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THE STUPIDEST STAR WARS ACTION FIGURES EVER

15/12/2016

21 Comments

 
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Star Wars toys defined my childhood. They were almost more important to me than the movies themselves, and it's only right - to me - that Lucasfilm is sticking to a Christmas release schedule for the new films. You see, Christmas was the only time I'd be guaranteed fresh toys and figures to play with.

Rogue One is out today, and it's as good a time as any to get some stuff off my chest. I've been bottling this up for decades, and I need to let it go. And it is this: some of the Star Wars figures were really bad.

And these are the worst of the worst: figures so wretched that I couldn't even suspend my disbelief to play with them.
HAN SOLO IN CARBONITE
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Prior to this grotesque being released, I had sold all my Star Wars toys to a boy who probably never appreciated them as much as I did. Frankly, I doubt he was capable of cherishing them on anything like the deep and profound level that I could. I bet he didn't even know all the characters' names, or motivations, or even what species Greedo was (er... hello? He's a Rodian...).

Certainly, by the time I bought them all back off him, a decade later - in my early-20s, when he'd grown out of them - most of them were damaged due to his gross mistreatment, and many of the guns were missing. What a terrible, terrible boy. A horrible little monster.

Nevertheless, I was happy to have turned my back on playing with toys, if the above is the sort of rubbish Kenner was prepared to put out in the years following Return of the Jedi. There had been a perfectly good Han in Carbonite bundled with Boba Fett's Slave-1 ship circa The Empire Strikes Back, but this version allowed you to put a figure of Han into a plastic Carbonite block. 

Also: as you can see... it recreates the scene from the movies where he tries to swallow a bucket of sand to impress Chewbacca, and the bucket gets stuck in his throat.
LUKE SKYWALKER
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When Hasbro resurrected Star Wars action figures in the mid-90s, they erroneously thought they should try and compete with the then-trend of making action figures all muscular and that. Hence; the first run of figures put the core Star Wars characters through a sort of Masters of the Universe filter - all steroidal physiques and tight clothing.

Did they know nothing about Star Wars fans? It had been over a decade since a new Star Wars movie, so the only people remotely interested in their toys were grown men who would always be profoundly bothered by the inaccuracy of depicting Luke Skywalker with a distressingly sculpted chest. Also: a pig's face.

It's just as well they gravitated to more movie-accurate designs before they started making toys of the tertiary characters. Nobody needs to see Aunt Beru's rippling abs.
PRINCESS LEIA
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From the same mid-90s run of toys as Beefy Luke, evidently nobody in Hasbro's design team had ever seen a photograph of a young Princess Leia. Presumably, the only reference they had to hand was a picture of a monkey wrapped in a shroud.

Look at those hands: perfect for grasping space bananas. Which, if her latest memoir is anything to go by, Carrie Fisher spent a good deal of her time doing while filming Star Wars. 
R2-D2
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This figure always bothered me - and I'm not talking about the lack of a third leg. What was the deal with R2-D2's face? It looked nothing like his face in the films, and yet Kenner stuck with that design throughout the original run of Star Wars toys.

They released slightly updated versions - such as one with a pop-up "sensorscope" - but stuck with that weird metallic blue disc and those other two bobbly bits. They could've at least made it square. God, it feels good to be unloading this. It has been stewing inside me for almost 40 years. 
WALRUS MAN
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Face-wise, this wasn't a bad recreation of the Tatooine cantina patron later known as Ponda Baba - he is after all just a melon with a baby's arse sticking out of it. But what the hell did Kenner dress him in? Some weird scuba driver gear, and an orange unitard? There's only one orange unitard round here... and it's whichever idiot designed this action figure.
POWER DROID
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Otherwise known as the "Gonk droid" for the noise it makes, this looks nothing like the on-screen version. Not only that, but I was convinced that mine was broken. The legs sort of clicked when you moved them back and forth, and I had the utter convinction that there was meant to be something more to it.

I showed the toy to my grandad, who inspected it and concluded that - yes - the legs were indeed meant to move by themselves, in a sort of walking action. Something must've snapped off. I only realised as an adult that we were both wrong.

This belief, as wrong-headed as it turned out to be, nevertheless ruined this toy for me. I mean... utterly ruined. I rarely even got it out of the box.
LUKE SKYWALKER (BESPIN FATIGUES)
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Costume-wise this wasn't bad, and at least Kenner had stopped the practice of giving force-wielding characters a telescoping lightsabre, which couldn't be removed. But what was going on with the hair there? Why is it the same colour as his lightsabre - neither of which are bright yellow in the films?! 

Also, for some reason this version of Luke had a face which always remineded me of Playmobil figures. You know: toys for stupid little babies.
BEN (OBI-WAN) KENOBI
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A reasonable face likeness, though everything is sort of wrong about the costume. Ben Kenobi had a cream coloured smock, and he certainly didn't wear a pair of flares, even if this was the 70s. And his lightsabre hilt wasn't brown. Also: he died two thirds of the way through Star Wars, which meant that including him in the further adventures of the characters would've deviated from the on-screen canon, which I wasn't prepared to do.
ANAKIN SKYWALKER
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This is more what Ben Kenobi's costume was meant to look like, but - c'mon... really? What are you meant to do with this? He appears on screen for about five seconds in this outfit, and he's a ghost. Also, aren't his arms a little short for a human being?
JAWA
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Here's my number one issue with 3.75" action figures: when they dress them in fabric clothing. It never hangs right on the characters, and it's usually a completely different material to the rest of the figure. And usually other characters in the range have clothing that is made from moulded plastic. 

Admittedly, the Jawa's original vinyl plastic cape was less accurate to the actual costume, and in Kenner's mind such a diminutive figure could be seen as less value than the rest of the range (which is why they released an updated version with the cloth cape), but at least it was consistent with the materials used on the rest of the toy. For pity's sake. What were they thinking?!
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
NEW STAR WARS MERCHANDISE CHECKLIST
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS - EXCLUSIVE SCRIPT EXTRACT!
15 STUPIDEST STAR WARS EXPANDED UNIVERSE CHARACTERS
THE MAN'S DADDY - Hilarious Star Wars Comedy Jokes
21 Comments
John Veness
15/12/2016 09:57:32 am

What's going on with the tip of Obi-Wan's lightsabre?

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Super Bad Advice
15/12/2016 11:16:16 am

For seemingly no reason other than to make them harder to manufacture, some of the original 'lightsaber built in' figures had these weird 2-stage lightsabers, which I assume was supposed to make it look like it got narrower at the tip. I had a Vader one as a kid, and of course lost the saber bit within days. Which is particularly annoying, as these sorts of figure, with saber, are now very rare if still in 1 piece and hence valued by collectors - those crazy guys who will give you real actual money for old stuff that you can then go out and buy strong drink with.

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Ben Gunn
15/12/2016 09:58:23 am

No mention of the hammerhead twiglet?

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Treacle
15/12/2016 10:12:53 am

Power Droid is the best (actually IG 88 is the best but he isn't on the list so at least that's right).

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Ben Gunn
15/12/2016 10:23:40 am

I actually really like Power Droid

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Treacle
15/12/2016 08:06:43 pm

Looking at my initial comment it does look like I'm dissin' da droid, but that's just my ungainly writing style. Power Droid is awesome, especially the rubbery joystick thing on its head. And I'm now so old that sometimes when I walk I make a clicking noise too, just like a Power Droid figure.

Fancy Pants
15/12/2016 11:44:39 am

The Bespin Fatigues Luke Skywalker figure that I had looked better than that. Wasn't there multiple versions of a lot of figures? I remember have a Han Solo with a big deformed head, and the same figure made from different plastic with a normal head.

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Gosunkugi
15/12/2016 04:05:48 pm

I might be remembering wrong, but I'm sure my Bespin Luke had a more sandy hue to his hair, less neon yellow anyway.

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Mr Biffo
15/12/2016 08:14:10 pm

They did indeed release a "beige"-hair version later on.

Breckford Heath
15/12/2016 11:54:13 am

I opened this article and laughed at the Han figure, then I had something to do so minimized the window. When I opened it back up I laughed at Han's neck all over again

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Han Shandy
15/12/2016 12:13:30 pm

Ladyboy Leia is best!

Also, the creamy Obi Wan looks like William Shatner.
A real 'what if'....
Live long the force is strong.

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CdrJameson
15/12/2016 12:15:01 pm

My Star Wars fights were always slightly unbalanced as Luke Skywalker easily outnumbered the Stormtroopers.

And for me the figures were also about summer holidays, where we'd go to exotic shops in a different area and find 'rare' figures to take back home and show off. I got many an admiring glance for my Nien Nunb I can tell you.

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Mrtankthreat
15/12/2016 01:01:45 pm

The jawa with the plastic cape is worth a few grand even out of the box. I have the jawa but no cape. It's worth 27p.

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Paulvw
15/12/2016 02:02:01 pm

I used to agonize over the shiny C3PO and imperial droids where you either had the choice of leaving them stiff legged with the shiny paintwork intact or moving the legs and cracking the paintwork. No child should be forced to make a decision of this magnitude.

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Gosunkugi
15/12/2016 03:53:03 pm

You can be a lot unkinder than this.

Chewbacca was so awful a figure. The crushing disappointment of this one cannot be measured, and I've tried because I must confess something here, I've held this in for over thirty years now... I stole my Chewbacca. That's right, Another kid at school, I think it might have been Matthew (sorry, Matthew) dropped his under the table when it fell out of his pocket during a particularly harrowing maths lesson. I was the only one who noticed, and through guile (not the Street Fighter character) and subtle foot shuffling I was able to shove it down my sock, where it remained for the rest of the day.

You can only dream of the anticipation I must have felt, coupled with an awkward tummy sensation I can only now ascribe to guilt (not the Street Fighter character), meant that one day was among the longest I've ever experienced.

And then I got home, and I pulled this... thing out of my sock. Huge, huge letdown. What was this furry flared lump of plastic shit supposed to represent? It looked like a sex toy with a face.

Perfect accompaniment then to the Han Solo figure from the first movie, who looked like a PVC-clad sexual sadist. I think that one might have been moulded before Harrison Ford was even cast, as it looked like a bizarre mixture of Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Kurt Russell, as if Kenner were hedging their bets right up until the last minute as to who to base it on, and then squashed them all into one face just to be safe.

And no, I didn't give it back, are you mad? It was Star Wars.

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Mr Biffo
15/12/2016 05:47:02 pm

Ah, see... I nearly included the Chewbacca figure, but it was the first one I ever got. My dog bit a big hole in the back of its head a week later, and that dog is dead now, and the hole in Chewbacca's head is all I have to remember him by. So... I just couldn't...

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T-wigs
15/12/2016 06:01:35 pm

My brother's Yoda suffered a similar fate to our old dog. Face deformed, ear chewed and lost an arm he did.

Kelvin Green link
15/12/2016 07:51:06 pm

"the Han Solo figure from the first movie, who looked like a PVC-clad sexual sadist"

Ah, I see you've read Carrie Fisher's memoir too.

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T-Wigs
15/12/2016 06:02:01 pm

Prune Face?PRUNE FACE!!!

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Nathan link
9/12/2021 11:55:32 pm

I like what walrus man I wearing I thing the colors are what make me like it

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pissgirl14
13/12/2021 04:49:41 pm

stars war get me so UGHHHH chewy and hammy nammy are my fav

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