Can We Talk About The New Snowtrooper Coming To TVC At Some Point?

We get to play that awesome internet game where we all saw something, but via an army of copyright strikes, we have to pretend it doesn't exist. I really don't get the practice of showing things to some of the public in the age where almost every single person is walking around with a 4K movie camera in their pocket, and the internet now largely exist to broadcast that content. There is no such thing as a controlled rolled out of content under these parameters, but Disney seems to have a passion for this model. It does them a disservice. A massive one.

In case you missed it, the teaser trailer for The Mandalorian & Grogu was shown at the D23 Disney fan event this past weekend. Disney should have released a hi-def version on the official YouTube channel shortly thereafter, but didn't. By not doing so, they created demand from the wider public that was filled by a now-deleted low quality and off-kilter screener of that trailer. 100% of the information is out there to nearly 100% of the fanbase, but instead of those fans getting that information delivered in the most presentable fashion, it was disseminated in a very low fidelity pirate format. What purpose does this sort of partial embargo serve? It's impossible to prevent the unauthorized dissemination. It's like anti-marketing, but I digress.

For me, the biggest thing to come out of the teaser trailer, that doesn't officially exist yet, is that the Snowtroopers are making an appearance in The Mandalorian & Grogu which releases in May of 2026. This should ensure that the long awaited update to the Snowtrooper comes to the line before '26 comes to a close. As you know, I've been a big proponent of such a release with my previous article on the subject HERE. So this would ostensibly be a good thing for me, but there may be some catches.

The first one is obvious. O96 fans are going to want the Snowtrooper on the debut card:


Obviously, a 2026 release would be branded to The Mandalorian & Grogu. Next, better nerds have told me that these new Snowtroopers are not an exact match to the Original Trilogy Snowtroopers. I have no idea what the extent of the differences are. I don't even know if it would be big enough for me to care. I'm just telling you that the word is out there. Finally, these new troopers appeared to be carrying something similar to the DLT-20A blaster rifle. In Episode V, the Hoth Stormtroopers were armed with E-11 blaster rifles.

All of this conspires to mean that a The Mandalorian & Grogu Snowtrooper won't check off the O96 Imperial Stormtrooper (Hoth Battle Gear) for reasons ranging from obvious to potentially nitpicky. For that reason, I think that Hasbro should get in front of it. Instead of waiting two years for a new media Snowtrooper, and then who knows how long for the O96 update, they should flip the order. Make the O96 Snowtrooper next year, then retool/repaint it for 2026.

I think that offers them the best ROI on the tooling. In the reverse order, I assume the earliest we'd get the O96 version would be 2028. 2027 is the 50th Anniversary of A New Hope, so I have to imagine the OT product that year will focus on Episode IV. Who knows what the media landscape will look like by then and how long an O96 Snowtrooper would have to wait before being slotted. Hasbro should get to the most sellable version sooner rather than later.

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