Original Review:  Chris - 7/24/2012 2:24 AM

In the highly likely - nay, certain - event that Hasbro is reading this review on a marginal fan site written by a Star Wars fan with an unmanaged drinking problem: Stop futzing around!  I’m tired of this slow trickle of skiff guard figures.  It’s no fun building a scene over the course of a decade, especially when aesthetics, scale, and figure technology can change during that time period.  Just put a mess of them in a box, tell Toys R Us to name their price, and take my mutha lovin’ money!  GIT-R-DONE already.  So, great.  I have the first modern super articulated skiff guard for the second skiff.  In the words of a young Austin Powers, “whoopty doo, Basil.”  I need like six or seven other guys to go with him.  You should have included a deck of playing cards so he can play solitaire.

Okay.  Enough about the (frustrating) circumstances surrounding this figure, you’re probably wondering about the figure itself.  Well, I’m still not ready to talk about it. I need more preface.  Banthaskull.com largely congealed out of a single thread in the forum of another site.  That thread was affectionately known as the “skiff guard thread.”  You should consider all biases and prejudices implicit in that statement when reading this review.

I LOVE THIS FIGURE!  Seriously, aside from the white plastic visible in the knee joints and the fact that the teal background color of the vintage card has not been faithfully reproduced in this neo-classic representation, I don’t know what I’d complain about.  The detailing doesn’t lack in any area (save for paint apps on the accessories).  The articulation is all there, even ankle joints which I thought might have been omitted when the first pics from NY Toy Fair were unveiled.  Like Shae Vizla, this is another figure I’d gladly buy more of if Hasbro would go back to selling Vintage Collection figures through big box retailers.  I’d buy one to stick in my Jabba’s palace diorama even though this unnamed Nikto never appears in the palace.  I just don’t care.  That’s how much I like this figure.  10 out of 10.

Updated Review:  Bret - 9/13/2018 07:05 AM

Man, it’s like I just went through a time warp reading that review from Chris.  So many things are now out of date as to render that review unreadable.  UNREADABLE!  Nah, the review itself is dead on.  This figure is awesome no matter how you look at it.  The sculpt, the detailing, the paint, the posability, the accessories…everything is great.  I agree with Chris’s few nitpicks.  The joints are painted wrong, which is a recurring problem with so many figures.  And the accessories, while excellent as far as their sculpt and level of interactivity with the figure, could use a few details, like some weathering on the pike, or a bit of coloring on the blaster.  But the holster functions well, and the figure can perform a THWG with both the blaster and the pike. 

Two minor complaints I will add.  My sample has a bit of a balance problem.  The ankles don’t have a great range of motion, particularly in that they don’t allow the feet to flex upward barely at all.  My figure tends to fall backward a bit, and it’s hard to adjust the ankles forward to compensate.  Also, the helmet is a bit loose fitting.  It doesn’t look bad at all, but it falls off very easily when you’re posing the figure.  A minor gripe indeed, if you just get into a certain pose and then leave it be.

Nikto are fairly well represented in action figure form.  From the lineup above, the most obvious omission is Yotts Oren, who is one of the missing figures from the same second skiff on which this guy was stationed.  Additionally, we need Vedain, the driver of the prisoner skiff.  Also, everyone should know by now that Hasbro has announced a new “Klaatu” figure, which will replace the 20-ish year old figure shown at the far right of the Nikto lineup in the gallery.  That white jump-suited character who emerged onto the deck of the Khetanna to fight Luke was actually played by Corey Williams, son of Billy Dee.  Neat!

As for the rest of the review, I will now and forever take the word “congeal” as the perfect description of the birth of Bantha Skull.  I now have an image of us swirling around a primordial soup of that forum so long ago, eventually finding each other, and gelling to create a new life form.  Gross and awesome at the same time.  So now I say that this year was the 10th anniversary of The Congealing.

Chris mentioned how much he wished Hasbro would just end the misery and give us a multipack with the missing Skiff Guards via Toys R Us.  I had to Google that.  Apparently, Toys R Us was a company that once had over 800 stores across the US and sold only toys.  ONLY TOYS!  What a wonderful world that must have been.  After eating your steak sandwich topped with donuts and cigarettes, you could rub some formaldehyde in your kids’ hair, throw them in the car without wasting time buckling them into a nonsensical car seat, and drive to that crazy dreamland of a store.  Amazing.

And finally, Chris mentioned that this character had no name.  He has since been given the name “Lathe”, although shortly thereafter, it was rendered (at least temporarily) moot by the whole Legends relegation thing.  We still call him Lathe, and he’s one of 8 members of the second skiff.  Four of them have been made by Hasbro:  Lathe and Brock Starsher have modern updates, while Pote Snitkin and Barada have ancient sculpts and need an update. 

This figure, while not necessarily 100% perfect, gets the label “definitive”, and should not be messed with.  We’ll update the grade to a 9/10, only because 10’s are just too special to hand out like candy.

You can read up on all the Missing In Action Figures from the Skiffs in our special feature.

This figure goes for moderately high prices on eBay.  I’m actually surprised it’s not going for higher, but I would’t be shocked if it does so as we get closer to the arrival of the Barge.  If Hasbro ever updates to a larger and more accurate Skiff, then watch out. This guy will go through the roof.  If you don’t have one, you should be ashamed of yourself. 

Updated Review:  Bret - 6/26/2023 07:05 AM.

If you read the above reviews, you’ll see that “Nikto” was given the name “Lathe.”  This name was first created way back in 2001, but was erroneously attributed to Nysad.  It wasn’t until March of 2013 that the confusion was cleared up, and the name was officially bestowed upon this Second Skiff guard Nikto. It was short-lived, however, as just a year later, in April of 2014, Disney relegated everything to “Legends” status, and began a new canon.  However, like so many other instances in the GFFA, the name was resurrected in 2020 (after the previous figure review), and is once again part of the current canon.  As such, I would have wished that Hasbro added “Lathe” to the name pill, but that probably would have sent some number of collectors into an emotional tailspin.

Nikto is the third (of 4) re-releases of Jabba goons which together formed their own wave of figures in mid-2023.  So far, we’ve reviewed VC24 Wooof (we kept the 9/10 score), and VC56 Kithaba (We dropped the score from a 9 to a 7).  Wooof was a great figure, and the sculpt didn’t suffer much in the 13 years since its release.  I didn’t feel the same for Kithaba, whose skinny waist, T-crotch, and narrow swivel hips make the figure look a bit dated.

In Nikto’s case, the answer is somewhere between the two.  The figure is excellent, and holds up well.  I certainly would argue that the character doesn’t need a JLA upgrade to the hips, hands, or feet, so it was a wise choice by Hasbro to skip any new tooling costs.  They did fix one of the gripes, which was the badly mismatched knee-joint colors; that was a nice touch.  They also added PhotoReal, which obviously wasn’t a thing back in 2012, although the difference in the appearance of the face is minimal.  The eyes do a appear a bit softer, and the skin color has some new bit of depth that was absent the first time around. These upgrades are worthwhile to acquire this figure again, but they don’t move the needle in the positive direction.  And while the articulation is acceptable, it doesn’t compare to the better modern figures in TVC 2.0.

In the end, Nikto is a really nice figure.  It’s not as awesome as Wooof, but it also doesn’t suffer any glaring issues that show its age.  I’ll drop it a point, and give it a very respectable 8.