As the holidays are almost upon us, we’ll take a little break from the 5POA lines, and serve up a review of Hallmark ornaments.  I’m normally not particularly interested in Hallmarks annual offerings, but after seeing the initial news about this “Storyteller” line, I decided I wanted these.

These ornaments light up and have audio, which is nothing new. But what is pretty cool, is that if they are near each other, they play in conjunction with each other to perform scenes from A New Hope.  In this case, the Death Star starts things off by replaying the destruction of Alderaan, after which they join up to play back the Battle of Yavin.

Each ornament is nicely detailed, and has multicolored lights that activate along with the beats in the audio.  So while Luke and R2 are discussing fixing the X-Wing, the cockpit lights up, then when Tarkin is giving the order to fire, the Death Star lights up.

The ornaments themselves look pretty great, with lots of nice details and paint.  (Note that the X-Wing markings are not specifically for Red 5.)

There are three different models out now, with as many as 7 planned in total.  The Millennium Falcon was announced for 2018.  It would be an easy fit as it would work for plent of dialogue during trip to Alderaan, and also would fill in the blank when the Falcon rescues Luke in the trench. 

It is noted that as you add the future ornaments, the unlock more dialogue on the current models, so I suspect an adventurous hacker could possibly figure out what vehicles are coming. 

Not sure what the other three would be to complete the set of seven.  A Y-Wing would work, with dialogue from Gold Leader.  TIE Fighter?  There’s no dialogue that could integrate, which would probably rule that one out.  Maybe they go for a different scene and do a Landspeeder or something, but that wouldn’t integrate logically with the others.  My guess is that they spread out to cover the entire OT and add an Executor, then Home One and second Death Star.  If the X-Wing and Falcon have more dialogue on board, then the asteroid chase and Wedge’s DS2 attack run could help round out most of the necessary dialogue for space scenes from all 3 films.

Each ornament retails for $39.95, but you also have to buy the $8.95 connecting power cord, which fortunately works for up to 7 ornaments.

*This set also is available in a boxed set of 3, as it is here on the Hallmark website.  There appears to be no difference in the ornaments themselves, but the set of 3 was available prior to the release of the individual x-wing, so for a little while, it was the only way to get all three.

Check out the video below, which shows everything off.  The entire sequence is about 4 minutes long.