R4-P17 - SW [DV/ROTS] - Saga Legends (SL06)

R4-P17 is Obi-Wan Kenobi's Astromech Droid. The faithful little Droid provides navigational and technical assistance aboard the Jedi's starfighter. Rebuilt by Anakin Skywalker, the Droid's original dome was replaced with an R2-series dome.

Man oh man. Was there really a need for Hasbro to design an all-new astromech droid sculpt for the 2013 Saga Legends line? With so many wonderful sculpt already in existence, we’re not quite sure is we fully understand why the budgeting dollars were wasted on a “from the ground up” sculpt that pales in comparison to all the ones we can recall before it in our memory. R4-P17 definitely gets a lot of love by Hasbro in the toy line. Someone there is clearly a fan of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Not including the permanently affixed ones in the starfighters, R4-P17 has been released three times before this. 2005’s ROTS R4-P17 (III 64) remains the greatest success Hasbro has ever created for an astromech droid (definitely check it out sometime). Then the figure was given an all-new “clean” paint job and released in 2009’s LC Kamino Conflict Battle Packs set. Lastly, R4-P17 was released with an all-new sculpt in The Clone Wars line as 2010’s TCW [SOTDS] R4-P17 (CW30) figure which was very popular for fans of the television show. So now Hasbro felt it was time to redo the droid.

The Saga Legends R4-P17 is bittersweet for multiple reasons. She only comes with three points of articulation. You probably have guessed it already, but she comes without any “foot” articulation. The dome swivels 360 degrees and so do the two legs, but that’s all she has. R4-P17 thankfully has a really tight center of gravity, so you can pose the body leaning forwards or backwards. If she didn’t, posing the droid would be come very boring very quickly. Does anyone else find it odd that Hasbro has decided to release a more obscure astromech droid in the kid-centered Saga Legends line first instead of and before R2-D2? And where will kids place a droid like R4-P17 when the Jedi starfighters have shrunken in scale to the point that the droid will look at of scale to them now? Sometimes we can’t figure out what is going on at Hasbro any more, but apparently they do. And we imagine that’s how we will have to leave it because our heads need to stop hurting at some point. We can’t say we dislike the figures in the Saga Legends line. But we are very cautiously “half-empty” about how the line will perform.

The sculpting and coloring on R4-P17 are pretty good. We don’t see that many sacrifices taken on the details and the sculpt shows an admirable likeness to the droid we really just saw the dome of in Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones. But the release of R4-P17 as a single-carded Saga Legends release now has our curiosity piqued as to what other characters Hasbro has planned to release in the line as well. There are definitely sacrifices made on R4-P17. No third leg, not “foot” articulation and no pop-up scanner and tools stowed in the body with opening panels. Clearly a lot has been cut here to keep the figures at a low MSRP. We understand the logic but we don’t see the collecting community warming up to this lowered quality action figure line. Hopefully the kids will prove us wrong. We just can’t imagine a kid would prefer intricate details like a hidden data-link behind the opening panels or a movable third leg (like The Clone Wars version) over a statically posed (and rather boring) version of the character. We could be wrong, but it will be interesting to see what transpires.