In the Star Wars universe, one’s social standing was directly proportional to the stiffness of one’s hat.  Luke’s floppy hat was the floppiest in all the land.  It let you know he was the lowliest of peasants.  Of course not a word of that is true, but when this wave was announced, the “floppy hat” was the selling point of the figure.  Again, it was very difficult to take the announcement seriously.  At the time, I couldn’t even fathom what this hat was.  What I didn’t know, or had at least temporarily forgotten in 1998, was that Luke wore a Gilligan hat during the Tatooine deleted scenes.  So in essence, this is the first deleted scene figure in the history of the line. It appears this figure is purpose built to recreate the scene where Luke is watching the space battle from the opening shot of the movie:

(click for the full sized image)

The first thing that jumps out at you is that the figure does not include a lightsaber, but of course that would be accurate to the source of the figure as it was before Luke would even meet the crazy old wizard (it really seems like Kenobi did nothing to hide his identity).  On the subject of saber-less-ness, the following year, the Commtech Darth Vader would be the only Darth Vader figure to ever ship without a lightsaber (unless my memory is failing me).  Instead of the ligthsaber, which Luke actually only briefly used in A New Hope, this figure includes a trio of accessories.  It includes the aforementioned floppy hat as well as the binoculars to recreate the battle gazing scene.  It also includes the long rifle that attaches to Luke’s Landspeeder.  He probably uses this rifle to target shoot small animals for sport.

The figure doesn’t interact flawlessly with either the binoculars or rifle, despite a decent effort to do so with the former.  To be fair, no figure has managed to interact well with binoculars at this scale.  A true pose with such an accessory would require both hands to be able to draw up to toward the face and toward each other in the middle.  This is almost impossible to do via articulation.  The joints simply lack the requisite range of motion.  Even the modern TVC Commander Gree falls short in this pose.  So the fact that this figure can only vaguely approximate the pose of looking through the binoculars isn’t a surprise, but it’s not for a lack of trying.  The figure is 10 POA, with hinged elbows and swivel wrists added to the standard POTF2 six points of articulation.  Additionally, the neck acts like a reverse ball and socket joint and has a little range of motion for the head to move forward and back.  This allows you to get in the ballpark of approximating the deleted scene pose this figure is purpose-built to recreate.  One final bit of interactivity the figure has with the binoculars is the that they attach to the utility belt via a peg.  This was pretty neat for the time.

As for the long rifle, the figure barely interacts with it at all.  The same articulation that allows the figure to interact decently with the binoculars works against any rifle poses.  The figure can hold the rifle across its body, but has no chance of any shooting poses.  To be honest, it’s a ridiculous weapon.  An actual human would have a tough time interacting with such an impractical weapon.  It would look as awkward as me batting lefty.  Most of the Flashback figures in the first wave have felt like a token effort.  It feels like a “placeholder wave” to keep the pegs warm until the Episode I line launched.  Many of the figures seem like they had previously been rejected, and Hasbro scrambled to pick up the editing room clippings to fill out a rushed wave.  Not so with this Luke.  It actually does an admirable job at its intended purpose and nets a respectable 4 out of 10 despite the vacant, shocked expression of the head sculpt.