Happy Thanksgiving-eve, everyone.  Despite our constant kvetching in the TVC community, we do have things to be thankful for. Namely, we should be thankful that Hasbro listened to the immediate hue and cry from the fanbase when they had plans to re-release the 2007 TAC 30-34 - Darth Revan in the 2019 Vintage Collection, and canceled those plans.  That Revan figure was questionable even in 2007.  Re-releasing it twelve years later would have been calamitous.  The downside is that a repack cannot be replaced with a newly tooled figure due to budgetary reasons, so we had to wait a long four years to finally get our Vintage Collection Darth Revan.

I’ve come to know myself as a figure evaluator.  Sometimes I can be too critical initially when I’m disappointed in a figure, but it’s more of an emotional response.  I know I need to cool off so I can be a little more objective.  I received this figure last Thursday and posted some quick shots to Instagram where I wrote this:

I have to be honest. I think the figure kind of stinks. It doesn’t pose very well. The sculpts were better in 2022. I’ll give it another shot this weekend to see if my first impression is off.

While I stand by the comment about the 2022 figures, the rest is definitely too harsh.  This figure does not stink.  In fact, it’s pretty good.  I want figures to be able to achieve the exact pose I’m striving for, and I want that process to be effortless.  When I can’t achieve the desired pose, or the process is laborious, I get frustrated and lash out.  That IG post was the result.

My frustrations mostly arose from the difficulty in posing the lower body in dynamic dueling stances.  This is due to the restrictions from the lower skirt and plastic lower belt, which reminds me of a religious habit, and the soft plastic tabard that nearly touches the ground.  The skirt and belt prevent any meaningful engagement of the barbell hips, and the tabard gets in the way with any sort of crouched stance.  These factors are decidedly frustrating, but do not damn the figure.  While not every pose is unlocked, it is possible to coax some dynamism out of the sculpt with a little patience.  Image 14 above is what made me officially soften my stance on this Darth Revan release.  You’ll never guess the other issue that bothered me.  It’s the elbows, which, once again, barely bend to ninety degrees.  It’s a hard pill for me to swallow when just last year we were getting posing dynamos like VC245 - Obi-Wan Kenobi (Wandering Jedi).

You may notice that I almost always focus on function first with figures.  In fact sometimes I miss design or deco inaccuracies if I am enamored with a particularly posable figure, but this is not meant to downplay aesthetics. Premium deco is equally important to the Vintage Collection.  This Darth Reven looks amazing.  The metallic paint on the copper-colored armor pieces and the silver accents on the mask really stand out.  The individually painted silver hoops along the belt are another “cut above” measure that make this figure stand out.  If I reviewed this figure when I first opened it, I probably would have given it a 7.  Now that I’ve grown to appreciate it better, I’m torn between an 8 and a 9, but I need to err on the side of articulation as it relates to pose-ability.  So 8 out of 10 it is.  My 180 on this figure is so complete that it’s one of my favorite releases.  I don’t know who is responsible for getting the 2007 re-release canceled, but I shall call him TVC-sus. The TAC Revan can now go straight in the trash.

As I am a carded collector (as well as loose collector) I should spend a sentence or two on the subject.  The card looks stunning, but I’m not a fan of the increased encroachment of graphics into the title box.  The horse is out of the barn, but I would have preferred it stayed font based like it did from the vintage Kenner era through TVC 1.0.