Grievous was a great character when he was introduced in the Tartakovsky Clone Wars Microseries.  He was legit scary.  His first scene when he was approaching from offscreen, murdering his way through the cornered Jedi was one of the more memorable scenes in the whole series.  The Jedi were terrified, and so were we.  Then we saw him “in real life” in ROTS, and he was suddenly a cartoon villain like Dick Dastardly (which also happened to be my nickname in college).  We had already gotten a figure of him as one of the sneak preview figures.  It was more or less a statue, and it skipped the “big reveal” spoiler of the multi-arm lightsaber attack. 

This figure isn’t very good now, but at the time of initial release, it was pretty nice.  As the Bad Guy du Jour for ROTS, he was automatically popular, and the 4-arm attack was a pretty desirable trait to add to our collections.  But it was simply executed, and somewhat flawed, even for the day. 

The sculpt isn’t bad, although the face is too small and not particularly intimidating.  The paint application is well done, with paint in all the right places.  It has some very well applied weathering and washes to all the parts, which really brings out the details and realism in the figure; sadly something that may often be lacking in today’s TVC figures.

For articulation, Grievous has a ball jointed neck, ball jointed (effectively) shoulders, ball jointed knees, and swivel hips.  As usual, the knees are borderline useless without ankles, and your mileage may vary when it comes to the figure standing upright if the feet are warped in any way.

The action feature for this figure is embedded in the head.  If you push down on the head, the arms move up and down (left arms opposite direction of right arms). The arm “pairs” do not separate automatically, even with the action feature, but you can move them around to create different poses.  He comes with a pair of green and a pair of blue lightsabers.  The hands, unfortunately, are oddly positioned, and sometimes don’t grip the lightsabers well, sometimes pretty loosely.  Also the angles of the hands make it difficult for the figure to not look like he was about to slice himself with the blades.  Finally, he comes with his uncivilized blaster, which was ultimately his undoing at the hands of the snobby Obi-Wan.

Grievous is important because in the Star Wars universe most previous saber-wielders used a single blade, and sometimes a character, like Ahsoka used 2.  But Grievous committed a slight breach of etiquette by skipping over a third lightsaber and going straight for the throat.  4 was unheard of.  This is another reason why Pong Krell sucks.  Even a crappy character like Grievous was able to fight with a lightsaber in each of his 4 hands.  All Krell could do was Force Push a lot.  What a schmuck!

Hasbro has struggled to make the definitive Grievous, and it may be difficult in the 3.75” to achieve a properly articulated and styled version.  But it’s something I would hope they are working on.  The previous TVC version, which is arguably the best available, is very far from perfect.

This figure was nice in 2005, but is also a far cry from acceptable today.
5 stars.
5/10 banthaskulls.