Hasbro:  Immediately No To All of These

The vast majority of figures since the rebirth of TVC in 2018 have been incredible. But we've also gotten a few head scratchers. And sometimes we need to stop the madness before it's too late.

Lately I've been begging Hasbro to make stuff just for me for a change. Give me more than a trickle of debut items, help me complete my crews, and support my HasLab purchases more consistently. I'm sure some of that resonates with a nice chunk of the community, but I also know a sizable portion of you prefer things that don't interest me in the slightest, like packaging, O96, The Sequel Trilogy, and redos of many characters and toys we already have. That's okay, as we can't all agree on everything. But sometimes there are notions that unite the overwhelming majority of collectors. Unless I'm completely out of touch (and I very well may be), I think this is something we can almost all agree on.

The Biker Scout, Tusken Raider, Battle Droid, and Sandtrooper are not ready for prime time. They need a complete overhaul. The Frankenstein experiment must end. The constant incremental updates fall short every...single...time.

We went through this with VC281 Endor Han Solo. Hasbro tried to give us a figure we very much wanted. It was a main OT character, and it was long overdue for an overhaul. But what we got was a half-measure figure that satisfied nobody. It was a waste of partial tooling. Fans were loud and clear that they weren't happy with this figure, and it seemed like Hasbro heard the message. But we still get this type of nonsense from time to time, and there have been several examples recently that fall into this category. In an era where the OT is finally getting some love after falling down the priority ladder for many years, Hasbro has bunted foul multiple times on OT figures that deserve much better - particularly because they are often army builders.

The most notable is the Scout Trooper. For whatever reason, Hasbro keeps pumping out incremental updates (head, feet, hips), but can't manage to just give us a definitive update once and for all. It's staggeringly frustrating, because while I'm sure these are selling reasonably well, a definitive Biker Scout would sell just as phenomenally as the Stormtrooper and Snowtrooper. The figure seems to be getting uglier at the same time as there are slight improvements to the articulation. And those hands...those hideous hands! We keep getting variants from different media sources even though the base figure isn't good. The Scout has become a monster, and the only cure is more cowbell as a completely newly tooled figure.

Next up is the Tusken Raider. Same deal as the Scout Trooper. A constant stream of updates to this body part or that joint, but in the end, the overall result is a failure. It's a hodgepodge of parts that don't really go well together so the figure just looks bizarre - and it still has swivel wrists with hands that are awkwardly posed. Like the Scout Trooper, Hasbro continues to find ways to repaint and re-use this base figure, and none of the results are satisfying.

Taking a detour to the PT, we have the Battle Droid. This is one of the more frustrating figures that exists. We've heard excuses like "tolerances" and "he's not climbing walls" and "cost" and "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit." I don't care about any of this nonsense. It's high time Hasbro figured out how to make Battle Droids that can do what they are meant to do: Stand upright without melting, and hold their blasters with two hands. We can put a man on the moon, but we can't get a battle droid to perform a two-handed weapon grip.

And most recently, we got the Sandtrooper updated for TVC 2.0. What should have been a glorious moment turned into another teeth-gnashing disappointment. While Hasbro got some of the details right, acknowledging that a Sandtrooper is not a Stormtrooper, they still missed out on multiple details with a figure that, like the others on this list, falls frustratingly short. The ammo pouch should not be attached to the pauldron. The ammo pouches on the belt should be black. There should be a diamond shaped left knee plate. The RT-97C rifle is needed. And it's time the hips are updated to the most modern "barbell" standard.

The sub-par Scout and Tusken have been tweaked, re-painted, retooled, and re-released with nauseatingly high frequency. The Battle Droid with updated legs has so far only been seen once (even though the previous mold was reused multiple times very recently (from sources such as the Microseries and video games). And likewise, the weak sandtrooper has only been offered one time so far.

I am hoping that Hasbro can save us all the aggravation of further releases of any of these figures until they are completely redone from top to bottom before it's too late. Only when we get a definitive figure that meets the most modern standards should it be approved for repaints and re-releases. I hope to never see any of these particular sculpts ever again.

Hasbro: We need an all new Biker Scout, Tusken Raider, Battle Droid, and Sandtrooper. No more Frankensteins!

---

comments powered by Disqus