If I’m being honest, I don’t love making these photo galleries and reviews.  As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a chore at times.  Don’t get me wrong, this is my passion, and I can’t express how grateful I am that I have this outlet for it.  But in an ideal world, I could compose one review a week. Unfortunately, that’s not the way the “daily original content” business works.  It’s those demands that make it feel like a chore at times, so I don’t always look forward to writing these.  Having said that, I have been excitedly anticipating making this entry for a long time.  It’s been a slow march toward acquiring the pieces needed, the most time consuming search being a decent quality vintage Kenner Boba Fett figure for comparison.

For the purpose of good storytelling, I should tell you that this Power of the Force “2” Boba Fett figure is the one that got me hooked on the modern Star Wars line, but that would be a fib.  I’m a collector and always have been, even as a child.  Prior to 1995, I was furiously collecting the Toy Biz X-Men line, and I was doing so largely because it was reminiscent of my childhood collecting the vintage Kenner Star Wars line.  Those X-Men cards even had other figures from the line on the back.  So if I was collecting the Toy Biz line as a proxy for collecting Star Wars, when Hasbro brought actual Star Wars figures back, of course I was committed from the jump.  I didn’t need this Boba Fett figure to set the hooks.  I just needed the name “Star Wars” on the card.  That’s not what this Boba Fett represents to me.  Instead it’s the figure that made me realize how ridiculously far action figures had come during the 10 year hiatus since POTF ‘85.

I’m not going to say this is a good figure by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s a bulky disproportionate figure with limited articulation and an awkward preposed stance.  It stinks.  But look at it compared to the vintage Kenner Boba Fett.  The Kenner release is like a crude sketch compared to the “Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover” POTF2 version.  I think what blew me away about this Boba Fett are the tampos.  Not only did this give us the wheat emblem on the chest, it also gave us the first ever Bantha Skull on a 3.75” Boba Fett figure.  WOOT!  If any of you youngins say that it’s a “Mandalorian Mythosaur”, we’re going rounds.  This was the first indication that 3.75” action figures didn’t need to be merely rough impersonations of their on-screen counterparts.  It would take a few more decades, but we would eventually get to the highly accurate replicas we’re seeing today.  This Boba Fett was the first step on that journey of a thousand miles.

It wasn’t just the tampography that made the incremental march toward perfectionism.  Crude as it may be, Hasbro even made attempts to sculpt the dart launcher on the left gauntlet.  By the time we get to the VC186 - Boba Fett figure, Hasbro is even sculpting in the calculator buttons on that same gauntlet.  Again, this POTF2 Boba Fett isn’t the destination, but it was the promise of better days to come.  We typically give 5 or 6 POA figures a base score of 3, and knock them down a point if they are particularly bad.  Because of what this figure represents in the history of the line, I’m giving it a 4 out of 10, and I’m happy that I tracked down a high quality carded sample.

One thing to note is that there were many variations of this release.  You will notice that my sample has the full circles on the hand.  The most notable variation is the “half circle” version.  There are also “no circle” and “one circle” versions.  I personally only recognize the half circle variation, and view the others as production errors.