How cool that the company who bring you Disneyland are now presenting articles about a place that is Disneyland for Star Wars fans and collectors. Here, Steve explains to Disney readers who may not be familiar with his collection and career just how Rancho Obi-Wan got started.
I didn’t set out to own the world’s largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia, as recently certified by Guinness World Records. It just sort of happened… over a period of 37 years. The more-than-300,000-piece collection is housed in what used to be hen houses that held around 20,000 egg-producing chickens until the early 1970s. I call the place “Rancho Obi-Wan.”
I’ve always had the collecting gene—baseball cards, comic books, matchbook covers, you name it. But growing up with a love of science fiction and fantasy, I gravitated toward older Japanese space toys and robots when I started collecting as an adult. And then, in 1977, my life changed, as did my collecting habits, as Star Wars blew me away. It all started as part of the space toy collection, but after The Empire Strikes Back came out, it really took over. My one-story cantilevered house in the Los Angeles hills eventually became a three-story house; one supplemental storage locker grew to five.
