On the date of this publication, the famous 2025 Battle of Bantha Skull sports ball battle has concluded.  In the course of only five days, three of Bret’s sports teams played three of my sports teams.  Here are the results:

Friday 11/28/25 - Rangers 6, Bruins 2 - Winner Bret (Bret up 1-0)
Monday 12/1/25 - Patriots 33, Giants 15 - Winner Chris (Tied 1-1)
Tuesday 12/2/25 - Celtics 123, Knicks 117 - Winner Chris (Chris wins 2-1)

Congratulations to me!  I’m totally going to make Bret carry my books to class for the rest of the week.  My position as the king of Bantha Skull is unassailable.  Here’s a live look at me right now:

With that out of the way, it’s on to the story of these red carded Jawas.  When I started doing these POTF2 reviews (on weekends) I said there was little value in reviewing the figures themselves.  I will dedicate a few sentences at the end for that.  What I’m more interested in discussing is what was going on in the hobby at the time.  With these Jawas we have another of the 1996 transitional figures.  Starting in 1997, POTF2 would transition to the green card line look.  There were two waves of figures that came out at the tail end of 1996, and they bled over into early 1997.  Those two waves initially came on the red cards, but with a new gold Star Wars logo replacing the silver Star Wars logo spotted on the cards for all of 1995 and the first half of 1996.  Because these two waves came out late in 1996, and the line look was changing in 1997, it was presumed that the red/orange cards would be rare.  In fact, some of the cases even had a mix of the red and green cards.  These Jawas would rapidly transition to the green card look as seen here:

(click for the full sized image)

Needless to say, this quick transition created a feeding frenzy with fans over the late 1996 figures on red cards.  There were eight such figures:

• Death Star Gunner (Collection 1)
• Greedo (Collection 1)
• Tatooine Stormtrooper (Collection 1)
• Jawas (Collection 2)
• Luke Skywalker (Stormtrooper Disguise) (Collection 2)
• Momaw Nadon (Hammerhead) (Collection 2)
• R5-D4 (Collection 2)
• Tusken Raider (Collection 2)

I vividly remember the more desirable transition figures fetching an easy $25 on the secondary market which represented a five times premium over the MSRP at the time.  The dud of the bunch was R5-D4, but even he would fetch $15.  I would say that this type of rampant speculation was unique to the those early POTF2 days, because that era was synonymous with speculation.  If you were hunting brick and mortar during that time, you may have been in front of the pegs and bumped by a technically perfect hip check from a squat mom who was going to pay for her kid’s college tuition with “Monkey Face” Leia figures.  But let’s be honest.  This type of frenzy still exists over presumed short print early card variations.  The VC164 Ceremonial Princess Leia “error” card still fetches roughly $30 on the secondary market.  If Patrick were correct and some samples of the orange pill VC186 - Boba Fett card did slip out into the market, it would be easily into the triple digits on Ebay.

These Jawas were definitely one of the more sought after figures amoung the late 1996 releases.  It had a lot of collectibility factors in its favor.  In addition to the transition card, the Jawas are also army builders plus it has the novelty of being the first ever 2-pack on a basic main line Star Wars card.  For a little while, it was a historic release, but Jawa 2-packs of some sort would become the norm for nearly the next twenty years.  But time has not been kind to the collectibility of this once desirable figure.  Last week I reviewed another former grail with the Theater Edition Luke which I found for $5 at a local consignment shop.  I got these red carded Jawas that same day for the same price:  five smackeroonies.  I would like to find a high-grade sample for my collection, however, as I would for all of these 1996 transition cards.  They’re a good memory of a wacky little moment in the early hobby.  I still remember the first online report of these red cards hitting.  It was at a Toys R Us off the New Jersey Turnpike.  I was heading home from Mayland for a long weekend, and stopped in to check it out.  The only one left.  You guessed it. R5-D4.

The figures themselves are terrible and not terrible.  If you wanted to stick a few of these POTF2 Jawas as static display pieces into your Jawa ranks, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.  They’re not jarringly out of place.  As action figures, however, they’re fairly lacking as you might expect for something that’s almost thirty years old.  They can hold their weapons in straight armed poses. The small blaster has a trigger guard, but the figures don’t have floating trigger fingers.  So the blaster basically floats above the hand.  The larger ion blaster can’t be posed in anything resembling a shooting position.  Another first for these Jawas is that I think this is the first use of the mono-leg in the history of line.  Is that right?  I think it’s right, but I’m not super confident.  Anyway, the single hinge doesn’t provide a lot of functionality.  It can allow the figure to bend over a little, but it doesn’t have enough range of motion for seated poses.

Because you can still sneak this figure into your displays as an inexpensive way to flesh out your Jawa ranks, I’m giving it a 3 score.