The Black Series
Imperial Death Trooper
The Death Trooper strikes a classic Star Wars sweet spot for many of us. The Original Trilogy had many creepy elements, but not creepy in the sense of the frenetic spaghetti monsters from The Force Awakens. The creepiness in the Original Trilogy was more artful. It did not originate from what things did, but rather from a sense of unease that these things merely existed. Whether it was insectoid looking droids meandering through the interior of the Sandcrawler, little green boogey men who steal Luke’s lamp, or a solitary tentacle doing a Harvey Weinstein impersonation on C-3PO (too soon?). When something is unsettling just for existing, it’s truly creepy. Enter the Death Troopers. From the scrambled cybernetic sounding screeches they use to communicate, to the all black armor, to the “classified augmentations” the subjects underwent, there is a sense of “wrongness” to their existence that adds to the terror they cause. They are creations that are out of phase with nature, and that darkness falls within the “Goldilocks” zone: not so nightmarish as to draw too much attention, but enough to simply add to the atmosphere of menace. To that point, Garett Edwards actually reeled in his initial design a little. According to concept artist Christian Alzmann:
[Edwards] wanted to make it clear through the design, to show that the brain was gone by giving them helmets that no human could actually wear. Red lights under the dome. They’d be like Lobot from Cloud City and could be controlled.
That probably would have made the Dark Troopers too unsettling, and the final version strikes the perfect balance. Edwards saved that gruesome concept of a brainless automaton for the Decraniated which I have never spotted in the film despite looking. Incidentally, the Decraniated were the work of a certain “doctor” from the cantina who has the death sentence on twelve systems. It’s no wonder with hellish creations like that. Get bent if you think all this interconnectivity makes the Star Wars universe too small. IT’S FUN! Like eating breakfast for dinner.
The figure itself is another home run by Hasbro in the Walmart exclusive (for now) 3.75” Black Series line. Hasbro has done us the ultimate kindness by delivering a highly configurable figure. Instead of milking us for two releases: one with and one without the “squad leader” designating shoulder pauldron, we get one release that can be configured either way. I put “squad leader” in quotes because I’m not sure that the presence of pauldron-designating rank is canonical. That seems fan-invented. It’s more logical that it’s just a load-out option and does not indicate rank at all, as that would be a bizarre way to do so. Why not a rank-indicating shoe? Regardless of this silliness, the point should not be lost that we can achieve two distinct load-outs with one figure.
The other accessories are the SE-14r light repeating blaster (commonly referred to as a Dr. Evazan blaster), and the DLT-19D heavy blaster rifle. The figure interacts very well with the SE-14r. It seats well in the figure’s hand and the trigger finger can be slipped into the trigger guard for a natural pose. I’m not so enamoured with the DLT-19D, and this is the source of the lone point deduction for this figure. I’m not sure if it’s a case of the rifle being a little too small, or a lack of range of motion in the figure’s upper body. I really wanted to pose the figure shouldering the rifle, but I could never quite achieve that despite the premium ball-jointed wrist articulation. You can get close to that pose, but the rifle ends up moving more across the figure’s body as opposed to having the business end pointed at some tangos. If the list of my criticisms consists of being unable to a achieve a single, specific pose, you know you’re dealing with a pretty good figure.
The lower body articulation does what you want it to. The figure can achieve all manner of crouched and kneeling poses as well as aggressive fighting stances. Conversely, it can also be be posed in a completely neutral standing position should you choose to do so. This is what we ask of our super-articulated figures. It can do everything a 5POA equivalent can do, and innumerable things that a 5POA figure can only achieve via hours of “classified augmentations”. As mentioned above, the slight complaint about interacting with the DLT-19D blaster rifle keeps this one point away from a perfect score with a 9 out of 10. We know that this figure is getting re-released in the Vintage Collection in 2018. So if you’ve missed out to this point and you’re patient, you can wait it out until next year. But if you’re human and want it now, it is available from Walmart on their website with free store pick-up at the time of this review: