There are two wolfmen in the cantina, which represent two different species despite some initial similarities in appearance.  The one that appears first is a chap by the name of Arleil Schous.  He is a Defel with glowing red eyes, and is part of the opening shot of the cantina.  Prior to the Special Edition, he even had an isolated glam shot.  Of the two, Arleil is more wolf in appearance than man.  The second is the Shistavanen, Lak Sivrak, who is (loosely) the basis of this figure.  Prior to Special Edition, Lak engaged in a menacing confrontation with Dice Ibegon.  Lucas never intended wolfmen to be in the movie, but the cash strapped production was forced to recycle masks from other productions, and that is supposedly the genesis of these two characters.  Arleil’s mask seems to be on par with the quality of the other cantina aliens.  Lak’s mask is barely above Halloween costume quality:

(click for the full sized image)

Naturally when it came time make a figure of one of the cantina lycanthropes, Hasbro went with the one even Rubie’s would say looked cheap.  Furthermore, aside from the head sculpt, Hasbro didn’t come within a mile of accuracy.  As you can see from the above reference, Lak is wearing a reddish brown tunic.  In other reference images, a lighter colored undershirt can also be seen.  Hasbro ignored all the reference material and decided what kids really want is an action figure of a wolfman wearing a beige leisure suit with a belt that would make the WWE champion jealous. 

Doubling down on the nonsense design decisions, Hasbro added some nonsense accessories.  The figure interacts terribly with the included blaster.  It holds it in the same manner that a fancy British woman holds a teacup.  The figure interacts better with the vibro blade that clips onto to the wrist, but the concept is quite silly.  Where does Hasbro get off including silly playful weapons with their toys?  This is serious, damn it!

So this all leaves us with an inaccurate, six points of articulation figure with nonsensical accessories.  But something about it makes me smile.  And it’s not some sort of “too cool for school” ironic hipster smile.  It’s genuine.  Part of it is that Hasbro managed to bake some character into the sculpt.  The other part is the fondness for the time when we could get a figure based on a terrible costume that was so reviled by Lucas himself, that he deleted it from the Jedi archives.  That’s just fun.  Today we can’t even get repacks of cantina figures.  Back then we could get figures of characters that Lucas tried to banish from existence like the Holiday Special.

I’d really like to give this figure a 4/10 score for that fun-ness, but the inaccuracies force me to deduct a point from the base limited articulation score.  It’s a 3 out of 10.  One last thing,  if your rock images 7 and 8 back and forth using your right and left arrow keys, you can kind of make Lak Sivrak do the monkey.  [Editor’s Note:  That was good for about 20 seconds of high quality entertainment.]