The die cast ships were available to buy through catalogues in the United States and Canada. The toys were shipped in plain mailer boxes with the Wave 1 and Wave 2 ships (apart from the Land Speeder) available through Sears, JC Penney's and Aldens catalogues, with the Land Speeder only available through JC Penney's and Aldens.
Sears boxes can be identified by their 49-59xxx code written on the box, although boxes with these codes can be found with alternitve store stickers.
The first issue boxes included the toy, paper packing and the first issue Kenner collections catalogue, with the later boxes including the second issue catalogue with pink banner and the name of the ship printed on the box. Each later box proudly states 'Star War' in another of Kenner's quality control oversights.
Boxes were plain card and featured the assortment number for each ship with or without the vehicle name. The vehicle name was not printed on the first issue mailers but some 'blank' boxes have the ship name hand written in pen. The boxes can have the text written vertically or horizontally.
Sears Land Speeder box
JC Penney first issue Land Speeder box
JC Penney 2nd Issue Land Speeder box
X-Wing
First issue TIE Fighter
JC Penney second issue TIE Fighter
Darth Vader TIE Fighter
Y-Wing
Photo courtesy of Martijn Emmelot
JC Penney Millennium Falcon
Imperial Cruiser
The Slave-1, Cloud Car and Snow Speeder were only sold in Sears catalogues and each box contained the carded vehicle folded in half and a catalogue. The examples below are an ESB11CN Snowspeeder and an ESB11CU Twin-Pod Cloud Car.
Snowspeeder mailer courtesy of Marc Kuin
Twin-Pod Cloud Car mailer courtesy of Marc Kuin
No attempt has been made to catalogue the store variations on this site - we'll save that for another day.
Additional images courtesy of bchick1022
