No Elbows On 8D8 Makes Me Want To Retch

Our friends from the Star Wars Vintage Collection Facebook group conducted a Q&A with the Hasbro Star Wars brand team at SDCC. You can watch the full Q&A HERE, but I want to draw your attention to one specific segment where they address the articulation on the upcoming 8D8 figure:


I'm a little okay with the lack of knees. If the figure had them, I'm not sure I'd ever engage the knees when I display the figure. He's going to be standing behind the branding device that came with the POTF2 8D8, but the lack of elbows is an absolute gut punch. A bent elbow is the quintessence of 8D8. In your mind's eye, that is THE pose for the droid as seen in the image above. What borders on infuriating is the reason given, which is that the limbs are too thin to accommodate the point of articulation. Are we all supposed to ignore the fact that we just got an IG-11 figure?


If the spindly limbs on IG-11 can feature well functioning elbows, there is absolutely no reason 8D8 can't, even if some aesthetic compromises had to be made. This is the second time that I feel like the community is being gaslighted recently. The first time was during our infamous contentious Q&A where Hasbro couldn't or wouldn't admit that the Black Series got more 100% newly tooled figures per year than TVC.

I can personally deal with difficult, but truthful answers. I have a hard time feeling like excuses are being made to avoid addressing the hard issues. This reminds me exactly of the time during TVC 1.0. when the then brand team said that the lack of ankle joints on Hoth Leia was due to the limbs being too thin to accommodate the articulation. We were all supposed to ignore the fact that two years prior we received an Ahsoka figure with even thinner limbs that had ankle joints:


In both the 8D8 and Hoth Leia cases, it's hard not to be a little insulted because Hasbro's answer assumes we can't remember very recent contradictory examples. I was upset that the Jabba Set was initially only a limit of 2 per customer (now a limit of 5) because I wanted to get three 8D8 figures, but the lack of elbows completely sours that. In fact, I'm now thinking of canceling one of the two I did order.

Moreover, the SDCC presentation for the Vintage Collection was split. The product reveals were great, but pipeline reveals combined with the reduced articulation on 8D8 paint a somewhat bleak future for TVC, and that article also needs to be written.

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