At Bantha Skull we like to make our silly little jokes.  We like to make our Family Guy and 80’s movie references.  We like to talk about pants.  But we also like to inform.  It’s something on which we pride ourselves, and I hope we do a good job of it.  With that in mind, I’d like to pass along a fascinating bit of trivia that one of the staff members just shared with me.  Dave Filoni is a massive Different Strokes fan, and he based Cad Bane on Mr. Drummond:

I can really see the resemblence.  “Cad Bane” is in fact just a play on the actor’s name, Conrad Bain.  Incredible stuff.  Excuse me one moment.  I’m being called in the other room. ... ... Okay, I’m back.  Apparently none of that is true.  CJ was just pulling an early April Fool’s Day joke on me, and I am the “full on goon” for believing him.  The truth is that Cad Bane is based on Lee Van Cleef’s “Angel Eyes” character from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:

That makes a lot more sense. Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns were a huge influence on the Original Trilogy (along with a melange of other sources), and Dave Filoni is a student of what makes Star Wars tick.

Cad Bane was my absolute favorite thing to come out of The Clone Wars. He was competent, menacing, and most importantly, cool.  That trifecta is a rarity for TCW villains.  In the Book of Boba Fett episode From the Desert Comes a Stranger, I was thrilled when that stranger was revealed to be the Duros bounty hunter, and immediately began counting down the days until a Cad Bane figure would grace the Vintage Collection.  A little over a year and a half later, that wait was over.  I love that we have a realistic 3.75” figure of Cad Bane, but I can’t say that I love the figure.  I like it, but not love.

There are several gripes that I have.  The elbows don’t even bend to ninety degrees.  With a pistoleer, deep elbow bends are not critical, but this is alarming as part of a larger trend.  The head has almost no up and down range of motion. This is despite the neck featuring the new barbell construction.  It’s a shame because I really wanted to pose Bane with head tilted down peering out from under his wide brimmed hat. The shape of that hat is also off.  The stovepipe portion should be roughly perpendicular to the brim.  Here, the stovepipe rises at an angle. Finally. the plastic duster interferes when trying to pose the legs in dynamic poses.

The positives can best be summed up with the phrase, “this figure postdates the advent of barbell hips”.  It has all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect in a newly tooled figure in 2023, though I couldn’t find a meaningful reason to engage the rocker ankles due to the interference of the duster mentioned above.  The figure also looks great.  While you might not be able to get it into the exact dynamic pose you want, it’s still going to look amazing in your display.  Hasbro nailed the proportion of the limbs.  This Cad Bane is appropriately tall and lanky.  This is something we can’t take for granted in the “minimum wall thickness” era where making things thin enough is suddenly a challenge:

As I wrote above, I have a fairly long laundry list of nit picks with this figure, and I even left some off (Bane draws on Fett with his right hand, but Hasbro sculpted the duster to reveal the left holster, and the flares sculpted into that duster make it look like Bane has a big fanny from behind).  I’m tired and cranky enough as I write this to give this figure as 7, but that’s too tough.  Most of my disappointment stems from the same source which is the plastic molded garment, but there is absolutely no way Hasbro could have given this figure soft goods because of the fact that the gauntlets go over the sleeves of the duster.  They only way to achieve this in an aesthetically passable way is to sculpt the sleeves.  Once you sculpt the sleeves, you have to sculpt the entire thing. A hybrid approach (plastic molded sleeves with a soft good body of the duster) would have looked ridiculous.  So I’m going to lighten up a bit and give the figure 8 out of 10.

These reviews are easy to write when the entire opening is a joke.  Mr. Nomad and I were racing to see who would do this review just to make that Conrad Bain joke, which will probably only make the two of us laugh.