The Response Thus Far On The HasLab Vintage Collection Gunship Has Me Perplexed

Preface: It's HasLab season, and it's off to a slow, but so far steady, start (hopefully it's closing in on 2600 as you read this). That means over the next 40 days, the Gunship HasLab will have a large presence in the discussion here. I don't think it will fail, but if it does, we will go down swinging knowing that we did every bit of advocacy and evangelism that we could. Bret already mentioned this Tuesday, but these articles are never meant to pressure anyone into buying something they don't want, nor are they meant to pressure anyone into buying something they can't afford. I don't want to have to preface every article this way as it will get old fast, so this will be the last time I mention it. All I'm trying to do when I write about this is to provide rebuttal to the detractors, and share why I love this HasLab Gunship. In doing so if I can convert a few fence-sitters (or get Bret to back a 4th), it will have been mission accomplished. With that said...

Right from the jump, I was bemused by the "we already have this response" to the Gunship, which I saw all over the community. I know this is a grotesque oversimplification, but if you extend that logic, I guess you could say Hasbro never should have given us any new Darth Vader figures since we already had one in 1978 (I hope I didn't just give the Retro Collection fans a soapbox). We just had a Chewbacca figure revealed that is still using tooling from 2004, and some fans are getting indignant saying that tooling from two decades ago is too old for such an iconic character. The LAAT/i Gunship is the single most iconic vehicle from the Prequel Trilogy, but in this case, fans are saying that tooling from two decades ago is too young to warrant an upgrade. Why?

Now you might be saying that it's apples and oranges to compare a figure to a vehicle as I did above. I was only doing it to highlight the wildly different reactions to twenty-year-old tooling from the SDCC presentation. Let's talk vehicle to vehicle. In 2008 we already had a Millennium Falcon. It had been released multiple times, most recently four years prior as part of the Original Trilogy Collection (-4 years). The base tooling was thirty years old, and was very much toy/play focused without a strict adherence to accuracy. Then Hasbro announced the Big Millennium Falcon (BMF). The community erupted in excitement. No one said, "but we already have this". We were all gasping at the fact that we would finally have a four person Falcon cockpit. Today, the BMF is considered one of the most iconic vehicles in the history of the line, no hardcore collection is complete without one, and it fetches a pretty penny on the secondary market.

Let's go to 2010. We already had an AT-AT. It had only been released once in the modern line during POTF2 in 1997, but it was part of the Great Toys R Us Clearance of 2000, so it effectively had a second release, and at $10 to boot (-10 years). The base tooling was thirty years old, and was very much toy/play focused without a strict adherence to accuracy. Then Hasbro announced the Big AT-AT (BAT-AT). The community erupted in excitement. No one said, "but we already have this". We were all gasping at the fact that we would finally have a four person AT-AT cockpit. Today, the BAT-AT is considered one of the most iconic vehicles in the history of the line, no hardcore collection is complete without one, and it fetches a pretty penny on the secondary market.

In 2025, we already have a LAAT/i Gunship. It has had multiple releases with the most recent one being in 2013 as part of the Vintage Collection (~12 years). The base tooling is twenty years old, and is very much toy/play focused without a strict adherence to accuracy. At SDCC, Hasbro announced the Big Gunship, and the community yawns for the most part. What's changed? It doesn't make sense to me. If it's strictly about the price, just say that. I don't see how the "redo" argument comes into play. This pattern had played out twice before, and the results have been legendary. Why are we balking now?

Is it a HasLab thing? I personally feel like that's part of it. I really suspect that if this were released like the Galaxy's Edge Falcon as a limited release Target exclusive at $450, it would sell out quickly. The complaints wouldn't be about the price or the fact that it's a redo. Fans would be complaining that Hasbro made it too hard to get. I feel like because it's a HasLab, the community is turning into an army of Kevin Malones and making Hasbro do a song and dance number to get our cookie sales.

This HasLab Gunship (The Big Gunship) utterly supplants the ROTS Gunship in the same way that the BMF and the BAT-AT utterly supplanted the Kenner Falcon and AT-AT respectively. If you're saying that the 2005 release "wasn't that bad" I wholeheartedly disagree. It's severely under-scaled. I currently do not own a single Gunship, but I have bought several over the years. I've never been satisfied with them, especially when equipped with the full sized ball turrets (like the 2013 TVC release). It looks ridiculous:


Look at that thing. It looks like a person who has elephantiasis in the part of Bret's body that gets affected when someone customizes a figure. Just as a reminder, this is literally the ball turret that is in-scale with the existing gunship:


This HasLab LAAT/i Gunship is a labor of love from some enormously talented artisans. Regardless of whether or not you personally want a Gunship, if you can watch this video and not feel impressed by the amount of care and attention to detail that went in to it, you need to check yourself for a pulse:


Click HERE to back the Vintage Collection LAAT/i Gunship HasLab project

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