Editor’s Note:  This review borrows heavily from VC40 R5-D4.  That review explained in detail why this 2006 version is actually better than the one from 2011.

Uncle Owen, this R2 unit has a bad motivator!

Luke, you schmuck!  It’s an R5 unit!  If you weren’t wasting time with your friends slaughtering womprats, maybe you’d know this key piece of information!

{Start of slightly edited text from VC40 review.}

Here’s some neat background on good ol’ R5-D4.  The droid was actually seen in Attack of the Clones, passing in front of Anakin and Padme’s rickshaw (and R2’s-D2 trailing behind it) when they were looking for Watto on Tatooine.  Strangely, other than R5-D4 being mentioned as sourced from AOTC, there is almost no information on what the droid was up to 22 years before he was almost sold to Owen Lars.  Many of you may be familiar with the old, never-canon story, Skippy the Jedi Droid.  R5 was depicted as being Force-sensitive, and after sensing Luke Skywalker’s destiny, sacrificed himself so that Luke could join with R2-D2 and fulfill that destiny.  Well, thanks to “The Red One”, the short story from the book From a Certain Point of View, R5-D4 now has a similar, but less ridiculous, canon backstory.  You can read the review HERE, but basically R2-D2 explains his vital mission to R5-D4 on board the sandcrawler. R5, who was previously an Alliance operative but had his memory wiped, decides to sacrifice himself so that R2 could be purchased instead.  R5 later survives the stormtrooper attack on the sandcrawler, and eventually manages to find his way back into the service of the Rebellion.

TSC 032 R5-D4 utilizes a good basic mold, based on the VOTC R2-D2, but with the chest panel glued down.  The figure was later released in TVC, but even 5 years later, Hasbro made the egregious mistake of using the inferior Build-A-Droid mold for the flagship line. First, and perhaps most importantly, the TSC mold includes the “bad motivator” in the top of the dome - a gizmo that extends and retracts when you turn the droid’s head.  That’s a big miss for TVC, which completely lacks this feature.  Also, this TSC figure was painted with a better dirt wash than was used on the TVC figure.

Not being the BAD mold means there is one additional advantage here over the TVC figure:  it lacks those extra holes on either side of the barrel body, towards the bottom.  Interestingly, this was FINALLY rectified recently with the TLJ (5POA basic line) R2-D2.  Such a fix to the mold back in 2011 would have likely made the TVC release more palatable.  On the negative side, there is one missing paint detail that was actually added to VC40:  The blue horizontal stripe just below the dome, and above the red chest panels.  It’s one minor detail where this TSC figure loses out to its TVC successor.

One final note.  Neither version of R5-D4 has the rear panels painted red as seen in A New Hope HERE.  However, for his appearance in Attack of the Clones, you can see HERE that the rear panels appear unpainted.  Most likely by coincidence, VC40 is more accurately representative of its appearance in AOTC, and can be considered definitive for Episode II.  If this TSC version was re-issued with the rear panels painted red and the blue stripe on the chest added, then the included bad motivator feature would make this the definitive Episode IV version.  As such, we recommend TSC 032 as the best available R5-D4 version for your Episode IV displays.

{End of slightly edited text from VC40 review.}

This figure was later re-released, and slightly repainted (perhaps in a marginally inferior manner) for the Vintage Collection Special Droid Set.  Again, we choose this as the best R5-D4 out there.  If Hasbro ever looked at re-issuing this figure in any format, they should make sure the red panels are painted on the back of the body, and the blue line is painted on the front.  As an alternative, Hasbro could apply these same paint app suggestions to the new BAD mold, which has done away with the large holes on the sides of the body.