Mark Hamill’s box collection
Mark Hamill collects cereal boxes.
The ‘Star Wars’ actor admits his collection of breakfast food packaging drives his wife Marilou York – with whom he has grown-up children Nathan, Griffin, and Chelsea – "crazy" because it takes up so much space.
He said "I love cereal boxes, which drives my wife crazy because they’re really impractical.
"She says, ‘Can we open the flaps and flatten them out so I can store ’em better?’ "
The 65-year-old actor used to be an avid comic book collector, until he realised they were costing him too much and he needed to prioritise the needs of his family, and also because he was unable to sit down and read them if he wanted them to retain their high values.
He told SFX magazine: "You reach a point where you have children and there are priorities – they’ve got to go to private school or you need to get them braces.
"I thought, ‘What the heck am I spending $11,000 on a ten-cent comic book for? It’s crazy.
"I switched to reprints. They don’t have the ads that I love so much and the letters pages. But if you really want to read the material, you can’t do better than the DC Archives or the Marvel Masterworks. So I eventually sort of stopped collecting comic books.
"I remember my accountant calling me and saying, ‘Did you get that ‘Adventure #40′ in the safe deposit box?’ I thought, ‘Look, if you’ve reached a point where the things you’re collecting have to be stored in a bank rather than pulled out and read and passed around and so forth…’
"That’s the thing, because it’s all based on condition. You know, I’d get a book that was so pristine and think, ‘Geez, I can’t even read it now because it’s all about value. I should have bought a copy that was more beat up just to read.’ "
