The Star Wars Black Series has been an extraordinarily welcome series full of great characters and even better toys. However, there has been a disturbing trend lately. While there are plenty of gems, there are also… some troubles. Troubles are natural in a toy line. They’re even expected. Nothing is perfect; you take the good, you take the bad, blah blah blah. The paint could use some tweaking, especially in the eye department. Darth Vader was disappointing when he should have been a toy of the year. These things happen, but they need to stop happening at these prices. A bad execution or a bad toy is one thing. A stupid toy… that’s something different. Occasionally a toy comes along that really stands out from the crowd and says “Hey, look at me, absolutely no thought was put into me.”
I will say I have absolute respect for the sculptors and everyone who works on these. I don’t pretend to know the minutiae of your jobs and all the back-and-forth that goes into it. But with Yoda (officially reviewed here), I have to wonder at what point nobody noticed how wrong he was going. He’s mind-boggling in a way that ill-fitting fabric isn’t.
It’s in the way he moves.
It sucks.
Oh, I know, that sounds odd when he has a lot of articulation points, including double joints on such tiny arms. You’d think that would be a marvel of engineering. But the annoying anti-play factor of it all makes me wonder what happened.
Those double joints are connected to a non-mobile bicep, so he’s only able to move his arms up and down. His level of articulation has been reduced to the days before G.I. Joe’s swivel arm battle grip. Hasbro has predominantly used their swivel hinge elbow joints, commonly called “elbros,” for the majority of the Black Series. But here, they switch to double joints, when that scheme would have been ideal for maximum articulation.
Baffling.
His arms are so restricted that he can’t hold his lightsaber with both hands, or even lean on his cane wearily with both hands, glaring at stupid old Luke trying to raise the X-Wing we don’t have in this scale yet.
With all the people involved in this line, I don’t know how this decision gets made without somebody along the way saying “Uh, guys, he’s not really functional.”
Sure, he can grab his own ears. Yay?
I’ve said it many times, and I’ll keep saying it: I like my toys to be toys. Yoda needs to move and play with all the optimal articulation of a toy that can be played with in 2014. And he can’t. His arms bend, sure, but they don’t bend in service of the play.
Moving down to his legs… he has what are the familiar ball-jointed swivel hips. They’re great hips. I like these hips. Balls can go jump off a cliff. But in this case, with this size, they don’t make sense. Because he has no knees to go with them. I mean, he can twist his leg, which is fine…but his ankle already twists around as much as you’d need it to. So the hip is redundant. I’d rather him have the dynamic ability to bend at the knee. Which would mean dumping the ball and swivel and giving him the swivel hinge knee that are awkwardly referred to as “kneebros.”
Yeah, it doesn’t have the ring of elbro, but you work with what you’ve got.
That would have satisfied the bending of the knee and allowed for the twist and turn of his leg for more poses, and the robe combined with the pants sculpt would have worked perfectly.
With those small changes, Yoda would have been well worth the 22 bucks because he would have been able to pull off all the dynamic posing required for a Jedi Master.
First person to say, “He’s Yoda, how much do you need him to move around,” gets such a slap…
Even if you’re an ardent prequel hater and the thought of him hopping around like a Battletoad annoys you in your grumpy parts — and I, too, hated the hopping — he’s still a toy. Being a toy has to mean something after all these years of improvement. It means these things are play worthy as well as shelf worthy. And while Yoda may be one, he’s not the other, and it’s all due to a few things that could have been altered at any point from computer screen to toy aisle, or Amazon cart as was the case with mine.
I don’t know how this line is going to work. I don’t know if we’re really only getting one shot at figures, or if multiples will be coming. I had assumed that we’d be getting the Ultimate version of each character, with no need for a second purchase. Well, that’s not going to happen with decision-making like this.
I love you toy guys because you make older dudes like me feel like a kid again. Unfortunately, this did make me feel like a kid because I was frustrated with his toyness. For 20 to 22 bucks, that can’t keep happening.