Figure of the Day: Day 760 6/4/2008 12:55:25 AM - Adam |
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LUKE SKYWALKER Yavin Ceremony Bio: Young and impulsive, Luke was already a phenomenal pilot when he arrived at the Rebel base on Yavin, having developed his skills hot-dogging his T-16 through Beggar's Canyon. Even so, without trusting in the Force, he might never have landed the proton torpedoes that destroyed the Death Star. (Taken from the figure's cardback.) Image: Adam Pawlus' toy room. Commentary: Color is everything. I frequently tell people that it's not the sculpt, but the paint that often ruins a figure. The sculptors do marvelous work, and somewhere along the line a figure like Luke Skywalker is given incredibly pale skin and incredibly dark hair, giving us a ghostly figure that doesn't look all that much like our hero. The sculpt seems like it might be pretty good, but it's hard to get past the fact that Luke was decorated to look like some emo kid who never leaves his parents' house without an umbrella. If you can get a look at the figure with an absence of color, you can see that it's actually not a bad sculpt. The eye paint needs a little work, the skin color needs a little... color, and the hair needs to be lighter relative to the face. There's a good figure here, Hasbro just didn't quite make it that way. The sculpt of the figure itself is actually one of Hasbro's better releases. The jacket is a separate piece from the torso and, if you play your cards right, is removable. The arms are super articulated, and the legs are close-- there are no ankle joints on this particular son of Skywalker. The figure can stand, sit, pose, and more, plus his lightsaber and his blaster can plug into his belt for safekeeping. As a toy or as a collectible, the designer of this figure seems to have done a lot of work. The sculpt of the costume is superb, full of wrinkles and creases in just the right places. His boots are shiny, and his jacket is colored the same as the jacket arms, which are a different kind of plastic. Accomplishing this is no small feat given Hasbro usually employs different colors of white on its troopers, so it's really nice to see such an excellent job done on a figure's costume. But the head... oh man. It's so awful that it turned out this way. A figure's personality comes from its head, or from how it is posed. You can pose this one any way you wish, but there's no getting past that pasty, poorly decorated mug of his. I'd still suggest this figure as a worthy purchase simply because it comes so close to being one of Hasbro's best, but you might be better served holding off for a redeco in a battle pack some day. I'm willing to bet a customizer with the right skill could easily turn this head into one of the best figures we'll ever see out of Hasbro, if Hasbro proper isn't willing to give him another chance. Collector's Notes: Multiple versions of the figure exist. The first releases came with a Darth Vader lightsaber hilt, easiest identified by a black cap. Luke's saber has a silver tip. There's also an "Ultimate Galactic Hunt" version of the figure which shipped with a gold coin and a gold foil logo on the packaging. It doesn't really command a premium, but a lot of fans for some reason believe it does. Don't spoil their fun, just buy it cheap on eBay so you can have one too. It's worth noting that this figure seemed to take less of a beating than the other two Lukes released in 2007, all of which arguably had problems. Fan reaction toward the Tatooine version of Luke seemed the fiercest, Ceremonial Luke saw few complaints, and the Jedi Knight one was somewhere in the middle-- despite having numerous flaws. I guess there's no accounting for taste.
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