One Small Accessory Could Have Made The Echo Base Soldier Pack More Appealing

It's the Saturday of the 4th of July weekend here in the states, which means that our readership will be about 25% of our usual traffic. For the six of you reading this, thank you. I mentioned yesterday that I'm in the process of setting my collection up after nearly two years of being confined to bins. Part of this process involves scouring the the films for reference. I was in the process of setting up some Echo Base displays, and something that others have noted about the Rebel Soldier (Echo Base Battle Gear) Troop Builder Pack really stood out.

The head gear on the soldiers in this pack appears to be removable. That's pretty neat, but the value in removing the headgear, like the helmets on the Rebel Fleet Soldier, would be much greater if there was something else with which to replace it:


The character above is Corman Quien, who is commonly referred to as the Tauntaun Handler. All that distinguishes him from the "Echo Base Soldier" version is that soft cap with the Elmer Fudd flaps (do people still get that reference?). If Hasbro had included that cap as an accessory in this set, we instantly could have created a whole new class of figure for the cost of next to nothing. And don't think that all we could have done was create one new stable boy. The Echo Base hangar is teaming with similarly chappeau-ed gents. This appears to be the uniform of the ground crew on Hoth.

It's hard to imaging that we'd get another release of this sculpt with the soft cap, so this feels like a missed opportunity. I only bought one of this trooper pack (begrudgingly). If the soft cap with the ear flaps were included, I would have been angry that Hasbro Pulse was limiting me to only two.

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