The San Francisco Chronicle Visits Rancho Obi-Wan

To pass through the gates, walk past the chicken coop and into the first building is to enter a world where is everything is about, or seen through the lens of, “Star Wars.”

After crossing the themed floor mat and ascending the stairs, fans are welcomed by a recording of none other than Obi-Wan himself: “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world,” booms a recording of James Arnold Taylor, who voiced the Jedi in the animated TV series “The Clone Wars.”

But Taylor’s voice hasn’t greeted visitors since last year, when Sansweet was forced to close the museum because of the pandemic, unable to share his treasures in person with the museum’s more than 1,000 members from 47 countries. Museum tours are normally open to members who pay a monthly fee and can also buy tickets for their guests.

The ranch plans to reopen for its volunteer docent-led tours in early 2022 but will likely feature smaller, masked groups that wander through the shelves of memorabilia that include everything from practice lightsabers from the original sets to toys and art from all over the world.

Since the closure, Sansweet and a small team have busied themselves cleaning and reorganizing the collection of more than 300,000 items — only about 1% of which are on display at any given time. There is also now an online museum with photos and videos to help hungry fans connect with the collection, a pandemic-induced necessity.

“I think we all sort of wondered about what was going on and when this would end,” early in the pandemic, Sansweet said.

The collection is meant to tell the story of “Star Wars” fandom as much as of the saga itself. But without any visitors for almost two years, the museum has been trying to find ways to connect with the franchise’s legions of fans. After all, what is a museum but storage shed if no one is there to see its Great Pit of Carkoon bathroom, complete with everything from Scent of a Wookiee cologne to a jar of Admiral Ackbar’s Collector’s Envy Reliever pills for the faint of heart.

“The entire point of it is to share it with people,” Sansweet said of his collection. “It is absolutely about the people and the sense of community,”

It’s not hard to see what he means.

Rancho Obi-Wan has all the items, large and small, you might expect in a museum created by an inveterate “Star Wars” collector, from original action figures under glass to a life-size Darth Vader mannequin complete with a helmet and mask used in the original films.

But the bulk of the collection consists of pieces from all over the world made either by or for devotees of that galaxy far, far away.

Those include “Star Wars”-inspired items like Storm Trooper-themed golf bags from Japan that sit in the same room as a piñata from Mexico festooned with purple streamers in the likeness of a bantha — the woolly mammoth-like creature from the original films.

“I think Lucasfilm and George (Lucas) were very smart in letting fans have an ownership role,” Sansweet said. “Other major genres would sue fans for doing newsletters and things like that.”

Perhaps the best illustration of that sits in the museum’s library, a sort of preamble to the main collection which houses, among other items, the 17 books on “Star Wars” that Sansweet himself wrote or co-authored, starting decades ago when he was still a journalist at the Wall Street Journal.

The story of the museum and collection dates back almost to the release of the first film, well before Sansweet took on his first job with Lucasfilm as director of content management and head of fan relations.

Advancing past framed, original movie posters, Sansweet knocks on the door at the end of a hall and calls out to the famed composer who scored the original film, “John? Oh, Mr. Williams?” In response the door opens and the full scope of Sansweet’s collections collides with the senses as the “Star Wars” main theme crescendos.

Racks extend to the back of a long room brimming with busts, toys, kitsch and figurines large and small. Along with the life-sized Vader mannequin, four animatronic musicians from the cantina scene in the first “Star Wars” film sway and belt their catchy anthem.

he original door to that cantina is here, too, Sansweet rescued it from ignominy as part of a chicken coop in Tunisia. He said his days of big spending sprees are mostly behind him, but rescuing movie artifacts and snatching action figures off the shelves built the core of what became the museum.

There is also a film-used costume crotch piece that once belonged to the bounty hunter droid 4-LOM. Sansweet bought it when an insistent collector waylaid him outside the Pasadena Convention center and sold it to him out of the shotgun seat of his car for $400, to make rent.

“That was strange,” Sansweet said. But “where else would you see the crotch of a bounty hunter from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ ?”

Another rack holds dozens, if not hundreds, of dolls and figures of the Baby Yoda character from “The Mandalorian” series Disney created after it bought the franchise in 2012. While some purists decry the prequels and never-ending spinoffs, Sansweet doesn’t see it that way.

“I love everything,” Sansweet said. “I accept the episodes. and I love ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘The Clone Wars’ animation.”

Although Sansweet hasn’t yet made an appearance in any of the films or series, he’s come close and been on a number of the sets, including “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” where he rescued scraps of clothing from the funeral pyre of Obi-Wan’s mentor Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson.