Nobody speak to me today.

Now that we’ve handled the administrative issues, let’s move on to this review.

Action features in figures are terrible.  This is an incontrovertible truth.  But there are degrees of terrible.  For example, ROTS Tarfful looks excellent, particularly by 2005 standards.  Embedded in this figure is an action feature where twisting the waist creates a spring-loaded swipe.  But you wouldn’t know it just by looking at it.  It’s well hidden.  The spring does impact the waist and arm posability, which is why it’s terrible.  It’s just less terrible than it could have been.

Then we have more terrible.  An example of that would be this figure.  III-26 is the second version of Yoda in the ROTS line, allowing III-03.  Now that figure was also terrible, and it didn’t even include an action feature.  So this was a chance for Hasbro to release a more realistic version of the character to make up for that transgression.  They failed.  This is worse.

The figure is designed with the intention of accommodating the silly action feature, so all aesthetics and practical articulation are sacrificed.  And it really didn’t have to be this way, at least from my non-toy designer perspective.  Let’s start with the action thing, since apparently that’s what Hasbro did.  We get a Yoda figure that is supposed to be launched into a whirling dervish.  Think Palpatine at the beginning of the “office arrest” scene.  I don’t recall Yoda doing that particular move, but let’s assume he did.  There’s a little platform, with a button-activated launch-pad.  It’s not unlike countless other “figure launching” features often found in the floors of playsets.  This launcher is a weird design of a small gray step.  I’m not sure what this is supposed to be - something from the Senate I would guess.  So the figure is designed to be launched and spun.  For whatever reason, Hasbro made a Yoda that actually looks a little less unnatural when he’s posed holding is cane with both hands in front of him.  But adding the lightsaber just looks silly no matter how you position the arms.

The waist is a spring loaded feature, but you’re supposed to twist it multiple times in one direction, which basically “coils” the twisting ability like a wind-up toy.  The “uni-foot” is the trigger to uncoil the waist and cause the twisting motion.  So the idea is that you wind him up, and then carefully place him on the launch pad.  If you make the slightest wrong move, the foot gets triggered and you have to start over.  But if you can gently place the “coiled” Yoda onto the pad, you then push the button, and he is launched into the air, spinning very quickly multiple times in some sort of Force attack move.  The motion is almost too fast to perceive, so even if you get everything to work perfectly, it’s almost like you push the button, and Yoda just ends up a couple of inches away. 

I made a slow motion video, and even then you can barely see what’s happening.  Excuse the festive audio, it’s from a couple of weeks ago and in no way reflects my mood today:

Yay.  That was phenomenal.  Someone at Hasbro got back the final sample for review and approved it for mass production.  They either thought this was the best thing they’d ever seen, or they didn’t care at all and just needed to rush it to market.

The cape also seems non-sensical, as it sort of loosely plugs into the back.  I’m not sure what the purpose is.  It doesn’t seem to aid in the “spinning attack”, so it just sucks.

The only marginally redeeming value of the figure when it was first released was that unlike ROTS 03, this one came with a cane.  But you’re never going to want to display it.

Five Stars. 
2/10.