Well here we are.  We’ve made it past the Divisional round of the playoffs, and the pretenders are gone, as it should be.  Well, not really.  Denver snuck in, and they paid the price, losing their QB in the process.  So it’s essentially a cakewalk for the Patriots.  Congrats to me ol’ pal Chris!  But, if you are a Pats hater, then life must be miserable right now, as the decades long search for the next franchise QB took a mere 5 years.  That’s not as ridiculous as the instantaneous move when the 49ers went from Montana to Young, or when the Packers went from Favre to Rodgers, but still, it’s almost unfair to the rest of us that the Pats are (most likely) already going back to the Super Bowl with Drake Maye.  Meanwhile the stupid Bears, who had a strategy in 2025 of only playing well in the last 2 minutes of games, finally had their luck run out.  Good riddance.  That’s your sports update for the weekend, and I didn’t even get into the misery that the Knicks are experiencing right now. Yay for everybody reading!

Anyway, Happy Monday, and welcome to another review of some 20+ year-old nonsense!

This one is actually not all that bad.  More specifically, while the warmup act is horrific, the main event is pretty neat.  The prequel era was a huge boon for our hobby.  The announcement of the new films more or less precipitated the revival of the Star Wars action figure line with POTF2.  4 years later, we got the first Midnight Madness with TPM.  It was an eternity (3 years) before we started getting product for the second prequel film.  These days, such a break between media events is unheard of, and Hasbro simply can’t keep up with the onslaught of new source material.  But back then, we got 3 years to enjoy a slew of figures, vehicles, playsets, and beasts from a film before the next one came out.  That was such a long time that there was time in there for Hasbro to go back and keep giving love to the previous films. 

As we’ve discussed a bunch of times, the [Blue] Saga line was the first time that Hasbro did not have the film name on the line-look packaging.  It was blue, with the iconic raised lightsaber image - but there was nothing specific to associate it with AOTC.  Nevertheless, the early waves contained only figures and toys sourced to AOTC.  But it wasn’t a long wait before some OT figures were released.  In fact, the first 28 Saga figures were sourced to AOTC, but 29 and 30 were Luke and Vader.  And if memory serves (it probably doesn’t), almost all of the first 28 were available at Midnight Madness, with maybe the exception of a handful of figures that came shortly thereafter.  It was a bit odd, but I don’t recall putting too much thought into it at the time. 

I’m not sure, to this day, why that happened as such.  Maybe Hasbro’s market research and feedback told them that the year or so of only EP1 product started to wear thin with consumers, before they infused some OT stuff back into the line.  Maybe they felt they overproduced EP1 product, and needed to pull back a bit.  And maybe they didn’t want to alienate any OT purists by putting “Attack of the Clones” on the packaging.  Whatever the reality was, it was an aberration.  It wasn’t until The Last Jedi 15 years later that Hasbro launched another line look that was missing the name of the associated media.

Anyway, here we’ve got one of the small vehicles from the line.  This one is Anakin Skywalker, along with the swoop bike he rode when he searched for his mom and then killed all the sand people (And not just the men, but the women and the children.). Technically, it’s not really Anakin’s Swoop, as indicated on the package.  It’s the Lars’s swoop.  But that probably would have been confusing to consumers when a significant portion of buyers were casual or family members looking for a quick and easy gift for their kids, nephews, neices, grandkids, whatever. 

The Anakin figure is objectively terrible by almost any measure we could use today.  But I’ll give it a few small props.  First, it’s 10 POA, which was pretty good for the day.  Anakin has swivel neck, right shoulder, wrists, waist, and hips.  He also has a hinged right elbow, and hinged knees.  For sculpting, the figure is quite dynamic, which was par for the course in 2002.  The stylized figure lacks nothing when it comes to flowing tunics and shirts, mimicking the fast-moving air that would be pushing past Anakin as he rode the swoop through the Tatooine desert.  Even his Padawan braid is flowing backward, a nice touch.  Unfortunately, most of that good stuff is rendered moot if you try to do anything with the figure.  While it looks pretty good on the bike (more on that in a bit), if you try to pose Anakin standing on the ground so he can kill some of the aforementioned Tusken women and children, he looks ridiculous.  He can basically only crouch, and hold his lightsaber strangely.  His expression is another matter altogether.  Part of me appreciates Hasbro’s effort to add some true emotion to the face, but he looks VERY concerned about what he’s doing, rather than expressing the dark-side rage that Hasbro was likely going for.  And then there’s the action feature.  There’s a conspicuous button on the back of his waist that activates a rudimentary lathe arm slashing motion.  It doesn’t work all that well, and it makes his skills with a lightsaber look rather silly.

The star of the show, of course is the bike.  It’s well sculpted, with many nice details throughout.  The colors are appropriately muted (Hasbro sometimes went a little too bright and vivid with their choices) and the weathering was fairly well done, especially for 2002.  Interestingly, unlike the Anakin figure, the bike has no action features.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zero.  Zilch.  That’s probably a good thing, because a bright red spring loaded missile that’s bigger than the bike is something nobody needed.  But there’s also nothing with regard to moving parts.  No kickstand/landing gear, or moving handlebars, or moving steering vanes, or a removable supply pouch.  Nothing.  In end, I’m not really complaining, because the alternative might take away from the aesthetics. 

The best thing you can say about the included Anakin figure is that he interacts quite well with the bike.  As a standalone figure, it’s terrible, but Hasbro made sure it looks as good as possible on the bike.  His articulation is meant to allow for both hands to grip the handlebars, while the hinged knees and wide stance allow for Anakin to sit naturally on the bike.  The wind-blown clothing gives the whole thing the illusion of motion and speed, so kudos to Hasbro for that.  If you want, Anakin can flail away with his lightsaber while riding, and he can look really worried doing it.

I give the bike a 7.  Maybe that’s generous, but I think it works well enough in your displays today, even if TVC could obviously do better today.  I certainly am not advocating for an update, and I’m happy with this one as is.  The figure is a novelty, and only serves a purpose if you really want an Anakin figure to express this much concern.

My takeaway with taking a good look at this set is that Hasbro still has an untapped TVC market with the small vehicle expression.  We got the all new Imperial Speederbike recently (which was a bummer because that was a waste of new tooling if I ever saw), and we got an update to Luke’s landspeeder (also somewhat underwhelming when you look at the mis-use of the limited new tooling budget) but there has to be a market for swoops, speeders, cars, and “mini-rigs” (screen-accurate only, please) to fill the old “Class I” vehicle niche.  I’d really like more of this type of thing in TVC, please.