What’s better than Ezra?  Aha, it was good.  But probably a lot is better.  In honor of the announced return of Rebels on February 19th, we’ll unveil our first ever review of a figure from that show.  I had only recently purchased this figure for professional reasons, so that I may bring to you, the billions of Bantha Skull readers, a gallery and review of Ezra Bridger.

As most of you probably already know, I had passed on watching both The Clone Wars and Rebels until this past summer, when I binged all of it in time to start watching the premiere of Rebels season 4.  With regard to collecting, I had acquired a few of the TCW figures at the time of release back in 2008 and 2009, but soon gave up because the animated styling didn’t fit in with the rest of my collection.  But I actually had owned zero Rebels figures until about 6 weeks ago.  I did pick up a few of the vehicles from the Rebels toy line a few years back, but none of them came with any pack-in figures (not the versions I bought, anyway).  So after seeing the show, enjoying it, and becoming somewhat attached to the characters, I figured, eh, let me pick some of them up.  So here we have Ezra Bridger.

The figure, obviously, is styled after the animation of the show.  While the animation is cool, I don’t see why the figures have to be modeled this way.  Not only are they 5POA, but they don’t even pretend to look like they belong with other Star Wars figures, which is a real shame.  Apparently Hasbro doesn’t listen to me, because if they did, they would have learned their lesson back when I stopped giving them my money for animated TCW figures, but at least many of those were articulated well.  Since I wasn’t collecting these figures at the time, I barely ever saw any of the figures from the Rebels line, just a few of the vehicles I picked up one day.  In retrospect, I think it would have been cool if Hasbro kept producing figures from the show, and releasing them in the Rebels line look, rather then ending that one and mashing newer releases in with the TFA line.  Hasbro is just confusing sometimes.  Whaddya gonna do?

Ezra Bridger is sculpted well, and he pretty much looks spot on, although I think his face is a bit off.  The figure is colorful, which is one nice advantage over many of the movie figures from TFA, RO, and TLJ.  The paint applications are not the sharpest, with much bleeding and overspray throughout the figure.  One would hope that the lines would be as sharp as the animation, but they’re not quite to that standard.  Ezra has 5 points of articulation, including a rather lame swivel neck.  It doesn’t get much more basic than this. 

He comes with 2 accessories.  One is his trusty cadet helmet.  It fits nicely over his head.  The other is his special lightsaber/blaster combo.  Although this figure had been offered a few times before in earlier lines, this was the first time he came with this unique lightsaber. Sadly, the 5POA formal does not allow Ezra to do any cool poses with the weapon, but it is what it is.  It sure would be cool if the blade was removable to allow the hilt/blaster to be used separately, eh?  (Ominous foreshadowy music plays in background…)

The figure is true to the source, although I wish it was realistically styled. Hasbro did this for them Sixer folks, so why not here for collectors of the one true scale?  They must think only kids with low IQ levels buy these figures and would otherwise be unable to connect the toys to the show.  Curse you, Hasbro!  Overall, the figure is accurate, and functions as well as it was designed.  It gets a 4.

Editor’s Note:  The score is changed to a 3, which is our baseline for 5POA animation -styled figures.