Pit Droids [Orange - Version 1] - TAC - Saga Legends

Pit droids help repair and maintain podracers with zealous efficiency. Small yet incredibly strong, pit droids often dash onto the racetrack before the vehicles have stopped, risking their mechanical lives in their eagerness to get to work.

There aren’t too many things more powerful that the voice of the hoi polloi are there? Fans demanded and Hasbro obliged, although admittedly the request didn’t arrive exactly as planned. We’ll explain. 2007 was in many ways the year for collectors. And it might be more accurate to express “all ways” because very little was geared towards kids and younger collectors. The 30th anniversary of Star Wars was a huge celebration, and Hasbro came in swinging by providing a fantastic basic figure line, a supplemental greatest hits line and all of the complementary vehicles, multipacks and exclusives a collector could ever want. The zest and excitement of Star Wars fans was at an all time high as we all eagerly celebrated 30 years of the Star Wars saga. And while Hasbro didn’t necessarily focus on toys based on A New Hope, they celebrated its spirit wonderfully with a few dedicated waves of figures and other exclusives. Hasbro celebrated this momentous event too. Not only did they release their finest basic figure line to date, they created a new sub-line entitled Saga Legends which would bring some of their greatest efforts of the past to the toy aisles again for collectors to get a second chance and/or army build as well as offer kids a chance to buy the most popular characters from the Star Wars universe by making them available once again. It was a grand time to collect and all of the figures sold extremely well. Each Pit Droid figure comes with five points of articulation, but it’s enough for the purpose they serve. Waiting nearly a decade for them was grueling, but it’s finally nice to have them in hand, even if they’re a little bit different.

But the Saga Legends line also presented an opportunity to get hard to obtain action figures out to hardcore collectors in a plentiful fashion. And this was accomplished through a Fans’ Choice poll hosted by Rebelscum.com where hardcore collectors could be influential at getting their own personal choices released again. That’s where all the Pit Droids variations come into play. Figure that essentially were nonexistent in the aftermarket have become plentiful for the very first time. The “Bonus Pit Droid” figures from 1999’s and 2000’s Episode I line were an overseas exclusive. This was done to give an extra premium to foreign collectors who really had no use for the “English speaking” Comm Tech chips that were the premium for American collectors. But that instantly made Americans quite envious that we didn’t have an opportunity to grab any of these newly sculpted action figure for our own collections. Even in 1999, these Bonus Pit Droids were tough items to find and they haven’t been easy to acquire ever since. Hasbro developed six unique combinations of Pit Droid plus two different accessories. So just imagine how many possible combinations of these sets were made especially when the same Bonus Pit Droid could be packed with multiple random figures. Some figures only came with one type of Pit Droid, but others came with multiple characters. They have no doubt become a mission of many hardcore collectors. The aftermarket value for them is all over the place, but keep in mind that they are quite different from the Saga Legends releases, especially the paint jobs.

Unfortunately, Hasbro found it impossible to locate some of the original tooling and needed to recreate the Pit Droids because they were committed to releasing ALL of the Pit Droid configurations for the Saga Legends line based on the Fans’ Choice poll results. Although all-new sculpts with completely different paint jobs (accessories included), six unique Pit Droids sets were released under the Saga Legends banner much to the happiness of collectors everywhere. Each set includes two identical Pit Droid figures (although two different sculpts can be found throughout the six sets). And each duo of Pit Droids is joined by one of two accessories. Three unique color schemes exist for the Pit Droids: orange/white, maroon and white/brown. It’s hard to know for sure if these exact iterations can be found in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, but most of us won’t care about that at all. We’re just happy to finally have these figures. It has been rumored that one of the Pit Droid molds was savaged while the other is all-new, but to know for sure is not something we can absolutely confirm. It’s also believed that the “storage locker” accessory’s tooling also needed to be recreated from scratch too (the “Version 2” Pit Droids have this piece). Admittedly, it’s cool to finally own these figures, but knowing that they’re just a tad different than their original release makes us want to hunt down the original 1999 versions, as impossible as that is going to be. That may give value to the original 1999/2000 releases, so maybe that’s a good things too. We just know that these are fun figures and should be considered for your own collection.