Anakin Skywalker was minding his own business.  Just a slave kid on a sandy rock in the Outer Rim, passing the time by doing chores at a junkyard business, and building droids and podracers for fun.  Then those jerks from Naboo and Coruscant had to make an emergency landing outside Mos Espa, and his idyllic life was ruined.  After a few more bumps in the road of life, he eventually became Darth Vader and terrorized the galaxy for over 20 years before changing his mind and throwing the Emperor off a balcony.  But while on Tatooine, he was just a nice little boy who loved his mom, built things, and raced for fun.

A lot of fans had problems with an entire film based on Darth Vader as a happy go lucky boy of 10.  After seeing J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot in 2009, I thought that would have made for a much better template for the opening film of the prequel trilogy.  Lucas could have told the story of The Phantom Menace and Anakin’s childhood in a 10 minute clip at the beginning of the film.  Instead of messing around with politics, treaties, and blockades, it could have picked up the story with Dooku leaving the the Jedi Order, and fracturing the council.  Then we could have spent 85% of the film with Anakin as a rebellious teenager thrust into the declaration of civil war.  Then the second film could have been all about the Clone Wars, instead of cramming it into a 5 minute montage in the third film.  It’s actually because of the Star Trek reboot that I was as excited as I was that JJ was named to helm TFA, and why I’m very hopeful that he’ll wrap up the Skywalker saga in a fitting way.  It’s a lot to ask, but I’m crossing my fingers that JJ can somehow help heal the rift within the Star Wars community that has developed over the past couple of years.  We’ll see how that goes.

But this is a figure review, so please stop distracting me with your jingling keys and shiny objects.  Anakin is a 6PO figure, with swivels at the neck, shoulders, waist, and hips.  The sculpt is actually pretty good otherwise.  Like Padmé, this Anakin has a lot of texture sculpted into the fabric of his clothes.  In addition, there’s a nice application of paint washes that adds depth and realism to the outfit.  Everything he’s wearing looks slightly tattered.  Even the shoes look worn and dirty.  His pose is just slightly askance, and not completely neutral, but it’s not as annoying as the flexed foot Padmé figure.  The face sculpt actually isn’t bad.  The eyes are painted nicely, and the hair has nice variable coloring to it.

For a figure of such small stature, we usually hope to get some great accessories to help balance out our purchase.  I can’t say the included accessories are mind-blowing, but they’re okay.  The best one is the backpack, which is definitely a key part of the outfit Anakin wore for some key scenes.  It fits over his shoulders pretty well.  There are “snaps” at the bottom each shoulder sling to help with moving it on and off the figure, but I had no difficulty leaving everything intact.  Anakin also comes with a grease gun.  Unfortunately, neither of his hands is sculpted particularly well to hold the gun securely, so that’s a negative. 

It’s a neat little figure, but other than a couple of minor re-tool and repaint variants of this figure, it’s basically the best version we have of Anakin in his basic Tatooine outfit.  As Hasbro had given the “Naboo/Youngling” outfit the full TVC treatment with VC80, it’s about time that Hasbro be thinking about an update to this figure.  As it is, this figure gets a 4.  It gets an extra point for the sculpting details and paint, but loses a point because it can’t hold the grease gun well.