Bantha Skull Strikes Back 8/14

Planned obsolescence is the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer.

It's an age old concept. Manufacturers don't want to sell you a permanent solution. If they did, they'd never be able sell that same product to you again. Sometimes this can be achieved by simply making a product that doesn't last that long. That doesn't work for adult collectors and their toys. We may or may not open them, and if we do they get plopped on a shelf. We don't play with our toys so wear and tear does not come into the equation. Okay, we do play with our toys, but not like a spastic five year old would. So the odds of us needing a new Boba Fett due to the figure falling into a state of disrepair are slim. One way to get us to re-purchase a figure we already own is to continue to push the sculpting quality and articulation. This is generally well received by the masses, but what if there was a more sinister short cut that could be taken? What if Hasbro simply programmed in minor accuracy or aesthetic oversights that could be corrected at a later date? It gets a little conspiratorial from here, so if you're not a big Oliver Stone fan, you might want to get off the ride now.

So 2006 brought us our first C-3PO figure with articulated knees. The community was thrilled, but there was something wrong with the initial release:



Did anyone at Hasbro notice that the unpainted knees greatly detracted from the figure's aesthetics? Couldn't this have been caught before the figure's release? Well it wasn't, and shortly there after a "corrected' version was released. How many of you ended up with 2 Ewok Throne C-3PO's? I know I did.

Lets bring things forward to the beginning of this year. We rejoiced at the Legacy of the Fetts Evolution Pack that was announced. However, the Boba Fett figure was released missing its trademark "wheat" emblem on the chest:



You could argue that Hasbro was simply unaware of this particular design element of the Fett costume except Boba Fett has been released numerous times since 1995 and every release included the wheat emblem. Where this goes a little deeper is when Hasbro went so far as to issue a statement via the Q&A that a corrected figure wasn't likely to come out in the near future. Of course they wouldn't want us to know that a corrected version was coming because we would simply skip the ones on the shelves. How many of you re-purchased Legacy of the Fetts in the Legacy packaging to get the corrected Fett figure? I know I did.

This brings me up to my latest purchase of the Imperial Pilots evolution set. Why am I not surprised that the Revenge of the Sith Clone Pilot is missing the Imperial symbol on his upper arm?



Whether or not this is an intentional practice by Hasbro is unknown, but the trend is growing tiresome. These aren't the only examples of this pattern. They are merely some of the more annoying examples because the effort to make the figures correct is so minimal that you wonder why it couldn't be done in the first place. Along these same lines, we didn't even touch on the ever growing trend of pre-paints (Felucian Rancor, Purple Windu squad Airborne Trooper, sandstorm Luke, etc), but that is really better served as its own Strikes Back.

Anyone want to bet that next year's highly anticipated Death Star 2 Luke will have the glove on the wrong hand?

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