I waited until the last minute to do this review, and I had to go to the emergency room while I was taking photographs, so I may have to ease up on the word count.  We’ll see how it goes.

First of all, this is a glorious day.  We’ve waited 117 years for definitive versions of the main characters from A New Hope, and we’re finally here.  There may be an argument that each of the figures is imperfect, but there is no universe in which these aren’t light years ahead of the best existing versions.  VC373 Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi is no exception.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close, and might be the least controversial of the bunch, at least of the ones I have in hand so far (I’m probably about a day or two away from receiving my case of Chewbaccas.)

Let’s start with the packaging.  I don’t care about the packaging.  But I’m still going to complain about something that I’m sure puts me in the minority if I were amongst those that do care about such things.  I’m a big proponent of fixing Kenner’s mistakes.  I’m not interested in carrying them forward for the sake of accuracy to the Kenner aesthetic or for the sake of nostalgia.  I’m more interested in accuracy to the media source.  Hasbro opted to replicate the weird yellow “action” lightsaber of the original Kenner photo.  I believe Hasbro should have done one of two things, either make the lightsaber movie accurate, or use a different film out.  Yes, I know most carded collectors want to exactly replicate the Kenner original, no matter how dumb it may be.  But it’s wrong, and should either be fixed or offered as some kind of exclusive alternate card for those that care about such things.  But as I said, I packaging isn’t my thing, I just felt obligated to write this stuff - even though I intended to keep my word count down.  Sigh.

One other note - I ordered a case worth of Kenobi’s, but I didn’t get my order in with EE before they sold out, so I had to resort to Amazon.  Amazon doesn’t sell cases of figures, they just throw 8 figures into a large box and send it out.  Amazingly, the samples arrived with almost no shipping damage to any of the cards.  However, 7 of the 8 cards had bubble indentations of varying severity on the film outs.  Again, I don’t really care about such things, but I know many people do, so I’m calling it out.

OK, enough about the cardboard and plastic nonsense, let’s get the plastic goodness.  The figure is great - but I have a couple of nitpicks that I will get to shortly.  The sculpt is lovely.  It’s a fantastic base figure, which you can admire when you remove the soft goods Jedi robe.  The articulation is almost perfect.  The good news is that the elbow bend well past 90 degrees - something which HASBRO MUST STANDARDIZE.  The knees also go past 90 degrees, although not quite as far as the elbows.  Again, this is something HASBRO MUST STANDARDIZE.  The wrist range of motion is slightly hindered by the extended sleeves.  Sometimes this isn’t a huge deal, but it can impact dynamic lightsaber poses.  The neck articulation is particularly nice, allowing Obi-Wan to look upward, as compared to many figures where the up and down range of the neck is often limited by the sculpt of the hair.  As for the headsculpt, it’s pretty, pretty good.  I think it’s about as close to Alec Guinness as we can expect to get.  It’s like a 9.5/10 for likeness.

The soft goods skirt is well executed, and allows for a decent range of motion of the legs.  A sitting pose is easily obtainable, which is great because Ben sits a lot.  He sits in his house, in the landspeeder, in the cantina, and on the Falcon.  He doesn’t sit on the Death Star, and he died there.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  It seems that sitting was very important to his survival, so Hasbro made sure the figure could sit.

All of this is great, but here are some of the nitpicks in addition to the aforementioned hindered wrists.  The hands are sculpted oddly.  The thumbs are above/outside the plane of the forefingers.  He looks like he would be perfectly sculpted to hold an Xbox controller in his hands.  The problem is that this allows the lightsaber hilt to easily slip through his fingers, just like all the star systems through Tarkin’s.  This is frustrating because it makes it much more difficult than necessary for Kenobi to grip the lightsaber well, especially with two hands.  It’s not impossible, it just isn’t…fun.

The other annoying thing is that the robe is designed to only be worn with the hood down.  Hasbro hasn’t really perfected the hood up / hood down thing with their soft goods Jedi robes, so I get it.  The hood is stitched down.  If you look at the gallery, you’ll see 2 images where I did something awful, and as I mentioned in the first sentence, it sent me to the hospital with acute groin-itis.  I snipped the stitch.  BY GOD I SNIPPED THE STITCH!  I doubled over in agony, but persevered long enough to blu-tack the hood over the head and snap a couple of pics. I then passed out and woke up in the ambulance being rushed to the hospital.  The things I do for this site…

Anyway, Obi-Wan spends a significant amount of time in the film with his hood up, and after I did the surgery, I’ve decided that Hasbro needs to re-release this figure with a hood-up soft goods robe.  And here’s how I say they do it: 

Proposed Special 4 Pack (exclusive if necessary)

• Obi-Wan (hood-up soft goods Jedi robe and alternate “mind-trick” hand)
• Leia (soft goods skirt)
• Luke (w/Stormtrooper Belt, grappling hook, and headset)
• Han (w/Stormtrooper Belt, alternate gloved hands, and headset)

And each would have alternate film-out cards from the original numbered figures.  Something like this could be also be part of the “Death Star Orbit” supporting figures and toys for a possible Death Star HasLab.  Obi-Wan needs his hood!

Okay, I went on way long than I thought I could.  It’s 1am here in Phoenix, so it’s time to wrap up.  This figure is outstanding, and we should all be ecstatic Ben Kenobi has finally arrived.  Minor issues keep this figure from a perfect 10, but it still gets a high 9.