It was nineteen eighty something.  Oh wait.  This isn’t the Goldberg’s where the anachronistic story telling prevents specific timelines.  This is real life, and I know exactly what year it was.  It was 1983.  It was a Sunday, to be exact, which meant one of the great rituals of 1980’s kiddom.  I would rifle through the Sunday newspaper circulars, but I would do so backwards because the toy ads were always at the back.  There in the Zayre’s circular was exactly what I was looking for:  Return of the Jedi figures.  I begged my dad to go, but he insisted that just because the figures were in the circular, it did not mean our local store actually had them in stock.  WAS HE INSANE?  Of course they were in stock.  Pre-printed circulars are a binding contract with husky little boys.  Some sort of lawyerly reasoning, petulance, and tears landed me at Zayre’s about thirty minutes later in what was assuredly supposed to be an “I told you so” trip.  There, sitting on the floor of the action figure aisle, was a case of Star Wars figures.  The “I told you so” trip turned into a fatherly “I’m never going to hear the end of this” eye-roll.  The case had been opened, but I still managed to grab, among other figures, a vintage Kenner Emperor’s Royal Guard.  Of course I now know it also would have been unpunched.  And I opened it!  What an idiot.

I don’t know if it was the exhilaration of my first ever successful toy run, or some other factor, but I’ve always been enamored with the Emperor’s Royal Guard, or ERG for short.  It even jumped lines, and I later became obsessed the G.I. Joe Crimson Guard figure.  So naturally, to spite me personally, Hasbro has made getting modern Royal Guards a challenge.  Perhaps the worst example was making the Vintage Collection Emperor’s Royal Guard part of an online exclusive case.  The figure was later re-released as a Walmart exclusive Black Series 3.75” figure, which means it was even less available at brick and mortar somehow.  That don’t even make no sense, but it’s true.  Okay, that’s a lie, but Walmart exclusives are the devil!  As for this POTF2 release of the Emperor’s Royal Guard, it was initially short-packed (as was a bit of a trend when figures were first released during the era), so it began the tradition of ERG’s being hard to acquire (at least initially).  Of course, this scarcity was short-lived, and the figure would eventually become plentiful (another POTF2 trend).  Nevertheless when my sister told me she saw a bunch of Emperor’s Royal Guards at Walmart, I jumped in my 1987 GTA (yes, my car was that color) and burned rubber.  I think I ended up getting four or five in one fell swoop, and I was thrilled.

Then I got home and opened the ERG, and my first real collecting conflict emerged.  The figure barely does anything.  The body is one solid piece of “salt shaker” plastic.  On paper, it has a whopping three points of articulation, but the head barely rotates.  It only has two effective points of articulation at the shoulders, but they offer little in terms of posing options.  Basically, this is an inert hunk of plastic.  It has one viable pose, but it admittedly nails that pose.  It made me think, “What are we doin’ here?!?”  Should we just be collecting chess pieces that nail that one perfect pose? It’s the first time that I thought the hobby was perhaps a little ridiculous.  Some thousands of figures later, that is the most ground my rational brain has ever gained in the debate of whether or not I should be an adult toy collector.  Take THAT rational brain.  The frosted side of the mini-wheat WINS! 

The irony in this whole situation is that I demanded we get a properly articulated Emperor’s Royal Guard, but would judge that figure on whether or not it could achieve the only pose this figure can effectively achieve.  I don’t want to use the articulation.  I just want to know it’s there if I need it.  It’s like a V8 engine.  You don’t always need it, but when you do, you’re happy it’s there.  Of course the only time you need a V8 engine is so you can rev it to impress the babes.  So we’re getting to the score of this figure, and it brings me back to feeling 1997 stupid again.  The figure does almost nothing, so I should give it a 1 or a 2. but it looks passable in its one viable pose.  So I’m scoring this a 4.  You can yell at me in the comments.