The legendary Mark Hamill may be reprising his role as Luke Skywallker in huge new Star Wars movies these days, but he’s still keeping busy in plenty of other ways. Besides his acclaimed voice acting work -- he’ll once more be playing the Joker in the upcoming Justice League Action animated series, among several other current roles –- and his occasional appearances on The Flash as the Trickster, Hamill has launched a new series, Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest, on the recently-launched Comic-Con HQ subscription service - you can watch the first episode right now via DC Comics' YouTube channel

Mark Hamill's Pop Culture Quest.

(L-R) DC Comics' Jim Lee speaks to Mark Hamill about his own prized collectibles in the first episode of Mark Hamill's Pop Culture Quest.

On the series, Hamill -- an avid toy and memorabilia collector himself -- travels to see different notable collections, from classic Godzilla and other Japanese-created toys kept in a fan’s home to the iconic Batman comics and items on display at DC Comics’ headquarters. I spoke to Hamill about how the series came to be, what it’s like for him to interview the subjects, and more, including his own personal history as a collector.Well, it just sort of organically came out of the fact that I've realized that I couldn't keep collecting anymore. There's just no more room! I mean, when you find yourself renting space, it's ridiculous. I'm 90 minutes [away]... You know, it's like this is a drive and I just open this big garage and look and it's just the antithesis of what collecting is all about, which is appreciating these things but sharing them. I don't slab comic books. I want to get them out and read them and pass them around, show them to other people. Howard Kazanjian’s been a friend of mine since Jedi. He was over at my house one day and he was in my den, whatever you want to call it -- the TV room, the man cave -- and I mentioned that people had asked me to host these shows about UFOs and the obvious, space travel, or even paranormal and ghosts and thinks like that. I always said, “Well, I'm interested in these things. It's probably a show I would watch, but you know even though I would love to have seen a ghost or a UFO, I've never seen one! It doesn't mean I'm not interested, but it just doesn't grab me." He looked around my room, which is chockablock with toys and action figures and lunch boxes and board games and Aurora model kits and he said, “You know, this should be the show.” And it just went from there. So it's basically an excuse for me to be able to go into other people's homes and look at their stuff.I know, it's just crazy, isn't it?We've got the attic filled, the basement filled, the guest house is filled… We're looking around and I said to my wife, “We should have bought that property next door when it was for sale a few years ago,” but we just didn't think that far ahead.Oh yes, absolutely. That's part of the fun. I thought, “Boy, I could really get used to this.” You're right. It's role reversal. One thing that I discovered... Because you look at the schedule and it’s like, “We're going to do a show about a guy who collects shoes!?" That doesn't really grab me, but then you meet the person and it's really the shared trait that all collectors have that you relate to and then you hear the personal stories of how they got started on whatever collection they have and that's the connective tissue. So that's part of the fun. I don't personally collect some of these things, but I love seeing other people who do.You read the letters to the editor when you were a kid, you know, and they'd say if your letter is printed you'll receive a page of original art and maybe even a visit to the DC Comics offices in New York. Or even the bullpen, the mighty Marvel bullpen... I've just had this fantasy in my head of what it must be like to see all these people drawing these books. You'd see photographs and so forth but it really sort of fired my imagination. It was one of the first things I tried to do when I was living in New York doing a lot of theater, and I forget how it came about exactly... Oh, I know what it was! They asked me to write the introduction to Son of the Demon, a collection of Ra's al Ghul stories. Denny O'Neil was the editor. And of course I was in awe of him and I said, jeez, I don't know if I can do this. I don't have ghostwriters and it takes me forever. I think that he might go over every word and that's why I couldn't be a professional writer because I can't make deadlines, but they gave me enough lead time. But it was really an excuse to find a reason to go visit those DC offices. And it couldn't have been nicer.I met all these people... Mike Carlin, Joe Orlando, Jennette Khan. Joe Orlando goes back to the EC days of William Gaines! Like you said, your kid in the candy store analogy is particularly apt because I just couldn't get enough of it. This was actually the first time I'd ever been to the new offices out here on the west coast. That [DC Comics] archive we saw, that could have been the whole show down there. I mean, I have to find a balance. I'm fortunate that I'm working with people that really know what they're doing. [Executive Producer] Scott Kinney especially is a bonafide collector and somebody who is one of us. He's on staff and all these other people are very good at their jobs but he has that mentality and he has a collection of his own. I have to find a balance between really getting into the weeds of the minutiae of all of this stuff and also making it accessiblee to people that are just not as obsessed and compulsive as I am. [Laughs] But we're just finding ourselves. Look, this is not anything more than a chance to go to my happy place. Hopefully it's a nice diversion for people that just have a few minutes to spare.I was one of seven kids and we moved a lot. I went to nine schools in 12 years, so I was constantly coming home and finding out... My mom would pack us while we were at school and we'd get to the new place and I'd say “Where is my Beany and Cecil talking hand puppet?” And she'd say, “Oh, I gave it to Goodwill.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because, come on, you're 11 years old. That's a baby toy. Think of all the poor starving children in China that'll appreciate a talking Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppet”. It made no sense, of course. Basically, when I struck out on my own, I just started seeing things that I had when I was a kid that I wanted back.The first big jump into collecting that I did -- in fact, we just found the receipt for all the items that I bought -- it was $124 dollars, and it was like 11 Beatles items. The Yellow Submarine lunchbox... there weren't any thermoses, but still. I got the bobbing head dolls [and more]. Any one of these items is now more than $124. This was back in 1970 when they broke up. I only collected their music, I never collected The Beatles Flip your Wig game, or the Revell model kits, or any of this stuff. I’d go, “That's silly, that's for girls!” So I didn't buy any of the toys or anything like that, just the records. Then when I realized they were gone, suddenly that became very interesting to me. It's 1970, you're only a few years off from when these toys were new and it just had a sudden appeal for me. So I bought them. She’s going off to college and I looked at all the stuff and I said, "What do you think this is all worth?" She said, "Well, I don't know..." She did all these numbers and said, "Do you think $124 is fair?" I said, “Sounds good to me!” This was back in the day when that seemed like a lot of money. Now I look back and think wow, what a deal I got. The Beatles memorabilia was the earliest stuff.Yeah, and then at another point early on in my marriage, some dentist from Maryland was selling his Aurora monster model kit collection - a huge number of pieces. The figure kits, Frankenstein, Dracula, all the way through later model kids that I never even considered buying like Batman and Penguin and so forth. And he said, basically, "Here's the ones that I don't have." Which was Oddjob, blah blah blah. There were, like, six! He had every other toy! There must have been 60 or 70 kits and I bought them all at once for $30,000. My wife said, “Oh my god, that's a ridiculous amount of money!” But it was this gigantic Frankenstein, it was just all of them. The Batmobile... just all of it.Yeah, but that's not my favorite way to do it. I like going piece by piece and really searching. The internet's really changed collecting because now you can just go online. The old days you had to go to flea markets and garage sales and yard sales and things like that. I used to love to go on vacation to some oddball place because you'd go to the local five-and-dime, or you'd look in the newspaper and see on the way to location shooting, "Oh, look, that lady's having a yard sale" and you can ask your driver to stop there on the way back because that's the real fun. The real quest of the show is tracking down that elusive item that you think you'll never see. Adventure #210, the first appearance of Krypto, you know? I always will pick one book to look for, just some odd book that's scarce or something like that and some of them I've never, ever gotten my hands on and some I eventually saw, but that's the real thrill in the quest. In the hunt. Now you can go online and just go to ebay or wherever. It's changed a bit. I don't want to sound like an old fogey. "In my day, we had to do X, Y, and Z!" But it has really changed the nature of how you collect.

Mark Hamill's Pop Culture Quest is available on Comic-Con HQ.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman