overdue reviews presents

hasbro’s ric olie action figure

ah, episode one, collection two. collection one, as i recall, was primary characters. quiggy, ewan, darth maul, little orphan ani, and padme. and i’m pretty sure jar-jar rated collection one.

collection two, meanwhile, was lesser characters. darth ‘not the emperor’ sideous, senator ‘not darth sideous’ palpatine, watto, 3po, sio bibble, various jedi councellors, and etc.

such as ric olie. he was the pilot of amidala’s ship, and later flew around in a naboo fighter while anakin accidentally saved the universe. i’m pretty sure he lived through the battle, and probably retired a war hero on peaceful little naboo and lived happily ever after. maybe he got drafted for the war effort, maybe he got blowed up real good at the opening of episode two.

who cares. he’s a non-entity. he had two lines, both of them relating to baby anakin.

why buy him, then? simple, because of the toybuzz. (hah, that url is still in my muscle memory!)

see, the first few waves of episode one figures in particular, and all the early episode one product in general, was overwhelmingly over-ordered by every toy store, department store, hardware store, convenience store, and basically everywhere that sold anything anywhere at the time. then the movie came out and wasn’t so hot and suddenly every single store in the country was saddled with wave one, collection two.

suffice it to say we saw old ric olie on the pegs for a long time. so a friend of mine started posting sarcastically as hasbro’s ric olie action figure, pleading for some love from the fans and being a general curmudgeon. it was hilarious at the time and that level of internet sophistication. (honestly, it’d still be funny now…)

i should have bought the bastard nine years ago, or eight when he was still available, but didn’t, and now i can look back and review him and his context at the time. and he still makes me laugh.

you can see the other figures in his little collection on the back. all things considered, this was a pretty good wave. that palpatine was a nice figure, and that darth sideous is my favorite representation of the emperor ever, even if technically he’s only darth sideous and at this point still theoretically not palpatine at all. (what a stupid thing to pull, you guys. whatever. not as dumb as the queen’s ridiculously obvious deception, and let’s stop right there or we’ll be here all night…)

the e1 c3po is a great figure as well. watto sucks, but ric olie is funny, so four out of five! good times.

the later waves of e1 product were actually super hard to find, and some of the end-run items were so limited release that they’re actually quite valuable, despite wave one collection one and two figures still being available at retail or less to this day. i picked old ric up at my local comic shop this week because he happened to be right in front of the pegs on the star wars section, and at only five bucks, well, i’ve spent more on less.

[last summer they had a big clearance sale and put out a huge table of wave one darth maul, quiggy, ewan, ani, and jar jar for two bucks apop. i almost bought a darth maul for old times sake. kind of need a dozen of them to get the full effect, of course. someone on the buzz (in)famously quoted hasbro's overestimation of demand for darth maul figures as two per person who has ever lived or ever will live.]

the most ironic difference between the figures in collections one and two was that collection one was crap. i mean, absolute crap. soapy sculpting and sloppy paint, wierd articulation and awkward poses, they got by solely on main character powers and the fact that they were all you could find, even when the vastly superior cloaked versions of the jedi came out six months later.

collection two, meanwhile, was the start of what we now expect from star wars figures. nicely detailed sculpts and accurate paint, these guys even hold up to recent ridiculously high caliber figures. i believe collection one was supposed to be for kids and collection two for the discerning adult collector?

anyways. ric is not a bad looking figure, even nearly a decade later. crisp details on his face, good basic articulation, and his hands can hold whatever.

and then there were the commtech chips. every e1 figure had them. they were the gimmick. they were why hasbro could raise the price to $5.99 right before the movie toys came out, other than of course ‘because we can’.

i think the commtech reader didn’t even hit until several months later? and when it finally arrived, we all suckerd ourselves into paying $19.99 or somesuch for it, got it home, turned it on, and discovered, all of us individually in the days before youtube could have proven the rumors, that it was absolute crap.

the chips wouldn’t scan half the time, and the voice synthesizer was apalling. it was like star wars, the radio play, as performed by stephen hawking. the cadence was wierd, the timing was off, and there were four sound effects built-in that all the voice clips used.

terrible terrible stuff. makes you yearn for the days of talking marvel and gijoes, with the voice chips in a backpack with three buttons on the top and maybe an led or something.

it was kind of nice that every figure came with a display stand, but they were kind of wobbly. you were better off using the sweet little stands that came with all the gijoes in the early 90s.

battle corps for the win.

the most interesting thing about time-travelling like this is that it’s easy to forget how different packaging was back then. and not just the (frankly awful) graphic design. the bubble here? tiny and simple. far less plastic than modern bubbles, and it’s vastly more straightforward. glued only onto the front, not much bigger than the figure itself. peel off, remove inner tray, done.

modern star wars figures are half embedded into the inner tray, with elastic bands holding the legs and/or gear in place, and the outer tray has cardboard inserts, and is also wrapped around and taped onto the back of the card. it’s annoyingly complicated just to open up a new figure these days, so getting ric out of package in like five seconds was refreshing.

i had the same thing happen when i picked up some old ninja turtles figures from the early to mid 90s on ebay, last year when the new movie hit and i was on a kick. so so much nicer to just open stuff that’s simple and uncomplicated and has no twist ties. i shouldn’t have to keep wire cutters on hand to etc etc.

yes, that’s clone wars artoo holding a lightsaber in his little claw hand thing. yes, cw grievous is just as spindly and wobbly as he looks. yes, you can (mostly) plug grievous’ interchangeable arms into the pegholes on artoo’s legs for his booster rockets. yes, it’s as awesome as you think it is.