Hello, friends.  If you know me by now, you know I like to write the reviews where I get to talk about stuff other than the thing being reviewed.  This is one of those cases, and boy do I have stuff to say, AND YOU WILL LISTEN!  Well, not really listen,  Unless of course you read with an imagined internal voice of what I sound like.  It would be good if you did that.  If you haven’t heard my few podcasts, I suggest blending up Wallace Shawn, Charlie Day, and Jason Bateman in your head.  Got it?  Good.  Let’s proceed. 

We should get the toy out of the way so we can get to some of the more fun stuff.  One thing that is interesting is that it’s one of the true scarcities in the modern line.  How scarce?  At the time of this writing, there isn’t a single one on Ebay.  Don’t believe me?  Go ahead and hit any of the many Ebay links on this page.  I’ll wait. ...  See?  I told you (heh, sucker).  Recent sold prices are all over the map.  You have sealed in box examples going anywhere from forty dollars to almost one hundred.  Loose samples fetch right around the original retail of twenty five dollars.  Such erratic secondary market pricing can mean that the item is rare, but not particularly good, and that’s what we have here.  Lets do the list:

• It’s too small and squatty.  Boo.
• It doesn’t have wheels.  Boooo.
• It’s mostly and empty husk.  Boooooo.
• Most of the details are achieved via decals instead of paint applications.  Boooooo, Wendy Testaburger, booooooo.

This is straight from the era of shrinking vehicle quality in the kid line to keep the prices below some arbitrary pricing threshold the customers seem to get in their head.  I swear Star Wars collectors are like my depression-era grandparents.

WHAT?!?  In my day we could get sixty two Imperial Transports for eight cent.  EIGHT CENT!

Anyway, this amounts to a 5 out of 10 vehicle.  But now let us discuss the “why” for the vehicle, and why it’s suddenly worth discussing.

The “why” is that it was inserted into Rebels for the most gratuitous form of “memberberry” fan service (and I have NO problem with that).  It was an homage to the vintage Kenner Imperial Troop Transport:

Oh, heck yeah!

That vehicle never appeared in the Original Trilogy.  It was entirely a Kenner invention back in the day when we allowed our Star Wars toy companies to use their imagination (they’d better not try that nonsense today!).  Furthermore it was designed by the legendary Mark Boudreaux.  There is no kid from the vintage Kenner era that does not think fondly of that vehicle, and Dave Filoni did us all a massive solid by canonizing it.  But sadly, a more realistic and larger collector grade Rebels Imperial Troop transport missed its window entirely.  So why are we talking about this now?

Well, unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the new nerd God, Jon Favreau, has given this wonderful design a “keep alive” in The Mandalorian.  A slightly different version appeared in Season 1: Chapter 7:

Oh, double heck yeah!

Toy Fair 2020 is a month away, and rumors swirl that a new Mandalorian vehicle is going to see the light of day.  If a Vintage Collection Imperial Troop Transport is that vehicle, I promise to give at least two claps (just like I did for the Retro Collection Tarkin).