R5-D4 is the little Droid that . . . couldn’t. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for this hapless little guy. Red’s my favorite color, so I obviously dig his red accents, but I also like the design of his dome. “I like the design of his dome” is Star Wars for “the cut of his jib.” As the unofficial mascot of the R5 series of Astromechs, he’s been a constant presence on the toy scene ever since the very first waves of Star Wars toys started pummeling the aisles. Star Wars is a property where seconds of screen time translates into immortality, so there’s no real surprise that R5-D4 has managed to capitalize on his scant time on screen.
Well, to me nothing says “you’ve made it” like an expensive high-end 1/6-scale action figure, so, Arfie, old boy, you’ve made it. I promise never to call you “Arfie” again.
Now if only the Power Droid had his publicist. Gonk. Gonk.
Artoo made his Sideshow debut around a year ago, and the inevitable question on my mind was “When is R5 coming?” It wasn’t long before he was solicited, and then the wait began. Artoo was a minimal figure as befitting his stature and lack of a multitude of limbs, and as R5 is about 90 percent R2-D2, the same quality is present here. If you’ve read my review on Artoo from last year, then you know I was really impressed with everything about him, and the same holds true here. All the details and nuances hold forth, including all the requisite panels, wires, vents, and such.
R5’s dome is much less involved than Artoo’s, but what there is of it is done well. It’s slightly taller than Artoo’s lower rounded dome, leading to the perfect size disparity between the two of them.
R5’s got a nicely weathered and dirty paint application that really shows off his time on Tatooine. When you spend the majority of your days on a Sandcrawler being toted from farm to farm in the hopes of being offloaded by pint-sized vacuum cleaner salesmen, you’re not going to have a lot of opportunities to get spit-shined, so the little dude is appropriately worse for wear.
R5 has the same pop-out third leg that Artoo has . . . for the ladies. Also for rolling around and failing miserably at getting bought by moisture farmers.
While Artoo lit up, R5 is a simpler mech, so there’s no similar feature. Artoo is a Droid Swiss Army knife, so his figure came with a bunch of attachments, but R5 is a lot less useful, so he’s not really heavy on accessories.
He comes with two magnetic restraining bolts and two antennae that can be poked into a hole on the top of his dome. He comes with two because one is intended to be a replacement in case you lose or break the first one. I thought that was a really nice touch and I appreciate it because this antennae is really thin, and I can see an inopportune shelf-dive snapping it easily.
The main “action feature” on R5 is his pop-up bad motivator. For those who have lived on Pluto for all these years, a bad motivator is the reason R5 was left behind to rust on Tatooine while Artoo was scooped up by the Lars family to go on to be a galactic hero.
Another reason I’ve always liked this little dude — I have a bad motivator also.
If you pull the middle sensor on his dome, the motivator pops up with enough force to launch a peanut into the air. Seriously, the spring inside his dome must be super-tight because that motivator shot out of there like the last clown in a Volkswagen.
R5-D4 is like that kid in the spelling bee that spent the entire week before the bee reading the dictionary and then got up to the microphone and forgot how to spell “dictionary.” Unfortunately, there are no participation awards in a Sandcrawler. I know Jawas are on the way in this scale, so I can’t wait to have a couple of them to look at R5 disapprovingly. This is a fun, great-looking toy — or “collector’s item,” I guess — and a welcome addition to my small collection of 1/6 droids.