Nomadscout’s Collection Part V

You've seen some of my stuff. You've seen some of my junk. Now it's time to see some of my whatnots.

Previous parts can be found here if you missed them or are interested in looking again:
PART I: CIS Droids
PART II: CIS Factions and Leadership
PART III: Naboo
PART IV: Coruscant

You're either going to love this installment, or you're going to hate it. Or you're going to fall somewhere in between. Or you might not care at all. Or you might be interested to some degree but get distracted by something more important before you read any further and then forget to come back. But whatever the case, it's definitely going to impact your life in some way, or it might not.

I had a thought of laying out the entire Grand Army of the Republic for this gallery, but very quickly realized I didn't have enough space for my camera to capture it all. Also, it would have taken me about a year and a half to do it. So I decided to break up the GAR into multiple installments. So the first bunch will be the Phase I Clones. These were among the most varied and plentiful of troop types over the history of the line - outdone, of course, by the Phase II Clones. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do all of those guys in one shot themselves. So this whole Clone thing might drag on for a while.

In AOTC, there were 6 clone trooper variants visible on screen, if only for a fraction of a second. These are the basic white grunt, the green sergeant, blue lieutenant, red captain, yellow commander and the clone pilot. Hasbro gave us about 300 variants of each of these, either by simply resculpting them multiple times, or by adding paint variants to include battle damage.

Phase I Clone trooper figures were among the most popular released by Hasbro in the 2002-2004 time frame. The first ones had limited articulation, which was the standard at the time of their debut in 2002. The very first clone was an underarticulated red captain clone from the basic line, which included a tripod-canon accessory made of wet noodles, a strange attempt at an environmental stand (a small "rock" to accommodate one foot peg), and a large blast effect to attache to the end of the blaster rifle. Those blast effects were all the rage in 2002, and were also designed as "Force effects" included with many Jedi figures.

In 2003, fans were treated to the fantastic Genndy Tartakovky Clone Wars Microseries on Cartoon Network. This had its own sub line of Clone Wars figures and toys, with a unique packaging look.

It was during this time, that Hasbro launched the granddaddy of super-articulation, which we discussed in this review of the 2003 Clone Wars 03-50 Clone Trooper. If you've got more time to burn, give that one a read, and it may help with appreciating what was happening with the line at this time.

The most notable effort to provide army building for these clones was the 4 different 4-packs offered by Entertainment Earth. The sets consisted of 4 clean white clones, 4 battle damaged white clones, 4 clean color-ranked clones, and 4 battle damaged color-ranked clones. Over the years Hasbro offered multiple opportunities to add additional variants to your collection, either by putting them into the main line, multipacks, or in the "Legends" or "Greatest Hits" sub-lines.

Along with the 03-50 Super Articulated Clone Trooper, Hasbro used the Genndy series, video games, as well as the plethora of EU comics and books to inspire tons of clone variants beyond the basic ones from AOTC. We got ARC troopers in various colors and loadouts, commandos (from one of my favorite video games), and a few random specialists like the speeder bike clones and scuba clones.

We got clone troopers from the micro series with a unit name: Hawkbat. These guys, in muddy ponchos, were featured briefly in the opening montage of the series, and made enough of an impression to get their own figure.

And let's not forget everyone's favorite, ARC Trooper Captain Fordo (who sadly went unnamed by Hasbro) and his "Muunilist 10" (which require some mixing and matching of weaponry to get a better approximation of what was seen on screen). "Not Fordo" as some collectors refer to him, was originally released as the epic VC54, which came with enough accessories to allow for the coveted "two-fer." Much later, for the 20th Anniversary acknowledgement of The Clone Wars, the figure was re-released by Walmart, but was given a more cartoony paint job and lacked the full accessory loadout of the original VC54. And the opportunity was missed to name him "Fordo."

The display above is led by a trio of important Phase I figures: The aforementioned VC54, the aforementioned 03-50 Clone (Grandfather of TVC), along with Commander Ponds, one of the few Phase I Clone figures with a name. Ponds was included in one of the TRU Geonosis multi-packs. He comes with binoculars, and is the character that apparently ran the Geonosis ground campaign from the command platform that was visited by Yoda.

Show us your Phase I clone collections in the comments below. Or don't. It's entirely up to you. Or is it?

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