Hi everyone Eric Ewton here! We’re back with our second part of the recap of “The Vintage Collection” as we get ready for the re-launch in the coming months.
In the first part, I covered the design and packaging and how it was a direct call back to the vintage Kenner line and we started discussing with the basic figure line and what was released from the original trilogy films. In this part I’m going to cover the remainder of the basic figure line, covering the prequels, expanded universe, and clone wars and then hit few last points about the basic figure line as a whole. Let’s get started!
The Phantom Menace
“TPM” received 17 character releases in TVC, which is the most from any prequel movie although it didn’t make its first appearance until late in the line. The first character to be released was Mawhonic (#71) and ended its run with Jar Jar Binks (#108).
This film saw a great balance in releases between major and background characters. We see nearly all the headliners from Qui-Gon (#75), Obi Wan-Jedi Padawan (#76) and Queen Amidala-Post Senate (#84) to Darth Maul (#86) and Darth Sidious (#79).
The other releases are a variety from the entire movie like Daultay Dofine (#82), Aurra Sing (#73), Battle Droid (#78) and Gungan Warrior (#74). There was even a release Quinlan Vos-Mos Espa (#85) on a “TPM” card.
There are some great releases from this film and I believe that as far as variety of characters, it gets the best treatment of all the prequels.
Attack of the Clones
The middle film of the prequel trilogy had 13 releases in the line. This is the smallest number of releases from the prequels. As far as character variety, we see more secondary characters this time instead of primary characters.
The first “AOTC” release was Kit Fisto (#29) and its last was Clone Trooper Lt. (#109). This makes it sound like there were consistent releases through the run of TVC but that’s not the case. There is a gap between “AOTC” figures that runs between Barriss Offee (#51) and the Clone Trooper Lt. (#109) with no releases from this film in TVC.
Most of the releases from this film around the hero characters with the only villain releases being Zam Wessell (#30), Jango Fett (#34) and Super Battle Droid (#37). Count Dooku, Geonosians, Tusken Raiders or any Confederacy members would have been very nice additions to this line.
“AOTC” didn’t exactly get the best treatment in TVC in my opinion. There are not a great variety of characters or a lot of releases from the film. There is such a great character pool to pull from and I’m hoping they get some more recognition in the new line.
Revenge of the Sith
The final part of the prequel trilogy clocks in with 15 releases in TVC. Figures from “ROTS” in this line can be easily put into one of three categories: force users, droids and clones.
The first appearance of “ROTS” in the collection comes with Darth Sidious (#12) and has a fairly consistent appearance until its last figure with a Shock Trooper (#110). Yoda (#20) makes his one and only appearance in the TVC along with a few other Jedi like Aayla Secura (#58) and of Course Anakin Skywalker (#13) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (#16).
General Grievous (#17) and a MagnaGuard (#18) round out the Confederacy characters without a Count Dooku again.
8 of the 15 figures releases from this movie are clones. Clone Commander Cody (#19), Commander Gree (#43) and Clone Pilot Daviian-Oddball (#97) are easily the standouts among them.
Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of background or minor characters due to the pace of the film and what it was trying to accomplish by wrapping up its story so as far as I’m concerned TVC did a pretty good job in character releases from the movie.
The Clone Wars
The animated show even got a little recognition with this line with three releases starting with Anakin Skywalker (#92), continuing to Ahsoka (#102) and ending with Obi-Wan Kenobi (#103).
These figures were realistic looking versions of their animated counterparts with Obi-Wan in his partial clone armor and Anakin in his brown and blue tunic and black shoulder armor. The Ahsoka figure was a more mature version of her character from the later seasons of the show.
The card art for these was obviously manufactured since Hayden (Anakin) and Ewan (Obi-Wan) never appeared in these costumes, but it’s still a cool look that works really well by using their faces. The Ahsoka card art is nice too, with HASBRO having to adapt her face from the original animated style to a more realistic look, in keeping with the style of the of the other two releases but not having an actor’s face to simply drop into the photo.
Expanded Universe
Here is where TVC really dug deep into different parts of the Star Wars canon to give collectors some very unique pieces. Hasbro took characters from books, video games, the “Old Republic” era of stories and even one character from Genndy Tartakovsky’s original Clone Wars micro-series. Most, if not all, of these characters would fall in the “Legends” area of content today but at the rate those characters are being woven back into the new canon it might not be that way for long.
The “EE” would have its first release with ARC Trooper Commander (#54) which was a pull from the original “The Clone Wars” micro-series. There would be 6 more “EE” releases throughout the line until the final release of a Republic Trooper (#113) from the “The Old Republic” part of canon but it would not be the last.
“The Old Republic” would actually claim the lion’s share of the figure from this part of the TVC with 4 figures including Bastila Shan (#69), Darth Malgus (#96) and Shae Vizla-Old Republic Bounty Hunter (#101).
The other two releases would be Nom Anor (#59) from the “New Jedi Order” series of novels and Star Killer-Vader’s Apprentice (#100) from “The Force Unleashed” video games.
That brings us to the end of the coverage for the basic single figure line for The Vintage Collection and I just wanted to take a second to touch on a few more things to wrap up before moving on that I left off talking about in the article.
- This line is full of paint, figure, card and character name variations that it’s almost ridiculous to try and track them all down and collect them. In terms of collecting, I would estimate that for a completist collecting ALL the variations in TVC would probably triple the figure count on this line from the standard 115 releases. There were even a few international variations for some figures that would increase the difficulty even more.
- There were around 8 releases from early in the line that were included in HASBRO’s Ultimate Galactic Hunt series which were simply chase figures with altered cards throughout several figure lines. You can tell the ones for TVC by the silver racetrack border around the card being foil stamped. It’s super shiny and really stands out.
- This was an upper tier line geared toward collectors and the price reflected that in the store at around 10 bucks a figure. The secondary market today for some of these releases is insane due to short packs and those figures released toward the end of the line that are always hard to find.
- Finally, this was a great line, but the truth is that the overwhelming majority of these releases were re-releases of existing figures with only a few new figures or new sculpts. I don’t mean to take away from this line because I love it and I think it deserves a ton of credit for the places that it did innovate with new characters and new, super articulated figures while at the same time bringing us back to our childhood toys with vintage packaging, exclusives, and mail-away offers. As I said in the previous article, TVC‘s major draw is nostalgia, plain and simple.
We aren’t finished up yet because there is still a lot of cool stuff waiting for us to see! In the next part I will take a look at the vehicles and the multi-packs from The Vintage Collection.
~Eric
**images pulled from Rebelscum.com. Check their site out, it provides a wealth of information for any Star Wars collector**
