What would the Star Wars Galaxy be without droids? The robotic friends and foes are always a key element of a Star Wars story, so it makes sense that Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge features a droid Building Experience and a slew of droid related merch. We are wrapping up our look at the Disneyland Exclusive Galaxy’s Edge themed Black Series sets with the Droid Depot!
Steppin’ softly in a danger zone
No weapons in my hand
It’s just this brain, designed by man
It’s got me in trouble again
In trouble again
I put my life in jeopardy
In the service of my friends
I wouldn’t care but it’s a dangerous affair
‘Cause I’m in trouble again, trouble again
In trouble, in trouble, in trouble
The Droid Depot set comes in shiny bright white box that fits in with the other packaging specific to the Droid Depot store located in Galaxy’s Edge section of the Disneyland theme park. It’s an interesting merge of styles as it still features the regular Black Series monochromatic line drawings and like the other packs has an opening flap.
The set includes four droids, BB-8, R2-D2, C-3PO, and DJ R3X.
As far as I can tell R2 and BB-8 are just re-releases from the black series with updated paint deco.
Both droids look like they have a printed weathering around the panel lines. BB-8 in particular has a lot of dirt splatter on his head.
R2 has the removeable parts for his dome, but didn’t include any of the accessory pieces that plug in there, however the front compartments do open and have their hinged tools.
He also has the third leg and you twist the dome around to move. I do wish they had taken this opportunity to up-size the astromech body, though at this point they have made so many small astromechs it will throw a lot of figures out of wack to have larger scale ones.
BB-8 has a ball jointed head and is weighted to balance standing up, though it can be tricky. I think the BB-8 that originally came with Rey has a nicer paint job, with better panel lining, so I’m probably going to customize this one. These two are the weakest figures in the set, but Threepio is a little better.
C-3PO looks to be mostly re-used from the Episode VII or Walgreens Exlusive figure but he does include the arms from the recent 4-LOM figure. This is significant because it fixes the main flaw of the original figures and adds a bicep swivel and elbow hinge.
It is interesting that Hasbro kept the gun holding hands from 4-LOM for Threepio rather than swapping out the open hands from the original figure. It is nice because he can hold the comm unit from trash compactor Luke or other items, if not representative of how you most often see C-3PO. This might be a good one to transform into C-3PX if you were a fan of that guy.
I had heard they were re-sizing C-3PO for this release as well, but he appears to be the same height to me as he was before.
His color seems to be a bit darker than the other Threepios, but I feel like it’s shinier somehow and I like the paint more on this figure, it’s still never going to really compete with vac metal. While C-3PO is a nice improvement on the original, the star of the set for me is DJ R3x.
RX-24 was the original pilot of the Star Tours ride and as a SoCal kid who went to Disneyland a lot, Star Tours (and in a weird way Captain EO) became a huge part of the Star Wars galaxy to me. He was voiced by Paul Ruebens and I was the exact right age to be charmed by his bumbling antics and always wanted toys.
I was a little sad when RX-24 was replaced on the Star Tours ride with C-3PO, so I was really happy to hear that the original Captain Rex was returning to active duty at Galaxy’s Edge as DJ R3X and on top of that, he was getting a Black Series figure!
The figure is packed with a ton of greeblie detail and matches the character design well from what I can tell. I especially like how he has a little raised piece of writing welded to his chest which actually translates to RX24 in the Star Wars writing known as Aurebesh.
He’s also got little cylinders all around his base that I’m assuming are speakers. The bottom of the figure also has little circular indents which has me wondering about locomotion. I assume RX units are bolted into their ships, so I wonder if DJ R3X is bolted to the cantina floor or can he move around freely on some sort of hover panels if he needs to.
The articulation actually exceeded my expectations. I have the old POTF2 RX-24 and it’s basically relegated to some swivels, but each arm on DJ R3X is fully articulated. Each arm is connected to a separate segment of the body and all three segments rotate. The neck can rise up and down and has a ball and socket joint where it meets the head. The arms swivel where they attach to the body and bend where it looks like they should and swivel again where they attach to the hands. The clamp hands actually open and close and the pincer hand has a hinge.
The only articulation point I miss is his visor. It’s in a fixed position and does not open and close like the visor on his original POTF2 figure, though his headphone strap can move.
The paint is very good with crisp details for the most part. There is a little slop around R3X’s name plate, but other than that it’s good. There’s a little bit of effective weathering, but not an excessive amount. I think one area where this set suffers is accessories. There aren’t any accessories and I would have liked a piece of R3X’s music control panel as a backdrop.
As much as I think R3X turned out perfectly, overall, this is probably the least effective set for me. Setting aside the irritating idea of counting an accessory as a figure, I really only like two out of four figures of the Droid Depot set where with the FO and Smuggler’s Run sets I liked three out of four. In general, I would have preferred one three pack of the Mountain Trooper, R3X, and Hondo.
That said, I wonder if there is a motivation (beside profit) for including these more well known Star Wars characters to sell packs with newer characters. At any rate, in general tiring of selling re-hashes without significant improvements in packs with new and interesting figures.
Currently these are available for purchase at Disneyland at the Downtown Disney World of Disney store and inside the park at Galaxy’s Edge or Star Traders. I’ve heard a rumor that they will be online at the Disney shop website sometime in July.
