About six months ago, Mr. Nomadscout was plowing through our backlog of TVC reviews.  When he got to the trio of Droids figures, he offered me the opportunity to review the Fett figure in deference to my years of campaigning for a carded Droids Boba Fett figure.  I accepted and then promptly forgot:

As mentioned above I’ve been campaigning for a carded Droids Boba Fett for a long time.  I had mentioned it here or there for a while, but I would say that my direct campaigning started in 2017 when I pitched the idea to Mr. Stevie at HasCon.  It was part of an overall “grail” concept which would be modern releases of the holy grails from the vintage Kenner line.  We even had a series to pitch some of these ideas HERE, where we once again brought up the Droids Fett.  Now that this has been realized, we have three figures from the “Grail” set.  The others are the Rocket Firing Boba Fett and POTF ‘85 Yak Face.  There are four more that Hasbro could tap:  Vlix, POTF ‘85 Anakin, Blue Snaggletooth, and a vinyl caped Jawa.  Vlix and Jawa are probably best suited to Retro Collection.  You could argue that the Rocket Firing Fett is spiritually the first Retro figure.  The POTF ‘85 Anakin and Blue Snaggletooth should use Vintage Collection figures, but I’m getting off track.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Christmas ‘83 would mark the end of my kid-era collecting.  In 1984, with no more Star Wars movies on the horizon, my parents decided that it was time to put childish things aside even though, being a Sagittarius, I was still 11 for most of the year.  With the exception of Wicket, I didn’t get any ‘84 vintage Kenner figures or beyond.  Well, there’s one more, but I’ll get to it.  At this point in the story, since I was a broke little idiot without means of purchasing toys on my own, my parents were the gateway, and my Star Wars toy collecting was over.  Temporarily.

Out of respect for my late father, I need to point out that my mother was more of the driving force behind the termination of my childhood Star Wars collection, but I couldn’t resist the Community joke. Of course my parents couldn’t stop me from looking.  I was keeping an eye on the Star Wars line every time we went to the store.  That’s where I would fall in love with the Droids carded figures that I would never get, and why this Droids Boba Fett is one of my favorite acquisitions ever.  It scratches a 40 year-old itch.  Just to finish off my childhood collecting story, by 1986 my gears had switched and I was full on into baseball cards.  To make room for my burgeoning card collection, I donated all of my Star Wars toys (most of the vehicles still had their boxes).  Via newspaper routes and shoveling driveways, I was also becoming flush with with my own cash.  I would end up buying a POTF lightsaber launching R2-D2 on clearance.  I think I paid $1.  I didn’t buy it to play with.  I just wanted to own it.  Looking back on it, that was the day I became a Star Wars collector versus a kid with toys.

I guess I should spend a few sentences talking about the figure itself.  This is a repaint of the landmark VC186 - Boba Fett.  That means it’s not entirely accurate.  In the cartoon, Fett wears more of an Episode V-style belt with a holster slung low on his hip.  The figure has the pouch-laden Episode VI belt sans holster.  The paint scheme, on the other hand, looks like it jumped right out of the screen.  Previous Fetts based on the Nelvana animation took liberties to try to bridge the gap to a realistic Fett paint scheme.  I love the purple-blue plastic used for the BlasTech EE-3 carbine.  It’s another positive step toward the animated aesthetic.  That VC186 release is graded a 10 out of 10, but I’m taking back one kadam Bantha Skull for the inaccurate belt.  9 out of 10.

I really hope the Droids packaging expression continues, but I have a feeling it won’t.  I would love to see a Droids A-Wing with a carded Droids A-Wing pilot.  I would also give my eyeteeth for a White Witch HasLab with Jann Tosh, Jord Dusat, and Kea Moll, but that would probably get to 1,000 backers.