Sunday Fun Day reviews are back!  For now.

Looking back on 1995’s debut Luke Skywalker figure today, only the word “ridiculous” comes to mind, but the culture at the time of its release made the “He-Man” Luke slightly more acceptable in my opinion.  I can’t help but think that 90’s era baseball plays a factor.  For decades, if you were athletic, your body type dictated which sport you played.  Big guys played football.  Tall guys played basketball.  Medium size guys played baseball, and of course, Canadians played hockey. In the nineties, this typecasting for the national pastime changed thanks to a certain gluteal injection and the long ball:

During this era, baseball sluggers and WWE Super Stars were largely indistinguishable.  In fact, in just three more years, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire would engage in a home run race that one could argue took on a bit of a Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant vibe. I think this plays into why collectors initially accepted these gigantic proportions when Star Wars figures at long last returned.  Looking back now, we have to consider the early Power of the Force “2” (POTF2) figures as being intentionally “stylized.”  They incorporate with a realistic movie display worse than some of the animation-style Clone Wars figures.

I’ll be honest.  I didn’t really notice how ridiculous the proportions of the figures were until my friend pointed it out to me.  But then it couldn’t be unseen.  The line sort of became part joke within the community culminating with the ridiculous Rebel Fleet Trooper, which was reportedly the figure that jarred the then Kenner division of Hasbro into rolling back the hulking proportions.  In 1998 we would finally get a much more realistically styled Episode IV Luke Skywalker, and it would even come with the blast shield.  From that point on, this “He-Man” Luke Skywalker would become retired.

The early POTF2 era was very much a continuation of the vintage Kenner line with respect to how much attention was paid to accuracy, which is to say, “not a lot.”  The same company that brought us Singlet Hammer Head and Flipper Feet Walrus Man would decide that Luke’s grappling hook needed a massive boost in the Toyeticism Department.  For this release, it’s replaced with a Batman-esque grappling gun.  Of course, Kenner also had the Batman license at the time.  One last note: eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that the carded sample above is the “long saber” variant, while the loose sample sports the revised smaller saber.  These variations were actually highly sought after by collectors at the time for the five early sabered figures.  To show how ridiculous the era of collecting was, the “transition tray” variation, which had the long saber tray holding the new shorter saber, was considered the holy grail of these variants.