The Siren Of Another Licensee Has Come Calling

First, please all take a moment to call Mr. Nomadscout "jerky jerk face". As I'm writing this, I'm on the last day of my work-cation. I really wanted to go out of the town and rip it up with the boys, so I asked nomad to fill in for me. He said he couldn't because he was planning on looking at pictures of birds this evening. Thanks a lot, jerky jerk face.

Two years ago, I wrote THIS ATICLE about how the LEGO UCS series was really cranking out the vehicles that I wanted to see in the Vintage Collection. In fairly short order, they cranked out the Landspeeder, LAAT Gunship and AT-AT. As each one was announced, I felt a tug to maybe dip a toe into the LEGO world. The problem is that I don't know how to collect in half measures. I have no speed between zero and obsessed. A few years later, you'd be reading an article about how I finally tracked down the the $2,000 Cloud City Boba Fett mini-figure.

Now another licensor is tugging even harder at my heart strings. As you're probably aware, Sideshow announced the first installment in their renewed Scum & Villainy line while also teasing several other figures (which are very easy to identify):


We obviously have decent versions of Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan, and a flawless version of Greedo is coming with the Cantina next year. But the other two sting. The reason it smarts is that I don't think the prospects of us every getting a new Labria and Garindan in TVC are very good, and to be honest, I'm not sure they would sell the volume that Hasbro requires.

Hasbro has to sell them at high volumes because of the tooling requirements. It's one of the challenges of the Star Wars line. G.I. Joe and Marvel have a ton of tooling reuse between characters, and the standard heights offer other benefits. The uniqueness of Star Wars characters limits the tooling reuse opportunities. This is the advantage that LEGO and Sideshow have. There's very little unique tooling with LEGO sets. 95% of each set simply draws from their existing brick tooling library. Sideshow benefits from cloth costumes over a few standard bucks. Again, very little steel tooling required for each figure. The uniqueness is mostly expressed via the soft good which have much smaller up front production costs. Those two companies have much more flexibility because this.

Still, though I understand why Hasbro probably can't do these figures, it doesn't make me want them any less. Thus I'm really tempted to wade into 1:6 realm, and if that happens, there's a possibility I will be lost to it. If you spend enough time talking to Hot Toys / Sideshow collectors, you will find that a great many of them have graduated from one of the two Star Wars lines. That is my only hope for Labria and Garindan to make it into TVC. Maybe these Sideshow announcements will create some pressure for Hasbro to make them so they don't have a few more collectors slip through their fingers.

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