The movie is The Empire Strikes Back.  C-3PO has been blasted to pieces, and Chewbacca sets about reassembling him.  Irvin Kershner and crew are brilliant visual story tellers, and they know that to be truly expressive, C-3PO needs at least one limb.  So Chewbacca almost immediately attaches 3PO’s right arm so he can engage in his nervous and panicked hand gestures.  Almost.  Immediately.  Chewbacca attaches 3PO’s head, we cut to scenes of torture and worsening deals, and by the time the action returns to the prisoner cell, 3PO’s right arm is firmly planted on his torso.  This is a long way around for me to say that, while the star of this figure is the disassembled 3PO, the armless torso makes it accurate to only a few seconds of screen time.  It also impacts the utility as an action figure, but we’ll get back to that later.  The main point for now is that an armless 3PO never appears in Chewbacca’s cargo net.

This figure is part of the “holy crud, Star Wars figures are selling so well, we need to add some unplanned figures to The Saga Collection” waves.  Obviously the community shortened that to the HCSWFASSWWNTASUFTTSC waves.  The acronym rolls off the tongue. Clearly I’m being quite silly here.  It’s the gin talking, but the story is true.  The Saga Collection sold so well that retailers wanted to order more.  As a result, these end of TSC waves are made up of repacks and repaints.  This figure is actually a slight repaint of the Chewbacca (Cloud City Capture) figure from 2002.  So at the time of it’s release, this mold was already four years old, and at the time of this review it’s nineteen years old.  And I’m suddenly feeling very old.  More gin!  Sufficed to say, the base Chewbacca figure has little place in a modern collection. 

For 2006, the Chewbacca figure wasn’t that terrible.  It actually sports ball jointed shoulders which was something way back then.  It also has bicep swivels which means it’s a spiritual G.I. Joe figure.  That’s right, kids.  If you click on that link you’ll see that the same company who felt the need to reinvent 5POA, once heralded added articulation on their packaging.  Unfortunately the articulation is only sufficient to hold the included E-11 blaster slung across the figure’s body.  This could have been mitigated by twisting the torso, but the figure lacks any waist articulation.  As such, the figure can only shoot the person standing to its immediate left. T-shirts have lead me to believe that person is always Stupid.  The legs are also a trip.  There is no articulation save for the swivel hips, and I swear one leg is longer than the other.  As a result, the figure has a permanent lean. Again, the Chewbacca figure has no place in a modern collection.  Toss is it in the junk bin. The only mildly interesting tidbit is the insane range of motion of the head.

The reason you might want this figure is the deconstructed C-3PO and cargo net, which you can donate to any of the much better Chewbacca figures.  The “removable limb” C-3PO figures don’t work well in the net because the damage to 3PO in the movie went far beyond a mere de-limbing. He was blasted to bits.  The removable limb figures have the legs as one piece, and they stick out of the net. Here, the two arms and two legs are one solid piece of modern art making a statement about post modern detachment (I hope that sounds smart).  This solid chunk of protocol droid makes better use of the geometry of the cargo net. The problem is the sans-arm torso piece.  It has a habit of wanting to pop out of the net when it’s worn on a figure.  Had the arms been attached, which would have made it screen accurate, it would have a puncher’s chance of staying put. The draw sting on the net is too long, and if you allow it to hang naturally, C-3PO ends up around Chewbacca’s rear end.  I have to imagine Wookiees are gassy, so that would be quite unfortunate for Goldenrod.  You basically have to pinch the draw string with the figure’s head to hold the cargo net in the movie accurate position.

Overall, this is a frustrating figure, but it offers the best “cargo net 3PO” we have.  When Mr. Nomadscout created the stub entry for this figure, he defaulted the score to a 5 and I don’t feel like changing it.  5 out of 10.