Bantha Skull’s (Not Quite) Year in Review

We've been around for a while, but a malaise had set in at Bantha Skull for some time, until that fateful day, with as yet unrealized promise, when Hasbro announced that The Vintage Collection would be making a return.

On April 17th, we made our first news post of the year, a poll asking for input in Hasbro's Fan Choice poll for the resurrected TVC line. Despite the best efforts of our readers, Dr. Aphra still managed to win over our old favorites, like Yakface.

Within 10 days of our return, Chris managed a complete overhaul of the site. This included the first major graphical facelift to Bantha Skull in years. We went with a look that evoked the Vintage Collection, complete with a logo inspired by the old Kenner special offer starburst. Chris also initiated a mobile friendly modernization. If you didn't notice, then it was a great success, as it is a seamless responsive interface that works well on all platforms, devices, and screen sizes.

On May 10th, Chris wrote about new attitudes in the community, and thus began a series of collector editorials that, despite his self-deprecating claims to the contrary, were some of our most popular entries for the year. These included a bunch of conversation-starting "Top 5" lists, such as the "Top 5 Vintage Collection “Original 92” New Sculpt Wish List"

On May 21st, Chris finally jump-started our toy gallery and review section, by featuring the Hawkbat Clone from the TAC line. Admittedly, an odd choice at that moment, but it helped get us back on track to daily figure galleries, which have always been the heart of our site since we launched almost 10 years ago. We finished 2016 with a look at the Black Series Princess Leia. In between we published 125 galleries, reaching daily output after Force Friday II.

Bantha Skull followed the business side of Star Wars throughout the year. There was some big news to follow. Hasbro's stock was hot for the first half of the year, overheating a bit, which led to a bit of a price correction. Indicators were that business was good, despite a slow (as expected) 3rd quarter, but Hasbro's short-term prospects took a hit with the huge announcement that Toys R Us was filing for Chapter 11. We followed the story closely, seeking to help understand what that would mean for the last big toy-only retailer in the US, and what it might mean for Star Wars collectors.

That was just the beginning of a lot of business news. A huge move was made by Hasbro, seeking to leverage its own relatively strong stock price against that of its closest competitor, when they announced a bid to buy Mattel. Again, we wanted to help out our readers with a deeper look at the deal, and why it may have made sense for Hasbro, while at this time, nothing has been approved. Even that paled in comparison to the biggest business news of the year, as related to Star Wars. Parent company Disney had been in conversations to buy most of 21st Century Fox, and when the companies reached a deal, we tried to help make sense of it all.

While the launch of Battlefront II was supposed to be the biggest news in Star Wars video games the year, the launch was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the revelations during beta testing that the game was going to turn out as pay-to-win. After lots of bad press and a few false starts, EA made an announcement just prior to the game's release that they would be suspending microtransactions (possibly for a return later on.). Despite the move, the damage was done, and sales of the game were disappointing. EA made other news this year, when they shut down Visceral, their subsidiary that was working on a Star Wars adventure game. The fate of this game is still up in the air.

We took a look into Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, which were all the rage this year. We showed you how Lucasfilm's ILMxLab was working on VR mobile technology earlier this year, and the tech picked up steam as it was used on Force Friday II, at a theme park experience, and as a standalone hardware set you could use to be a Jedi at home.

Speaking of theme parks, Disney went all out. Adding the Star Wars VR experience mentioned above was practically a non-story compared to the big announcement that both Orlando and Anaheim broke ground on all new Star Wars parks that would open in 2019. Details emerged over the months about the immersive experience, including a Star Wars hotel, uniforms for visitors, virtual reality games, and themed rides.

On television, Star Wars Rebels aired the first half of its final season, leaving us with a cliffhanger that will be resolved when the final episodes air in early 2018. In other news, Disney broke ties with Netflix, in an announcement that also unveiled Disney's plans to launch their own streaming services in 2018 (sports) and in 2019 (entertainment). After some uncertainty, Disney announced shortly thereafter that they would be pulling Star Wars and Marvel content from Netflix. The move was further clarified by Disney's planned acquisition of Fox assets, including Hulu.

Disney continued to make news with its rollout of the multimedia Forces of Destiny program. Included were comics, toys, and online animated shorts centering around the female heroes of the Star Wars universe, like Leia, Rey, Padme, Jyn, Ahsoka, Sabine, and others. The shorts were definitely aimed at a younger audience, but they were pretty well done, for the most part.

We did a recap of every short story in From A Certain Point of View, a collection of just off screen essays from the points of view of various characters that were in close proximity to the action we see in A New Hope. It was a delightful book that every fan of the OT should consider reading.

This year we started up our Instagram account. One of our favorite features resulted directly from starting that account. We focused on our Instagram friends and some of the many incredible photographers that we came across, several of whom were kind enough to share their work with us. We did an inaugural project spotlighting 8 amazing artists, and then followed it up with one more. We plan on dedicating more time to this in the future. Personally, I found it to be an inspiring aspect of the hobby that I never really appreciated before. As an additional feature, we are actively adding some of the great shots to our own galleries, thanks to several more awesome photographers.

In December we had fun doing a few giveaways, which we hope you enjoyed as well. We'll do our best to continue those in the future, and we congratulate our 5 winners!

We spent much time discussing Star Wars films. Chris and I (known around the community as "Two Jerks") debated plots for theoretical spinoff films, discussed some theories about what we would see in The Last Jedi, and followed the drama surrounding Solo. While I gave my quick hits after seeing TLJ, Chris did an outstanding review of the film.

This year, the Bantha Skull community (heretofore referenced as "we" in the rest of this paragraph) put its stamp on Star Wars. We coined "Sixer" as a derogatory term for those that would destroy our hobby by collecting those wrongly scaled...things. (We kid! We gave away a bunch of awesome "Sixer Stuff", so you're welcome!). We single-handedly compelled Hasbro to establish factories in Vietnam. We created the acronym THWG, for the two-handed weapon grip that only super-articulated figures can properly achieve. We also demanded that someone, somewhere, at some point, will be zip-lining in Solo. (If this doesn't happen, there will be consequences!). Thanks to original Banthaskuller, Randy, we all know that 5POA is not okay [Thanks for the reminder, MaarekStele] And we made shmatas as important a part of figure grading as articulation points and paint applications. [Thanks for the reminder, Coleman Miller!]

Finally, circling back to the collecting front, we took you on a whirlwind tour of Walmarts in North Jersey (Man, that just sounds...awful!) Much more importantly, Bantha Skull was happy to be invited to the 1st HASCON, during which Chris interviewed the Star Wars brand team, which provided some incredible information directly from that team. We followed that up by participating in one of the two New York Comic Con roundtable discussions, which allowed us, along with several other sites, to share our feedback, ideas, and enthusiasm for the hobby. We thank our friends at Litzky PR for including us in the Hasbro events, and for sending us awesome products for us to share with you.

As 2018 is upon us, we have The Vintage Collection returning in the spring, and Solo debuting in May. We have a lot more to cover, as Star Wars is as strong a brand as ever. We can only hope that long time collectors are kept interested in the hobby that we all love.

Chris and I would like to thank members of our little community for sticking with us despite periods of inactivity, and also to thank those of you that have only recently discovered Bantha Skull. We appreciate your passion and your perspective, and for devoting a little bit of your valuable time to be with us. Here's to a great 2018!

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