Hey fellow readers and collectors,
usually I only blog about my newest acquisitions, but today I want to talk about something completely different. Today it’s all about: the man Kim Simmons. If you don’t know him by now, he is the man who took many of the photos for Kenner’s packaging, sales slides and those images used for internal use of all the different figures / spaceships / packaging / prototypes / whatever-you-name it. He has had all the sought after prototypes in hand, to name a few: Rocket firing Boba Fett, the black cape + golden belt Squidhead and red cape Bib Fortuna. I can remember all kinds of ads from my childhood that made me tell my parents that we need to go to the city NOW to get all the different figures. And he’s also responsible for the photos that were used on the packaging of our beloved toys of Star Wars up through 2000. Until this day I remember standing in front of the toy shop, looking at the box of the B-Wing, wishing I could own one to recreate the scenes pictured on that box. But unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to have one. (Side note: Now that I’m grown up, of course I have fixed this.
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Kim goes by a nickname: TheManwhoshotLukeSkywalker. This very cool nickname was first given to Kim in the first edition of the Star Wars Galaxy Collector magazine. I own a copy and I can only encourage you to grab a one too if you are interested in Kim’s work. Among other interesting things, in the interview in this magazine he talks about setting up the shot below:

Some of you who know me to some extent or have followed my blog for a while, you know that I became addicted by Kim’s work and have started a small collection. Sometimes I’m lucky and some of his work becomes available for sale, but unfortunately this doesn’t happen very often. I am trying to acquire everything that I can get my hands on, but sometimes other people are just faster than me and I believe that a lot of stuff is sold ‘behind the curtain’ and not in public so to speak. Since I have started collecting I have missed out on a few occasions, much to my demise. So far I have acquired 3 8×10″ transparencies and 16 35mm slides that Kim produced back in the days and I’m proud to own them. As I’m writing about 20 new items are on their way to me, but much to your surprise maybe these are not Star Wars related.
(Hints can already be found on my blog.)
The coolest thing about Kim is, that until to this day he is still passionate about his old work too, just the same way as we collectors are, and he will email you with answers to some of those questions you have had. He has painstakingly done as many high-res scans as he could and archived most, if not all, photos he took in the past. Plus if you have film that was sold to you, if you loan it to him he will more then likely give you a serious discount on a print you order when he returns your film. He offers a great service: You can buy prints of his work in different sizes, so for example you could display them together with your focus figure or print a poster of a pic used in your favorite ad from the past and hang it on your wall. You can view a selection of prints you can get on his website, so head over there now and take a look: http://themanwhoshotlukeskywalker.com/. If you don’t find that image you have been looking for, don’t despair and show no fear, there is a huge chance that Kim can provide you that print. Simply head over to his Facebook page and leave a comment – Kim will read it and help you out: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Themanwhoshotlukeskywalker/423659341026868?fref=ts
As always – thanks for reading.