It’s another POTF2 Saturday!

Despite what you may think, these reviews are prerecorded.  We used to type them out live, but some of you are fast readers, and I couldn’t type quickly enough at 7:05 in the morning.  I’m no good until I have my coffee on deck.  Jackie Gleason would be ashamed, but I will not apologize for taking advantage of modern technology!  Thus I’m writing this on Friday evening and my mood is light.  They’re calling for snow when this review actually publishes, and I will be in a most unpleasant mood in the comments.  Somehow that’s Nomadscout’s fault.  I’m pretty sure he sacrificed a decorative autumn squash to the Norse god Freyr to ensure New Hampshire suffers perpetual winter.  [Editor’s Note:  Gadzooks!  He’s onto me!]

Okay, I’ve just indulged my desire to be silly for the entire opening paragraph because I’m struggling to come up with a lot to say about the figure itself, and I need to get my contractually obligated word count up.  This figure came out at the very tail end of POTF2 in early 2000, but it’s still very much a POTF2 figure.  The ridiculous proportions off the early figures are gone, but the limited articulation remains.  It’s par for the course for the era with flat plane (i.e. swivel) articulation at the shoulders, hips, waist and head.  You’ll be hard pressed to express the articulation at the head, however.  Due to the hard plastic sculpted hood, it takes about 900 foot-pounds of torque to get it to rotate even a few millimeters.  That hood, incidentally, represents the first “hood up” Episode IV Leia in the history of the line.  It was a massive addition at the time.

It’s pretty amazing. In the first five years of the line, we got three figures of the basic white dress Episode IV Princess Leia.  But we had to wait two decades to get the VOTC Leia updated.  Obviously part of the reason for that is the fact that there were only four Star Wars movies at the start of the century.  Now there are eleven movies and a billion television series, but I’m digressing again.  Back to the figure at hand, it was a big deal when it was released as mentioned above.  It was completely devoid of the POTF2 size silliness that plagued the line up until that point.  Not only is the figure daintily proportioned, but the blaster is reasonably sized.  Just two years prior, the Freeze Frame Leia came with a pair of blasters that are bazooka sized.

In something reminiscent of the Kenner era, there is the “arch and dot” paint applications for the eyes.  Another problem is that the interaction with the blaster is far from optimal.  The left hand doesn’t grip it very well.  In another Kenner throwback, the blaster has a tendency to twist in the palm making the barrel point in a skewed direction.  The right hand, which is where Leia would naturally hold the blaster, seems to not have been designed for this purpose.  It’s sculpted with the palm facing down to mimic Leia loading the Death Star plans into R2.  If the figure holds the blaster in that hand, it looks like the stereotypical Hollywood enforcer:

Perhaps my favorite thing about this release is the other figures that were released in its orbit.  This might have been the best job Hasbro has ever done to make sure the contemporaneous offerings worked with each other.  This Leia is meant to interact with the CommTech R2-D2 (the inaccurate restraining bold aside).  The CommTech R2 is meant to interact with the CommTech Luke.  Then this Leia is also meant to interact with the CommTech Vader with interrogation droid.  That’s some pretty good line planning right there.  Zero figures in a vacuum.  And I could keep extending this out.  R2 with the Jawa.  Vader with Motti.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Another notable aspect of this Leia is the soft goods lower robe.  I don’t think it interferes with the aesthetics at all.  I think it looks elegant.  It allows Leia to stoop over a bit to mimic placing the plans into R2.  Due to its age, there are a lot of limiting factors about this figure.  The facial paint applications are crude, and we’ve already discussed the primitive articulation.  But it does strike a decent profile when posing it in the corridor of the Tantive IV as she secrets the plans away in the soon-to-be-jettisoned bucket of bolts.  For that reason, I’m giving it a 5 out of 10.