Nomadscout’s Collection Part II

Still uninspired to do a regular figure gallery, you all have to suffer through Part II of looking at my collection...

PART I can be found here, if you're interested. It featured the massive droid army and navy that was released over the years by Hasbro. If you were a collect-them-all type, and you also were an army builder, then you spent a lot of resources amassing this part of your collection.

But the Confederacy of Independent Systems, or "Separatists", consisted of a bunch of planetary systems that banded together to reject the corruption of the Republic, and sought a better way of governance. While the CIS amassed huge numbers of droid soldiers and vehicles to fight their battles against the Grand Army of the Republic, those droids were programmed to fight for these planetary systems. Filoni's The Clone Wars series spent some time diving into the politics, trade, and finances of these worlds, introducing us to various planets and cultures that were more or less faceless during the Prequel Trilogy of films. With the exception of the CIS leadership council and a random senator or two, the only cultures/species that we saw on screen were the Geonosians, Neimoidians, and some blink-and-you'll-miss-them Mustafarians.

Part II features the figures, vehicles, ships, and environments from these 3 groups, as well as the CIS leadership themselves and their personal vehicles.

We have a few different Neimoidians, so Hasbro has occasionally sprinkled them into the line since 1999. Most of the figures are woefully outdated, but they look pretty nice. The best one is Daultay Dofine, which is the most recent figure of the species to be released, coming in the 2012 TVC 1.0 line. Many collectors would like updates to Nute Gunray and maybe Rune Haako (the latter of which never even got a repaint/retool for AOTC or ROTS). Aside from that, there once was some support for a Tey How figure, the character with the weird goggles that piloted the main Trade Federation capital ship that Little Ani blew up when he tried spinning, which was a good trick. These days, there's not a much noise surrounding new or updated Neimoidians. Unless there's some celebration surrounding a TPM anniversary, it seems unlikely we'll get more.

Geonosis was heavily represented by Hasbro over the years, and remains one of the most complete set pieces of the entire PT. We went into great detail with this in our Geonosis "Scene It" coverage, which included all the Jedi and Republic forces that fought in the first battle of the Clone Wars. In these images, I've included all the vehicles and environmental pieces that were offered. The centerpiece, of course, is the Geonisis Arena Playset, known in canon as Petranaki Arena. While the playset itself is a bit of downer in that it has some kid-friendly features and designs that I could do without, it is most notably frustrating because the balcony is too tiny to accommodate all the Separatist leaders and guests that occupied the place of honor during the execution scene. Also, the main wall to the balcony on my set doesn't snap into place any more, so it just hangs on by sheer luck, falling to the ground if you look at it sideways. Otherwise, it serves as a pretty nifty backdrop to the loads of figures and beasts that have been available. The biggest omission is the Orray beast, and the cart that pulled the prisoners into the arena. Sadly, the window for that toy closed a long time ago. I acquired a really nice custom Orray not too long ago, just to help fill out the scene.

Mustafar is reasonably well represented. It also has a centerpiece playset, but it's pretty terrible. It doesn't really do anything well, and has a bunch of silly gimmicks, like launching lava balls. It's garbage for the most part, but if you can get it to stay together, it's not a terrible backdrop for your Darth Vader Order 66 stuff, or your Obi-Wan/Anakin final duel. Mustafar itself was controlled by the Techno Union. The native Mustafarians are shown briefly in ROTS. We see a couple of guards in one shot that were made into figures, and we also see a couple of lava minors trying to mind their business why they do their terrible jobs. There's also a soldier riding a lava flea beast, which is another animal that Hasbro may have considered doing for 12 seconds back in 2005, but that will never happen now.

Beyond these 3 cultures, we do have quite a few figures representing the CIS leadership and key players, including Count Dooku and Jango Fest - both of whom have brand new figures coming this year. Aside from them, we have various members of the council, some of whom were repainted to represent either AOTC or ROTS appearances. We've also got General Grievous, and might as well throw in Kid Boba for good meausure.

While the 3 cultures discussed above only had one Geonosian Starfighter vehicle released, the CIS leaders had a few of their own personal modes of transport made available to collectors. While we never got Dooku's Solar Sailer (we do have the droid pilot, FA-4) Hasbro did give us his Geonosian speeder. Jango Fett's Slave I saw several different releases, the best being the "BMF" sized ship, which was repainted at least 74 times as Boba's version. General Grievous actually got two vehicles, his super weird Wheel Bike, which Obi-Wan destroyed, and his hotrod starfighter, which Obi-Wan stole. Basically, Obi-Wan repeatedly pwned Grievous just because he could.

If you put all of this stuff together with the droid army from Part I, you can see that Hasbro definitely put some serious effort into building out the CIS. While we sometimes find that our collections are overly stocked with hero figures and soldiers that lack bad guys to fight, the prequel era of figures and toys definitely respected the CIS.

So go ahead and share your Separatist collections in the comments below. Stay tuned for Part III, which may or may not ever happen.

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