Clone Wars
Clone Trooper
Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Fire. The Wheel. Farming. The Compass. The Printing Press. The Light Bulb. Antibiotics. The Transistor. 03-50 Clone Trooper.
This is it. This is THE Star Wars action figure. By most measures, this is the one that must be considered the first truly “modern” effort by Hasbro. It is the grandfather of The Vintage Collection.
By 2003, Hasbro’s sculpts had seen significant improvements from the “He-Man” style of the mid-90’s as they moved to the the more realistic approach of the day. Accessories had also improved, with more realism and movie-accuracy. Even a few scene specific figures made their way into the line. Articulation evolved more slowly. Many figures still had somewhere between 5-10 points of articulation, and most of those would be of the swivel or hinge variety. Extra articulation in a particular figure was generally intended to allow the collector to make one additional meaningful pose, and not much more.
What most of us Star Wars collectors (at least those whose collecting experience never expanded beyond Star Wars properties) didn’t really think possible at the 3.75” scale were realistic articulation points, so that we could pose them holding their weapons with two hands, fighting, crouching, kneeling, sitting, looking up and down, etc. We could either have a nearly neutrally posed figure, or one that was forever frozen in an exaggerated action stance. Our little plastic men were limited, more or less, to poses as per the way Hasbro packaged them.
Then one day in 2003, if you were extremely lucky, you walked into the Star Wars section of your local toy store of choice and were greeted by a featureless alien monolith. You approached cautiously and missed probably your only chance aggressively and looked at it closely on the peg. There it was, perched majestically among mere mortal figures consisting of limited articulation, snapshot action poses, garish and childlike accessories, magnet gimmicks, and button-activated action features. You reached for it, and upon touching the card, a bolt of lightning surged through your soul, giving you knowledge of an advanced civilization that promised a new and better way of life; a society in which collectors no longer needed to be bound by inferior, kid-friendly, near-statues. This…this was an ACTION figure. There was no going back.* We had seen the future, and it had a name. Its name was 03-50 Clone Trooper.
Clone Trooper was nearly impossible to find. I was living in Manhattan at the time, and my toy runs basically consisted mostly of hitting up the Times Square Toys R Us. I found it once. I was an army builder, and haunted the store constantly, but only managed it that one time. While I have around 10 SA Phase I clones today, only one of them has that telltale sign of lacking peg holes in the feet. It has also yellowed a bit in the almost 17 years since I bought it. Both of those problems (seemingly) were corrected in later releases of this sculpt. The yellowing obviously wasn’t a consideration at the time of purchase, and the missing peg holes were a minor convenience - if even that. It was otherwise a truly brilliant figure.
Before there was “Wookiee Rage!” and other epithets stickered all over figure bubbles, the Clone Trooper package highlighted the contents being “Super Poseable!” And boy, was it! Clone Trooper sported an unheard of 14 points of articualtion. And not any ol’ articulation. Most of the important points were of the ball joint variety: neck, waist/torso, shoulders, elbows, knees, and ankles. Only the wrists and hips had swivel joints. While premium articulation in the wrists was still a very long way off, the hips are the only thing that really limit the poses you can coax out of this figure. But I don’t think that in 2003 that was a reasonable gripe, especially considering everything else happening here.
Clone Trooper could perform an outstanding Two Handed Weapon Grips (THWG). While some figures had previously been pre-posed to do this, and while there may have been a handful of figures that could otherwise be manipulated to accomplish this in the most rudimentary manner, the Clone Trooper did it with outstanding realism. The ball jointed wrists and hyper-articulated necks allow today’s TVC troopers to perfectly aim down the sights, but up to this point in 2003, nothing even close to this kind of thing was imaginable in a Star Wars figure.
The ball joints aren’t quite as well done as today. It’s tricky to get the knees and elbows to reach 90 degrees, and more than that is impossible. The hips, with the sculpted armor, struggle to keep up with the poses that the knees and ankles want to achieve. The hands are a little to stiff to easily grip the weapons - not as awful as some of the stormtroopers that would follow this figure. Those rigid hands could drive a collector to murder. But again, none of this was noticeable at the time. The only real knock you give this figure in 2003 would be the lack of accessories. It came with only the DC-15S blaster. It could have come with DC-15A rifle as well, but who really cares?
These are all complaints that only have any meaning in hindsight. This figure not only launched the modern standard, it also still serves valiantly in displays today. It is worthy of recognition in the archives of the Jedi Order. In fact, it still holds up today. It lacks the modern hyper-articulation of the VC45 Clone Trooper, but everyone has an opinion on the overall aesthetics of that one. While I’ve warmed up to it, I still believe this 2003 veteran has a better overall look, with armor proportioned for an actual human, rather than an emaciated ghoul. So by most objective measures, it’s been surpassed. But subjectively this may still be the standard go-to Phase I clone trooper for your displays.
Clone Trooper is the very first figure released by Hasbro that meets the necessary criteria to score a baseline of 7 Bantha Skulls for a modern super-articulated figure. It was so far beyond anything else we had seen to that point, that on a 2003 scoring system, it would be a 10 while the next best figure available up to that point would probably be a 7. (Maybe that beautiful hunk of plastic, Ephant Mon, would be somewhere in between.) I will award this milestone achievement in Star Wars action figure history an honorable 8. It would be a tough call if, all else being equal, I had a choice between having 20 of these figures or 20 VC45’s. I might go with this one.
In 2012, towards the end of the first TVC run and coinciding with the disastrous glut of TPM3D merchandise, Hasbro started to backpedal on all the progress that was initiated by this Clone Trooper. Collectors have been disillusioned since. We demand improvement, and await the day of the arrival of the next monolith. That day may never come. This figure may be a unicorn, and it changed collecting (and collectors) forever.
*Until Hasbro went back starting in 2012.