Steve Sanweet’s Rancho Obi-Wan is set to merge with Duncan Jenkins’ Sithsonian, Guz Lopez’s Bobacabana and the Imperial Archives of Lisa Stevens & Vic Wertz to create a super-collection of Star Wars memorabilia, housed in a new permanent home.
This huge announcement will be formally announced at the Rancho Obi-Wan Fundraiser currently taking place at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and was exclusively revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco has the chance to become the forever home of Princess Leia’s metal bikini and more than a million other treasures collected by aficionados around the U.S. The owners of four major private collections of Star Wars memorabilia are planning to merge their holdings and create a nonprofit museum that would display the items to the public for the first time ever.
Dubbed the Saga Museum of Star Wars Memorabilia, the envisioned super-collection would see the largest trove, Petaluma’s Rancho Obi-Wan, combined with Kansas City’s Sithsonian and two collections in the Seattle area, the Bobacabana and the Imperial Archives.
“We’re all childless and we’re all getting up there in age,” said Rancho Obi-Wan owner Steve Sansweet, 79, of himself and his fellow collectors. His estimated 400,000-plus movie relics — including original set pieces and concept art — would anchor the new museum. “We’ve all wondered about what’s going to happen with our collections when we’re no longer here.”
Those questions came to the fore during the pandemic, when Sansweet and his fellow collectors could no longer show off their life’s work to delighted visitors. That is when conversations about the future ramped up, and the idea of a museum was born.
Sansweet said each collection brings something unique, with a focus on props or prototype toys or other ephemera. The museum, if realized, would bring together more than roughly 1.5 million items, relics of Star Wars fandom stretching back nearly half a century.
Lisa Stevens and Vic Wertz’s Imperial Archives, for example, includes unreleased and hugely valuable treasures, such as three extremely rare and never-released Boba Fett toy figurines with rocket firing action.
“I would love to have this become something that’s a bit of a legacy that we can leave behind when we go,” Stevens, 61, a retired executive at Dungeons and Dragons maker Wizards of the Coast, said.
Combining the collections would ensure those painstakingly gathered items live on, “instead of having them go to the wind,” said Duncan Jenkins, whose Sithsonian includes everything from toy concept sculptures to branded Star Wars TV dinners from the 1970s.
The San Francisco Bay Area, which Sansweet called “the spiritual heart of Star Wars,” would be just the place to make sure the collections endure, he said.
The area’s deep ties to the fantasy universe include Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, and the Lucasfilm headquarters in San Francisco’s Presidio, complete with its Yoda statue.
Lucas was rebuffed by San Francisco and the Presidio when he tried to construct a museum of his own there. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will showcase a range of works from Diego Rivera and Norman Rockwell to Star Wars concept art creator Ralph McQuarrie, is under construction in Los Angeles and set to open next year.
The collectors said they have already started fundraising the $2 million they will need to identify a home for the archive. That money would go towards hiring a museum design firm, architects, and undertaking a capital campaign to fund construction.
And yes, the collection will include Bobacabana owner Gus Lopez’ trove of one-of-a-kind items, such as the original movie-used model of the Death Star and that infamous metal bikini.
“The Bay Area is a wonderful area in terms of fandom,” Lopez, 59, said, calling it the “birthplace” of the multigenerational megahit. “The films grew out of the area,” he said.
The group is surveying the country for just the right fit, but “The No. 1 choice is San Francisco,” said the group’s spokesman, David Perry. They plan to send out requests to cities this year, and hope to have a location identified by the middle of 2025.
After San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and New York are all on the list.
Asked if any locations in particular had caught his eye, Sansweet noted that “Downtown San Francisco needs some filling in. It’s all according to whether we can strike some deals.” After raising initial funding, Sansweet said the collectors hope to put together a popup museum to raise awareness and excitement about the project.
The planned museum has already begun mulling available locations around San Francisco. Perry said they were looking at spaces in the recently closed wax museum at Fisherman’s Wharf and the former flagship Gap store in the Flood Building at the Powell Street cable car turnaround, in a “very preliminary” way.
Karin Flood, chief executive of the Flood Corp. which owns the Flood Building, said in a text “We haven’t talked to them. It would be great though.”
More on this breaking story over the coming days.
Learn more about Rancho Obi-Wan and how you can support this nonprofit museum that houses the world’s largest Star Wars memorabilia collection, as certified by Guinness World Records in 2014, here.
