The Force Unleashed:  A Star Wars Collecting Story

Yesterday we wrapped up our coverage of figures and toys from The Force Unleashed video game. The magnitude of offerings was representative of the glorious golden age, and helps bring in to focus the current state of the hobby, and what may be considered the recent de-evolution of Star Wars 3.75" action figure collecting.

The Force Unleashed was released (after several delays) in late 2008. It was a large multimedia project that consisted of the game, novels, a comic book, reference books, a role-playing game, Hasbro figures, and LEGOs. A sequel was released in late 2010 (which had a cliffhanger ending). A third game was in development before being cancelled due to Disney de-canonizing the EU in April of 2014.

The lead up to the release of The Force Unleashed was pretty exciting. As I've mentioned before, I bought an Xbox 360, my first console in over a decade, just to play this game. In support of the event, Hasbro had planned several figures to be released in 2007 under the Thirtieth Anniversary Collection banner. Delays by LucasArts pushed the game release to September 2008. Hasbro released a wave of TFU figures as the final wave of TAC in 2008. They also releases a few multipacks and the Battle Rancor at that time. The very last carded figure featuring the TAC line look was the poorly handled Gamestop exclusive Stormtrooper Commander. More figures were released during The Legacy Collection. Despite information from Hasbro that there would be no support for the sequel game, the Vintage Collection saw release of a Starkiller figure (the only one from the sequel game), which was even re-released in 2014 as part of The Black Series. It was clear there was a lot of toy support for the game, but it's amazing, in retrospect when you compare that support to what has so far been given to the Disney films.



Now compare that to collector-grade offerings of figures from Disney media, including the three new canon Aphra figures:



Crazy! A video game (with an assist from its sequel) amassed more figures than did the 4 theatrical films plus a comic series released during the Disney era.

35 unique figures were released under the TFU banner (34 for TFU, and 1 for TFU2). And that doesn't include the duplicates that were released as army builders within multi-packs, such as the stormtroopers, Incinerator Troopers, and Shadow Troopers. If you bought one of every figure and set that was available, you'd have a total of 39 figures, plus the Rancor. Three of those (Vader, Palpatine, and Stormtrooper) were essentially straight repacks from previous non-TFU releases, but they were valid additions to the TFU subset. So even if you stripped out the previous releases as well as the duplicates, you would still have 32 new and unique figures plus the battle rancor.

If you combined all the figures released during the Walmart Black Series as well as so far in TVC that are sourced from The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Solo, and the comics, you'd get 31 total figures from the Disney media. [Thank you to Disqus user sam for mentioning that Jedi Master Luke from TFA/TLJ was somehow missing from the group photo. The correct number of Disney figures is 31, not 30 as previously written.] And that number cheats because the Stormtrooper and Death Star Gunner could just as easily be OT figures. I would liken them to the Vader, Palpatine, and Stormtrooper figures that were released as part of the support for TFU, but since those figures already existed, I didn't count them as part of the 32 "new and unique" figures. Since the RO stormtrooper and DSG are actually new figures, I'll keep them in the count of 31 for Disney figures.

So 32 figures for TFU/TFU2, and 31 figures for 4 Disney feature films plus comics. Obviously the newer figures are subjectively better (paint, articulation, sculpt, etc.). But the sheer volume of offerings for TFU looks pretty staggering when compared to what we get today.

Happy Sunday!

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