Figures That Make Me Happy:  Rebel Honor Guard

Here's one that would have perplexed me as a kid if it were part of the vintage Kenner collection. I mean, I would have owned it. "Collect all x figures" wasn't just a marketing line on the back of the cards. It was a mandate. A commandment. And, well...


So if this figure had cracked the vintage Kenner line up, I would have owned it. You can be your bottom dollar on that. I had no idea who IG-88 and FX-7 were after my first few viewings of The Empire Strike Back, but I obsessed over them on the insert of the Darth Vader carry case.

I would have owned it, and I would have invented all sort of story lines for the character because that's what we did back in the day. It's what we had to do. Watching the movies at home wasn't an option. It wouldn't be for a few more years. We kept Star Wars alive during the interminable three year wait for Episode V by crafting our own stories at home, so the Rebel Honor Guard would have gone on many adventures. But just as I was perplexed why Saggletooth wasn't Dr. Evazan, I would have been equally perplexed as to why a hypothetical Rebel Honor Guard wasn't a Rebel Fleet Trooper.

Fast forward literally 40 years, and we had a Rebel Fleet Trooper. In fact, we had two (on the way to three), even if the first one was largely laughable. And of course the emerging principal customer for "collector grade" action figures was the adult collector, so the play-worthiness of the character selections was becoming less important. Completing dioramas started to becoming more and more important. Hasbro had put some work in for the Yavin Ceremony. We had a Ceremonial Luke in the same wave as at the Rebel Honor Guard. The POTF Flashback series brought us our first Ceremonial Leia. Both of those figures have been well updated since 2007. 2004 delivered General Jan Dodonna. That's a good amount of figures for a post action scene.

The Rebel Honor Guard beefed up those ranks even more. Even though the figure as carded appears at the back of the room, if you trade him the soft baseball cap from the Vintage Collection Rebel Fleet Trooper, you can recreate the guards that appeared on stage:


That's pretty cool. I'm thrilled we were once able to get a figure like this. I think it would be very neat to re-release this on a Vintage Collection card, but I'm sure the tooling is either lost or degraded by now. But I would like to see Hasbro have to figure out how to include that staff in a TVC coffin bubble.

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