Boy, I’m not fully feeling this figure, and not for the obvious reason which is the chestnut brown hair and navy blue eyes.  It’s as if Luke broke into a bottle of Clairol and bought some darkening contacts to express his new darker mood for the start of his Junior year of high school.  Does Hasbro know that this figure and the Bespin Fatigues Luke Skywalker are the same character played by the same actor?  If so, why do the two figures released in the same year have such radically different likenesses?

Those are paint issues, and while they can’t be excused, they could be corrected at some point no matter how unlikely that is.  My real problem with this figure is the hips, which is something that is not easily remedied.  Despite scads of articulation points, I didn’t find the legs highly posable at least not in an effective way.  This is due to limitations with the hips.  The hips use the t-bar style crotch common in the 6” line instead of the ball jointed hips frequently used in the 3.75” scale.  While it could be operator error, I made an honest effort to rotate the hips forward and backward and the range of movement was less than ideal particularly backward. I like to achieve some semi-crouched fighting stances with Jedi figures, but the only way to achieve this was to slide one of the legs out to the side instead of back.  It’s passable, but a tad annoying. 

Update with a late breaking opinion:  It’s not the hips.  I’m continuing to work with the figure and it’s actually the ankles that are the problem.  When the leg is articulated backward, the foot doesn’t flex upward far enough to stay flat to the surface.  The only way to level out the foot is to engage the rocker ankle in such a way that it looks like Luke has broken ankle.

The hands are rubbery.  I honesty prefer when the hands on figures are a tad rubbery because it makes interacting with the weapons easy provided those accessories are sculpted out of sturdy plastic, but that is not the case with this figure.  The lightsaber hilt is very rubbery and can easily be contorted into a c-shape.  If you look at picture twelve, you can clearly see it bending in Luke’s hand.  Unlike the legs, the arm articulation operates easily and you can achieve a decent range of sword fighting attacks and defenses.  The other accessory included with the figure is a removable chest piece that allows the figure to be placed in either the “flap down” or “flap up” configuration to represent the minor wardrobe change Luke underwent during the ultimate battle in Return of the Jedi.  This is a nice feature and something Hasbro typically does as separate releases in the 3.75” line (except for that one horrible Legacy Collection release). 

I’m really struggling with scoring this figure.  Aside from the paint issues on the head, it has all the ingredients to be a decent figure.  It’s like Peyton Manning.  It looks like it has all the necessary state on paper, but it just doesn’t come together when it matters most, but how far do I lower the grade?  I tend to think of our scores as letter grades, and I can’t decide if this figure flunks, is a d-student or a c-student. I think this figure probably deserves to be held back, but the teacher is under pressure to push it through the system, so 6 out of 10.

6/10 Bantha Skulls