As I’ve written in the past, R5-D4 is Star Wars royalty.  His malfunction during the droid sale at the Lars homestead is key to sending Luke on his hero’s journey, and according to A Certain Point of View, that malfunction was intentional so that R2 could complete his mission.  R5-D4 is one of the few astromech droids throughout the saga to have a distinct personality, having been established as a jittery fraidy cat in The Mandalorian.  Additionally R5 was one of the eight illustrious 20-back figures in the vintage Kenner line.  Anyone who experienced that first ever expansion in the Star Wars line will forever have a soft spot in their hearts for those eight figures.  They taught us that world building didn’t mean just vehicles and play sets.  It also meant secondary and tertiary characters.

For the reasons listed above, it’s no surprise that R5-D4 is on his fourth release in the modern Star Wars lines, but the impetus for this specific offering lies elsewhere.  It owes it’s existence to the release of The Mandalorian’s N1 Starfighter.  Once Peli Motto sells R5 to Mando to assist him in his quest to find the Mines of Mandalore, Grogu must give up his rumble seat, and R5-D4 takes his spot in the familiar navi-droid socket.  Rather than sculpt an entire cavity for the droid, as we have seen on the X-Wing mold, Hasbro opted to take advantage of the Build-A-Droid (BAD) sculpt.  Only the BAD head is used to plug into the socket.  The implementation is perfect because it gives the impression that the droid is sitting flush and securely in its receptacle, as opposed to the way the droid figures bounce around in the functioning astromech sockets.  The end result is that the release of Mando’s N1 necessitated a re-release of the BAD R5-D4, and thus VC303 was born.

Some fans might think this is a straight repack of VC40 - R5-D4, but there have actually been some changes that I personally consider significant.  The biggest of which is that the garish “port holes” that blighted the sides of the Build-A-Droid torsos have been filled in.  The BAD concept was introduced for the Legacy Collection in 2008 when kids still played with Star Wars toys.  The extra holes were for play value so that imaginative kids could carelessly created non-canonical four-legged nonsense droids, or opt for really tall two-legged astro-droids by only using the lower ports, which is equally as ridiculous.  Now in 2023, the 3.75” super articulated Star Wars line is the domain of the serious and distinguished collector with a carefully curated collection that bears the highest fidelity to what is seen on screen.  Those extra holes simply wouldn’t do, so eighty-sixing them is an aesthetic win of the highest order.

That is not the end of the changes.  The paint apps were also tightened up.  Most significantly, a 3.75” R5-D4 finally got the three red stripes on the back of his lower torso.  As you can see from the comparison shots above, this detail had been missed on every single prior modern release.  Ironically, Kenner, who otherwise gave accuracy a wide berth during the vintage era, actually managed to capture this detail:

The initial press images for this release did not show these three stripes.  We’d like to think that we played a small role in Hasbro finally capturing this detail by writing THIS ARTICLE, but the true credit goes to the will of the community.  Many collectors were raising this concern as soon as the press images were revealed.

Because of these improvements, I’m finally prepared to call this release definitive.  Despite this lofty designation, I’m only giving it a 7 out of 10 score because it doesn’t do anything extra.  It’s just the generic BAD release. It would have been nice if some homage to the bad motivator was paid to give this some R5-D4 specificity beyond just the paint applications.  For that reason, I don’t think this R5-D4 fully supplants 2006’s TSC 032 - R5-D4.  You may want to also keep that figure on hand for your “purchase of the droids” diorama.

At the time of this writing, VC303 - R5-D4 is sold out on Hasbro Pulse, and the initial run sold out on Entertainment Earth, but they are still accepting preorders for February HERE (sponsored).  I have to wonder it the Pulse sell through indicates that the tooling is going to be pressed into service for the pipelined R2-D2.  If you’re interested in this R5-D4, you might not want to slow play it.