Why It’s #TimeForTonnika: Part 1 of 3

Click HERE to sign the Tonnika Sisters petition

We here at Bantha Skull are the ultimate pragmatists with respect to priorities in the Vintage Collection. There is no room for kitsch or quirk in our worldview. An action figure's worth is proportional to how well it helps us build the world or complete a scene.  Conversely, a figure’s ability to complete a scene display gives it significantly greater priority.  A single figure available from a source is torture.  I'd personally rather have zero Knights of Ren instead of having the one solitary Knight we have.  The more context we have for a figure greatly increases interest and demand for that figure.  The better a given figure fleshes out a scene display, the more our desire for that figure grows.

This is important with respect to the current #TimeForTonnika campaign.  Our interest in having those two characters made in TVC is purely based on world-building.  It's not out of some sort of misguided "forbidden fruit" reasoning.  We don't want them because Hasbro has said, for all too long, that we can't have them.  We want them because they are critical to our cantina displays.  If you want to display a movie-accurate cantina, the Tonnika Sisters ANCHOR the left side of the bar.  From the camera's perspective, we have a great many characters that line the right side of the bar.  We have virtually none from the left side of the bar.  This comparison of the cantina's establishing shot from A New Hope to the number of figures that have been made to replicate that shot is jarring:





Part of the reason for the “left side blight” is that it’s heavily populated by humans, and not flashier aliens. Some of those humans didn’t even rate a name (see Unidentified Moisture Farmer). Out of the group, the Tonnika Sisters would qualify as some of the more compelling subjects. While the sisters are canonically human again, Angela Staines is 6’2”. That’s tall for a human in general, but 99th percentile for females. That in and of itself lends some exoticism to the display. A Senni Tonnika figure would be slightly taller than a Han Solo figure.

Moving on, the sisters get their own glam shot with the aforementioned nameless moisture wrangler (who is clearly photo bombing). That is a statement directly from the film maker. Those glam shots were reserved for only the more interesting subjects in the cantina menagerie. The Maker himself thought these sisters were visually compelling enough to give them a dedicated isolation shot in his passion project. That alone is all the argument we need to make, but we'll keep going.

Completing the “you need these for your display” argument is the “I’m not such a bad pilot myself” scene. Guess who occupies the background of that scene:





If you are like us, and scene completion is what floats your boat, the Tonnika Sisters are critical to your cantina displays. If you haven’t done so, please sign the Tonnika Sisters petition HERE. Additionally, please help us get the #TimeForTonnika hash tag trending by using it on all you social media platforms (ideally while sharing the petition). 

Just like the combined #FightForTVC and #BackTVC campaigns, this really comes down to all of you. Grass roots efforts speak the loudest because they are also the most genuine.

---

comments powered by Disqus