A Terrible Precedent Has Been Set By Adding Malakili To The TBS Racor HasLab Campaign

Early yesterday evening, the Hasbro Pulse Instagram account dropped a bombshell. Malakili, the Rancor Keeper, was added to the BASE offering of the Black Series Rancor campaign. It is included once the campaign reaches the minimum requirement of 9,000 backers:



I won't go into the boring bookkeeping again, but I would stake my life that the tooling for this Malakili is not being funded out of the Rancor campaign. I would assume the figure is coming to the 2023 main line. So this serves as a pre-pack, but that part is immaterial for the purpose of this article.

On one hand, this looks like a good case of Hasbro listening to the fans which is ostensibly a good thing, except this is HasLab. I fear this sets a new expectations that will cause a "hold out" factor with future campaigns. There were two arguments I heard for why Malakili needed to be included with the Rancor from the beginning. The first, which I don't buy, is that he is needed as a figure with which the Rancor interacts. Baaaaa-loney. The Rancor interacts with the Gamorrean Guard and Luke. Those are the action scenes. All Malakili does is posthumously mourn the Rancor while sending tears streaming down his gynecomastic chest.

The other argument, which I believe is the true argument, is that this campaign was the only chance for TBS fans to get a Malakili figure since he's a poor candidate for main line. In other words, HasLab is being leveraged to get a figure that would never see the light of day otherwise. This is now a set precedent, and is something that will be expected for all future HasLabs. If my dream of a TVC HasLab Death Star ever comes to fruition, fans are now going to leverage that campaign to get an equally main line questionable figure, Sim Aloo, and you know what, I'm not going to argue. This capitulation with the Rancor would make me look foolish if I did.

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