Cad Bane And IG-86 - TCW [SOTDS] - Two-Packs (Exclusive)

Cad Bane uses IG-86 assasin droids for many of his criminal ventures. This ruthless bounty hunter and mercenary assembles a team based on the particular skills needed for the job. He often uses the deadly IG-86 droids as part of his crew because of their intelligence and agility.

Hasbro can certainly surprise us by how cool some of their exclusives are and sometimes they can really let us down when others just don’t deliver as we had hoped. But how does one describe an exclusive that is 100% previously released product yet doesn’t look old or boring (when it probably should)? Well, that would undoubtedly have to describe the two-pack Cad Bane And IG-86 which is an exclusive from TARGET. These figures have been available multiple times before. And interestingly, it appears that although this two-pack is inspired from the Hostage Crisis episode in The Clone Wars, the included IG-86 wasn’t seen in this flavor in that story. (Actually, this IG-86 droid can be seen in the Downfall Of A Droid episode.) There were a few IG-86 droids in the Hostage Crisis episode but they all had different paint decorations (and one even looked like 2009's TCW [S2] Ziro’s Assassin Droid (CW37) figure to be quite frank). But Hasbro slightly tweaked these figures and put them in cool packaging and created a nice complement to the Senate Commando Captain And Senate Commando set that came out along with it. And there are a few things to note about this set which may make it worth your while to pick up.

Cad Bane is a painted a little bit differently from his 2009 TCW [S2] Cad Bane (CW22) carded release. The changes are extremely subtle and we aren’t claiming that this is a new version of Cad Bane here. But most notably, we didn’t have any problems at all standing Cad Bane (unlike the 2009 figure that drove us batty trying to make him stand up straight). It could have been our sample, but we essentially had to bend Cad Bane backwards just to prevent him from falling forward. We don’ think that Hasbro did anything differently to this particular sculpt for the rerelease here, but we certainly aren’t pulling our hair out anymore. Also, his hat stays on rather nicely and doesn’t fall off with the slightest bump any longer. Sometimes it’s the small things in life, people. (Or maybe we just had a really crappy basic figure sample. We aren’t sure anymore.) But the better figure here in this Two-Pack is the slightly revised IG-86 [Assassin Droid] figure. Sadly, Hasbro didn't repaint him to match the unidentified assassin droid from The Clone Wars episode, the one that is half black and half silver, a very cool-looking droid. Still, we feel that perhaps the definitive version of IG-86 is in this set. Sometimes the littlest enhancements do wonders for already established action figures. This is certainly the case here.

If you own 2008's TCW [F/S1] IG-86 Assassin Droid (No. 18) figure, you know it came with a solid gray backpack (that held his weapons which were originally gun metal gray then quickly turned to gun metal blue). In all honesty, it looked like it didn’t belong on him due to the mismatched colors. Hasbro made this problem a little bit worse when they gave IG-86 a second chance in the 2009 TCW [F/S1] Ambush On The Vulture’s Claw Battle Packs set. In that set its backpack turned to black and it just didn’t look right. For this 2010 release, Hasbro has colored the backpack to match the droid’s body and it renders it seamless with the rest of the figure. What’s more, Hasbro gave all of the photoreceptors and an extremely bright orange paint application which is so striking you might think that this figure is actually lighting up! IG-86 is a vast improvement on both the 2008 TCW [F/S1] IG-86 Assassin Droid (No. 18) figure and the one included in the Battle Packs set and in our opinion makes this two-pack a definite to pick up. You may not want the included Cad Bane, but we suggest comparing it to your basic figure before giving it away. We were surprised by how much this set intrigued us and we are happy to have picked it up! You may be too!