To protect his license, Harry (Factors Inc) was always on the lookout for pirated STAR WARS goods. Harry, more than anyone else, would spend his time scouting for goods which were illegal. When he found stuff, he'd call me up with the hope I'd run out and slap a Cease & Desist on 'em. Nope. 'Stead of doing what Harry wanted, I'd make a note of it in a little notebook I carried around all the time, and when I had the time, I'd check out the pirated goods usually by going down the list. Suppose this is like Kenner collectors who are always on the lookout checking out what other people are paying for goods. You want to maintain your turf so you can protect your interest. As is the case with Harry, back in 1977, dealing with people protecting their interest can get a little tiring.

When Harry Geissler (Factors Inc) was negotiating the T-shirt license, he came by one day with these proto shirts he had made up. He had this wild fantasy he could give them to Marcia and Carrie so they could be photographed in his shirts. Right, dream on, Harry... Woulda been nice if he got Marcia's spelling right.

Star Wars appearances

When STAR WARS was released, I expected it to do well, but did not expect the staggering, overwhelming response. No one did. In our wildest dreams, we could not have predicted how massive a hit we had on our hands.

The week the film opened, we were swamped with phone calls. Everybody wanted a piece of us. We were a very small office, and could barely keep up with things we had planned, much less this onslaught.

We had agreed to do certain appearances and promotions, but after the film opened, George felt that we had to be careful to preserve our image. For that reason, we had some appearances scheduled which were cancelled. We paid a cancellation fee rather than, as George said, cheapen our characters.

There were allegedly appearances made by STAR WARS characters, but I can tell you right now, most of them weren't authorized. Folks sprang up out of the woodwork claiming to be representative and making appearances. We tried stopping them, but undoubtedly, only caught a fraction of the guys out there posing as STAR WARS.

This is a stat of one of the few authorized Vader appearances which was done for Factors Inc, to promote the T-shirt sales.

Factor's T-shirts

Somewhere I had a box of Factor's T-shirts. Most of them were small -- well, let's put it this way. A LG back then is probably a MED today. Besides all of us being thinner, clothing sizes was less generous. And the other thing was there was a lot of polyester. A lot of poly-cotton blends. I didn't like wearing polyester because after a long day, boy, you could really smell ripe! Someone told me there were the Factor's iron on decals still floating around, which, while not 100% vintage, could at least give you a shirt which fit.