up by the Star Wars Collectors Archive from a find of company documents — show the figure was designed to ship with no cape at all, just the sculpted hood and robe. The vinyl cape was added before release as a fix, because a bare two-inch figure looked like poor value next to a Vader at the same price. Then the fix itself was judged too cheap-looking, and a sewn cloth robe took its place. Three costumes for one figure, and the middle one is the famous one.

The vinyl version shipped briefly (the Canadian Star Wars Gallery, which has studied this figure longer than almost anyone, puts it at about six months). The figures were made in Hong Kong — the stamp is on the left leg, G.M.F.G.I. and all, General Mills still owning Kenner then — and the vinyl Jawa shows up first on the earliest 12-back cards, with later finds on 12B and 12C backs. By the time the cloth robe arrived it needed a bigger bubble to fit in, which is one of those details that sounds like nothing until you're trying to authenticate a carded one.

Abroad it gets stranger, in the way this hobby always does. Australia's Toltoys sold a vinyl Jawa in a darker cape, close to the colour of Ben Kenobi's, and kept selling it onto Empire Strikes Back cards. Britain's Palitoy carded one too; collectors argued for years about whether it truly existed before accepting it, and the known carded examples are counted in single digits. France's Meccano version is real only on the rectangular 12-back — the square-card Meccano ones that surfaced in the nineties are, by the consensus of people who have handled both, all fake.

Which brings up the fakes, because this cape may be the most copied piece of plastic in the hobby. The classic fraud is almost elegant: a Ben Kenobi cape is the same material, so you cut one down to Jawa size. What gives it away is the colour (Kenobi's vinyl runs a deeper reddish brown; a real Jawa cape sits close to the figure's own colour), the armholes (factory ones are tight, sometimes torn from being tight; hand-cut ones are loose), and the texture — one side of a genuine cape carries a fine crosshatch that makes a faint zipping sound under a fingernail. The Ben cape zips too, being the same stuff, which is why the tests have to be run together and not one at a time. None of this is do-as-we-say expertise; it's the accumulated findings of the Canadian gallery, the old 12back.com feature, and the variant guides, and our footer credits them by name.

The seller called the figure on this page mint. We graded it Near Mint, because that's as high as our standard lets a photograph go — mint is an in-hand call, and nobody here has held this figure. The cheap fix Kenner apologised for with a cloth robe is now the version people cross oceans for; a carded one was reported at about $30,000 at Heritage in 2024. The robe, meanwhile, sells for the price of a pizza. The market has a sense of humour, it's just a slow one.

The photographs

What we still owe this figure

A full documentation set is seven stations: front, both profiles, back, top, bottom, and a macro of the factory stamp. This set fills the front and the back and gives the cape its own detail. Still owed: both profiles, the top, the bottom, and the stamp macro — which is a pity in one specific way, because the stamp is on the left leg and this figure's legs are right there in frame six, just not close enough to read. An owed photograph stays on the record as a want until a reshoot or the next generous seller fills it. It doesn't get papered over with a near miss.

The sales trail so far

Our price bot writes down completed sales with their dates. Not an average, not a valuation — the trail. Six sales were recorded for this figure and its cloth variant in the bot's first sweep; then we audited all three "vinyl" ones against their listings, and the audit is part of the record:

A sixth sale, first recorded at $60.25 as a probable vinyl, was caught by the audit: the seller's own description said the cape was a modern reproduction and the blaster was repro too. The title claimed; the description confessed. It doesn't stand in the trail above — it stands in the reproduction lane below, where sales with reproduction parts are priced separately and labeled, because the stand here is against the undisclosed kind, and a disclosed repro price is a fact a buyer can use. That's also why the bot now reads descriptions before it files. The $2,381 graded figure is a loose Jawa in a grading case, not a carded one; at carded money it would have been the bargain of the decade, and it wasn't.

Reproduction lane — priced separately, always labeled

Same figure, same month: $750 with an original cape that a dog once chewed, $60.25 with a reproduction. That gap is the whole reason the lane exists.