Emperor Palpatine - TSC - Basic (SAGA 043)

There is usually always one action figure in a new wave that doesn’t hold up to the quality of the rest. And in the instance of the Battle Of Endor wave, well, Emperor Palpatine wins that award hands down. He isn’t a straight repack as you might suspect. No, Hasbro slightly altered some of the paint applications in his face and retooled his right hand to include a hole so the included cane can plug into it. (The cane obviously has been retooled also.) So there are some changes from the 2003 SW [S - P3] The Emperor (Throne Room) ('03 #30) figure. Obviously, this isn’t enough change to warrant another purchase by most collectors, but we do find it quite interesting that Hasbro made these updates to a figure that is seemingly already outdated. And it’s a figure that not too many people even liked from the start. His hood swallows up the head because it is extraordinarily too large and the limited articulation and extremely bizarre aesthetics makes this action figure nearly an embarrassment to all others. Hasbro must not release early sculpts of figures especially when superior molds exist.

Poor, poor Emperor Palpatine. It’s a shame that his sculpt is almost too comical to take his evil Sith ways seriously. Not even the inclusion of ball-joints in the shoulders can improve the aesthetics of your sculpt. And it’s a terrible shame that Hasbro has decided to use this version instead of the significantly better 2005 ROTS The Sith Evolutions mold released right before this figure. All that needed to be done was to include and Episode VI specific head sculpt onto the Evolutions mold and we would have a pretty fine specimen of Emperor Palpatine as an action figure. We sometimes wonder what Hasbro is thinking when they do things like this. The time and energy spent retooling the hand could have been better saved for slightly tooling even the head of this figure to fit on the Evolutions body. Why would Hasbro opt for a solid plastic sculpture in favor of super articulation? We have to wonder this at least. But it is disappointing at this stage of the basic figure line that this is still happening.

Emperor Palpatine comes with a swivel waist, two ball-jointed shoulders and two swivel wrist. That's it. Not even his feet or head are movable. In fact, there is literally no meaningful movement in this figure at all. We wish that we could say that there are some positive aspects of this action figure but there are truly none. You may be able to argue that he has an accurate silhouette, but who really care when you can't pose him. Emperor Palpatine not only suffers from poor articulation, he is positioned in a very strange manner that makes him look like he is leaning back while bending his knees underneath the robe. His stance is quite bizarre and it just doesn’t do anything for the sculpt. Emperor Palpatine looks confused and that is probably the perfect expression for him since we are about just as confused on why we’re seeing this inferior sculpt in The Saga Collection. Maybe we shouldn’t be this disappointed in getting an inferior figure like this so late in the game, but unless you must have every single one, consider it easy to skip this one.