At the time of this review, Bantha Skull is currently in the final stages of its 30th Anniversary Collection retrospective reviews.  So if you’re reading this on the day of publication, you’re probably saying to yourself, “What the fudge?”  Exactly like that verbatim without any word substitution.  The reason for this temporary detour to The Saga Collection is simple.  When you’re working backwards through the lines, sometimes you get to a repainted figure.  We were rapidly approaching the TAC 30-52 Naboo Soldier which is a red repaint of this yellow TSC 050 Naboo Soldier.  We wouldn’t be able to properly review the repainted figure without having a review and gallery of its ancestor to reference.  These are the pains of a site that blinked into existence thirteen years after the modern line sprung to life. 

If you are reading this review at a date later than its initial publication, you rock (cold content getting traffic is the bee’s knees), but you can ignore that first paragraph.  Of course you’ve probably already read it to get to this paragraph telling you not to read it.  Sigh.  We really need to get cracking on that Bantha Skull time machine so we can avoid these logistical nightmares.

So finally we get to this figure.  I’ve hated it from day one and so did most of the collecting community giving the derisive nickname “banana trooper”.  While photographing and researching the character, I realized that my specific reason for immediate rage might be a tick unfair because it occurred to me that the figure is misnamed.  This figure is named Naboo Soldier.  That means I get it in my head that I want it to do soldier-y things, but it simply can’t.  The figure is armed with the CR-2 Heavy Blaster Pistol, which is a clunky chunky armament that bashes us over the head with its obvious styling cues.  We get it.  George Lucas was heavily inspired by Flash Gordon.  That aside, the weapon has a pistol foregrip, so the natural THWG (two handed weapon grip) pose is to have the trigger hand on the grip and the offhand on the foregrip.  With the swivel elbows and prodigious POTF2-esque c-grip hands, aligning that pose is impossible.  It’s extremely frustrating and accounts for the lion’s share of my detest for this figure.

But is that fair?  Is this character really a soldier?  I argue it’s not.  These aren’t soldiers.  They only appear in the Naboo hangar during the escape scene.  They wear what are essentially solid color jump suits.  They have no holsters or any other gear which would indicate a combatant.  I know what these guys are.  These are the Air Force enlistees who didn’t do so well on the ASVAB.  They’re mechanics, or possibly Signalmen.  If you use this figure for those purposes as background fodder in a Naboo hangar, it’s passable.  The figure is definitely a pea head, but when wearing the helmet it’s not terrible.

Having said that, I still need to evaluate this figure in line with the packaging promises, and it fails toward that end.  Not only does it interact poorly with the included blaster, it also lacks ankle joints.  Admittedly, ankle joints were not at all an expectation in 2006.  They were definitely the exception.  The figure does have ball jointed knees, but they have terrible range of motion.  They only offer a few degrees of flex.  I will say that the figure impressively balances on the tip of the back foot when you do engage the knee articulation.  It somewhat mitigates the lack of ankles.  It’s not a useless figure.  It’s good for background display as mentioned above, it stands well, and doesn’t have any limiting pre-posing.  This lands it with a score that’s better than 5 POA nonsense, but short of your average super articulated figure.  6 out of 10.