RAZOR CREST:  A Feature Unused Is A Useless Feature

If you recognize the title of this article, it's a paraphrase from Spies Like Us. If you're a youngin' and haven't seen that movie, you should. It has one of the best fart jokes in motion picture history. Tasteful and refined, without sacrificing any of the fart's innate funniness. Don't get me wrong. I also enjoy the work that Jeff Portnoy did in The Fatties, but when a joke is understated and yet still funny, it wins. This article is a bit of a milestone. It marks the 100th time the introductory paragraph at Bantha Skull has been entirely about farts. We should all have some cake.

Okay, enough goofing around. Let's get to business. My Razor Crest arrived yesterday, and I absolutely love it. I think I love it more than Mr. Nomadscout does IN HIS REVIEW, but that's because when mine arrived, the only thing I had to do was enjoy it. For him, its arrival meant the beginning of a three day chore, and I can vouch first hand that any annoyances become exponentially more irritating in those circumstances. Plus my overall experience was better. I didn't have the stuck ramp issue many are experiencing, and all the panels fit well. I can't wait until my man cave is completed and I can display it with the ramps open, and the roof and side panel removed so I can set up some scenes. Until then, it will reside on its stand in my office looking awesome, but there is an elephant in the room.

I love the concept of the weapons locker with removable accessories. If I were a kid, and those blaster pistols and rifles had merely been sculpted elements, I would have been devastated looking at all those awesome weapons that I can't use. Heck, as an adult, I would get frustrated at things like the sculpted pistol on the chest of the Freeze Frame - Lando Calrissian (in General's Gear). Having these removable weapons is absolutely incredible, but there is no way adult male hands can place the blasters on the pegs. And what good is a toy if it can't be enjoyed by adult males? They're the primary audience for toys! I had to use a pair of needle nose pliers to get each gun in position. The entire process took over an hour with many false starts, and a few instances of having to shake the crest to knock loose the failed attempts from the inaccessible crevices of the locker.

Ultimately I got everything in place. Even the horizontally stored pistols are perfectly parallel to the floor, which took even more patience (note: the image above is from Mr. Nomadscout's gallery with haphazardly pistols). But now that everything is painstakingly in place, I will scale Mt. Kilimanjaro shirtless before I remove even a single blaster from the weapons locker. This is a shame. What should be one of the coolest play features of the Crest has been rendered effectively useless unless I get that hand swap surgery with Reese Witherspoon (it's on the table). I really wish Hasbro had gone just an inch more in this area and made the locker removable from the Crest. It would have taken this feature from a 0 to a 10. Oh, the pain of missed opportunity, but that is my only major complaint. I almost can't wait to go to work tomorrow so I can stare at the Crest some more. Almost.

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