Credit:  Third Tantive IV corridor and 3 of the Rebel Fleet Troopers from the collection of John Miko of the Star Wars The Vintage Collection Facebook group.

This is the third of the adventure sets released so far in the Vintage Collection, and I dare say it’s my favorite for a simple reason.  How far you expand the layout of your Tantive IV corridors depends on how big your pocketbook is.  The Jabba’s Palace set is great, but there is only one trophy wall in the gangster’s palace.  If you buy a second one, a large chunk of it is redundant. You can buy two of the Carbon Freezing Chamber without any redundancy, but as noted in that review, they don’t really connect together.  The Tantive IV corridors connect together so well that I worry it might draw the ire of Lego.

This is the sort of modularity that I love in environment pieces.  Not only can you connect multiple sets in multiple ways, you can reconfigure a single set.  The long wall can be separated into three pieces.  This is actually necessary so you can reverse the order of the pieces to mirror the wall for connecting two sets into a completed hallway, and this isn’t just so that’s aesthetically pleasing.  The tabs of the floor won’t connect unless you reverse the order of the wall.  When a completed corridor is assembled, it’s a little too narrow compared to the actual set in the movie, but this is to be expected.  Almost all vehicles and environments are slightly scaled down.  Having said that, it would have been nice if there was some way to connect two floor pieces horizontally instead of only being able to extend them vertically.  It also would have been nice if there was a way to connect hallways perpendicularly as well.  The only way to connect two hallways perpendicularly is through one of the doors, but this does not give the illusion of intersecting corridors. 

The fact that the backside of the wall provides additional diorama fodder for the darkened hallway where Princess Leia secrets the Death Star plans into R2-D2 is a huge bonus.  It would have been an even bigger bonus if the floor piece could be connected to this reverse area as well, but alas it doesn’t.  In the pic above, the floor is just placed there and is not connected to the walls.  The working pocket doors are a notable feature.  Hasbro easily could have made them removable pieces instead, and no one would have complained.  Overall this is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for in environment/display pieces. It allows me to convincingly create dioramas from the early scenes of A New Hope.  I should probably deduct a point for the stickers on the walls, but I won’t.  The corridor is a 10 out of 10.

The included Rebel Fleet Trooper is a repack of the VC52 - Rebel Fleet Trooper figure upgraded with Photo Real paint applications on the face.  The eyebrows are more brown this time which is a good thing.  It makes the face more generic which is ideal for an army builder.  Only we can’t army build this figure unless we also want to accumulate an army of Tantive IV corridors.  We gave the original figure an 8 out of 10, which is why that score is retained here, but we may need to reconsider that at some point in all honesty.  The figure is starting to show a little age.  The swivel hips and wrists are limiting for a trooper figure.  A lot of shooting or action poses simply are not possible, but this is likely the Rebel Fleet Trooper mold we’ll be riding into the line’s sunset.