Collecting Star Wars Return of the Jedi Coins

Back around 2010, I started doing video-editing work for a Los Angeles-based artist who restored and sometimes created props and costumes. While most of my work featured the finished product, on one occasion I got to be a part of the restoration process and at the same time view the most impressive private Star Wars collection I’ve ever seen in my life.

Taking up the entire lower floor of a rather large house, there were life-sized statues, just about every Trooper helmet one could identify, a Mos Eisley Cantina bar, a theater room with functioning blast doors, and not one but two Han Solos frozen in carbonite – one outside and one inside. As if that wasn’t enough, the collection was broken up into different display cabinets, not for each movie to that point, but for each planet.

Now, I’m not sure how much that collection has grown since, or if they’ve added coins, but if you wanted to build a set of coins dedicated to Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi it can be done! And all in the space of a PCGS storage box or two, depending on how many characters and varieties you’d like to have.

Movie posters have long been sought after and, much like coins, can be collected by variety. I know when I go to a convention of any kind I make sure to take a few laps through the art areas, and probably go home with more prints than any other single item. So, a numismatic item I find particularly cool is the 40th anniversary movie poster coin seen at the top of this article. The 1983 posters featuring the same art can be worth hundreds of dollars or more depending on the condition – and hey, those aren’t even silver!

An unforgettable image from the film, shown just behind Darth Vader’s helmet on the poster coin, is responsible for one of my favorite and most often-quoted pieces of dialogue in Clerks. It is none other than the second Death Star, which is flanked by Tie Fighters and Star Destroyers and can be seen on the 2011 $2 piece above.

You don’t have to get very far into Return of the Jedi to encounter Jabba the Hutt, the iconic character seen on our next coin. The copper-plated dollar may not be enough to buy Han Solo’s freedom from being encased in carbonite, which you can also find in coin and bar form, at least not without some extra droids thrown in, but it’s pretty safe to say that this piece is a must have for a Star Wars set.

It would be pretty much near impossible to do any sort of meaningful Return of the Jedi recap without Ewoks. These feisty creatures were, and continue to be, very popular characters that spawned not only their own animated series, but also comic books and more figures than can ever be counted. Wicket, perhaps the most famous Ewok of them all, continues to have merchandise coming out to this day and was immortalized, or maybe further immortalized, in 2012 when he received his very own dollar.

Your training is almost complete as we discuss our final coin of this article. I am personally drawn more so to characters that represent the dark side of the force, so finding one with Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader is the best way to close out. That, and it works chronologically with the sequence of the film. You’re likely to notice that this piece also features the portrait of King Charles III, and this is the first year that we have been able to share such a piece with our readers for Star Wars Day.

As mentioned earlier, these are just a few of the characters that appear in Return of the Jedi, and there are most definitely more that can be added already. With new Star Wars films and shows being released regularly, there are likely to be even more in the not-so far far away future.