When Notorious Pegwarmers Need To Be Updated

If you've been collecting the modern line for any stretch of time, the mere mention of certain figures will cause an involuntary wince. Even if you're relatively new to the hobby, you likely know what I'm talking about. If I say Snoke, you probably react like John Ritter in Bad Santa:


If you're a long time collector, the list of cringe-inducing figures is much longer. Pegwarmers have existed from almost the line's infancy. I can remember feeling like my local Walmart store had a wall of figures populated solely by the 1997 Weequay and ASP-7 figures. Aside from exceptions like Constable Zuvio, figures exist in the line for a reason. Hasbro doesn't throw a dart at a character list to decide which figures get made. They're some combination of relevance to the plot, importance to a fan favorite scene, or are visually compelling.

This butts up against the challenges of any long running property. Longevity is a blessing and a curse. Comic books titles struggle balancing their decades of legacy against being accessible to new customers. For this reason, titles are often quasi-rebooted so that new readers have an onboarding point. With the longevity of the 3.75" scale, one of the issues is that older figures become so aesthetically and functionally incongruous with newer figures, that it's difficult to even consider them part of the same line. The action figure solution is similar to the comic book solution. Reboot those older figures by updating them.

But what about when those older figures were notorious peg warmers? As mentioned earlier, in most cases those figures weren't arbitrarily produced. They were considered important enough for Hasbro to invest in them at one point. Should they be ignored for the rest of time due to market forces dating back more than a decade? I give you the case of Nute Gunray and Rune Haako. They are inarguably the two biggest pegwarmers from the Episode I line. They are also important to the plot of The Phantom Menace and you will find yourself needing them in many dioramas. They stick out like sore thumbs due to being slightly out of scale with the present day line, and still having a toehold on the less detailed POTF era sculpting techniques and paint applications. Please note that in this case, it's not really about the articulation. It's more about aesthetics. Just look at this comparison shot:


Nute and Rune almost look like they are based on animation compared to Daultay Dofine and Lushros Dofine to their immediate left and right. I can live with the aforementioned ASP-7 never being updated, but it would be disappointing if two principal Episode I villains were forever locked into 1999 sculpts.

I don't think updates to these figures would require all new tooling, or even a lot of tooling. Given what Hasbro has been capable of with soft goods recently, much of the unique detail could be expressed with new robes, head sculpts, and plastic overlays combined with the aforementioned Daultay Dofine sculpt. It feels like these figures could be updated with relatively low investment, but on the other hand, Neimodians almost always pegwarm. So this leads is to the self interview trope portion of the article. Would I like to see Nute Gunray and Rune Haako updated? Very much so. Would I risk the future of the Vintage Collection on those two figures? Absolutely not.

Given the heavy dose of new media these days, combined with the reduced annual volume of figures, I have to resign myself to the fact that some pre-2008 figures are never going to be updated, but I genuinely want updates to old Nute and Rune.

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