The Knicks have temporarily staved off disaster.  After falling to a 2-1 series deficit against Atlanta, they managed to even the series as they return to Madison Square Garden for game 5.  Meanwhile Chris’s Celtics have a commanding 3-1 lead over the Sixers, even though Joel Embiid returned to the Philly lineup - too little, too late, I assume.  In other news, the Mets ended their historic 12 game April losing streak, winning 2 in a row, before getting swept by the also terrible Rockies.  That’s all I have to say about that.

Back in February of 2020, just before everyone got “the ‘Vids”, we at Banthaskull sounded the alarms on the 2006 Saga Collection TSC 007 General Veers.  In my review, I issued this scathing statement:

We could definitely use an upgrade to this figure, although the priority isn’t necessarily even above the halfway mark of resculpts that we need in the line.

Woah!  I was in rare form that day.  No quarter given!  I assume if anyone from Hasbro read that, they would have crumbled under my withering attack, and would have shut down the entire Asian manufacturing machine and made sure to get us a brand new Veers immediately.  I mean, I was obviously ready to go to war over this.  We beat that drum for over six years - and I don’t play the drums.  I don’t even know anyone who has a drum set.  But Hasbro finally listened, and gave us a new General Veers in 2026.  The evidence is clear:  Banthaskull is responsible for Hasbro providing us with a new General Veers.  You’re welcome, everyone!

This General Veers is a retool of the common Imperial officer buck.  That’s a good base figure, but suffers from the knees and elbows not being able to flex past 90, which is annoying.  For Veers, Hasbro retooled the torso to include his chest armor.  Unlike his TSC predecessor, this armor is not removable and is sculpted onto the figure.  This may or may not be to everyone’s liking.  At first, I didn’t like it because it meant we couldn’t have a non-armored Veers option.  On the other hand, it’s sculpted nicely, and looks better this way.  Also unlike the snap on armor, the TVC figure’s armor has the back plate, which is a first. 

Also retooled is the soft plastic lower tunic.  This time it has the armored “belt buckle”, completing the look.  He’s got a holster (which seems to appear about half the time on these officer figures), which fits the blaster rather loosely, unfortunately.  On that note, the included blaster does fit okay in Veers’s right hand.

Obviously, we have an all new headsculpt for this release.  It’s a nice resemblance to Julian Glover (who recently turned 91!). It’s a huge improvement over the TSC portrait, which looks a lot more like Quentin Tarantino than Mr. Glover.  Instead of a sculpted soft cap like some other officer releases, Veers is hatless.  This accommodates his newly sculpted helmet. Without the feature of removable armor, a soft cap was probably meaningless, but I find it interesting that the TSC figure had a sculpted soft cap, which still fit nicely underneath his removable helmet.  While I think the scaling is better on this new figure, I’m left feeling like Hasbro left out an important detail - the small black microphone that extends out of the right side of the helmet.  The 2006 figure had this, and I tend to really frown upon Hasbro for allowing a 20 year old figure to have a detail that was then missed on the TVC update.  It’s pretty obvious in the scene, so it’s a shame Hasbro forgot to include it.  Aside from that, the helmet fits rather loosely, which I find a bit ironic since it didn’t have to accommodate the aforementioned soft cap. 

Overall, it’s a great looking figure.  The proportions are nice, the articualtion is solid (although lacking the 90 degree thing), and the headsculpt is outstanding.  It soundly defeats the 2006 figure in most key areas (especially the swivel elbow thing), but due to the missing microphone, the loose fitting holster and the loose fitting helmet, it’s not a total slam dunk.  And the 2006 figure executed the “two-fer” option pretty well.  However, that figure still didn’t give us a proper “garrison” Veers, because you couldn’t remove the large “belt buckle”.  He’s also wearing black gloves, which may actually be accurate because it looks like he’s wearing them when he approaches Vader’s mediation chamber.  Anyway, to get a correct version, it makes sense that Hasbro skipped the gimmick here.  I certainly hope another Veers is on the way at some point, so we can faithfully recreate the scene where he is comically 2 inches from Vader’s face when he abruptly turns to command Veers to prepare his men to attack the base on Hoth.

Excellent figure with some annoying flaws.  I love that we have it, but it could have been better.  8/10.