With the Star Wars Black Series slowly trickling out, it falls to other companies to supplement the collection, or in some cases, better them. There has been a deluge of six-inch product available recently for Star Wars, some good, some iffy, but all welcome.
Kaiyodo’s Revoltech line was one of the more surprising entries into the 6-inch Star Wars realm, but they’ve jumped in wholeheartedly, already releasing Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper, with C-3P0 just out and R2-D2 to follow.
C-3P0 and Artoo were the first two Star wars toys I got way back in the ’70s, so I’ve always had a huge soft spot for them, and will enjoy picking them up in every possible scale up to Sideshow’s 12 inch line. There has been talk on the boards about “necessary articulation” for a C-3P0 figure, because he’s never been the most limber of characters in the movies (i.e. “He’s no ninja Spider-man”). Many want him to only have the amount of motion he had on screen, while others (or hell, maybe just me) have wanted him to be fully poseable. Not knowing what Hasbro intends to give the Black Series Threepio, I gambled on the Revoltech C-3P0 having a crazy ton of motion simply because that’s what Revoltech does. Well, I was pretty disappointed to learn that Revoltech really skimped on his articulation in certain key if predictable points.
Let’s focus on the positives first: he’s a great looking figure. He’s appropriately shiny without going in a vac-metal direction, and his color is nice and golden. The sculpt is very straightforward without much stylization. He has thinner arms than we may be used to, but I like to look at this as what C-3P0 would actually look like if he didn’t have to have a guy crammed inside of him to movie him around. I think a real Droid like Threepio would have thinner arms, so in a way this works very well for me.
The articulation he does have works very well. Revoltech joints give you a lot of posing options and his upper body can get a lot of expressive movement. With dual joints at the mid-chest and waist, he can twist, lean back and lean forward with a lot of personality. The two tendons on his arm can be slightly annoying, because the bottom end isn’t attached to anything and can easily slip out of the groove if over-extended, but it slides back in without fuss. His revoltech-jointed wrists allow him a lot of exasperation wiggle room. Because he is exasperated literally all the time.
His knees and ankles are also jointed for maximum motion, and those micro-corrections in leg bend really help him to stabilize himself, and counteract the one point of articulation he’s drastically missing: hips.
Yes, the one area I was hoping Revoltech wouldn’t fail is a huge letdown, because he has literally no side to side motion, and no backwards. His legs move forward at the hip and that’s it. They’re essentially as articulated as C-3P0’s very first Kenner figure. While some may dig that, I don’t. The biggest con about this is that his legs are so close together a little bit of play in the legs would have made a big difference in some of his poses. As it is, you really have to find the right balance. That’s not to say he doesn’t pose well. He’s light, and well-balanced, but every little bit helps. With Hasbro’s eventual Black Series Threepio and a Bandai Model kit upcoming, I have to wonder if every Threepio is going to be so hampered, and if the cheese—the cheese being me—truly stands alone in wanting a fully articulated C-3P0, movie-accuracy be damned.
Threepio comes with two sets of hands, a stand and a Mouse Droid. The inclusion of the Mouse Droid is a nice bonus as I don’t know if that’s something the Black Series will throw in with any figure. It’s a solid piece of plastic without any rolling wheels or anything, but it still remains a nice inclusion.
Threepio seems to be in fairly perfect scale with the Black Series and doesn’t look odd standing with any of the regulars. This is where being a droid has its benefits. Artoo will be getting a couple of different figures from different lines down the road as well, so you have plenty of options to put together your life-partner droid duo of choice. Options are never bad.
The most interesting part of this being a Revoltech figure is that he comes apart in most key areas, something it is unknown whether the Hasbro C-3P0 will do, so if you want Threepio to be the way he was in the entire last half of Empire, you can pull him apart, stick him in some kind of carrier and strap him to Chewie’s back.
The Revoltech C-3P0 is not a perfect figure, and I was disappointed before I had him in hand just on word of mouth, but he grew on me as I fiddled with him. I still wish his hips were articulated—something that could easily have been achieved without wrecking any perceived aesthetics—but it’s nice to not have that big vacant hole beside Artoo. This may not be the exact droid I was looking for, but it’s not bad at all.
