Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Enhancing Figures In An Unremarkable Way, The Episode I Tatooine Accessory Set Is All Right.


The Good: Decent sculpts
The Bad: Droid looks silly next to other figures, No collectible value
The Basics: The Star Wars Tatooine Accessory Set can enhance some figures, but is not as interesting as many of the other accessory sets for Star Wars figures!


When Star Wars Episode I was released and (predictably) heavily merchandised, the figures were sold with the sound chips. To offer some variety to the play experience, Hasbro offered accessory sets: an inexpensive way to augment the action figures without having to buy more action figures. One of them was the Tatooine Accessory Set. Unlike some of the other accessory sets, the Tatooine Accessory Set was pretty underwhelming.

Basics

The Tatooine Accessory Set is a package of six accessories, without any figures. These accessories are designed to augment the 3 ¾” figures and present options that were more how characters appeared while on Tatooine. Unfortunately, the droid looks much more like something from the Naboo hangar deck and blaster in the set also looks more like a Naboo blaster.

Accessories

The main accessory in the Tatooine Accessory Set is a droid. The droid is a bright yellow support robot with silver accents. It is 2 1/16” long, 1 5/16” wide and 2 9/16” tall to the top of its antennae. The pull-back droid has three wheels and a little radar dish. It is not one of the anthropomorphic droids from the Star Wars Saga and is in no way distinctive or memorable from the films.

The Tatooine Accessory Set includes a cloth poncho that fits over most of the 3 ¾” figures. The poncho is a clean one without any dirt or wear painted on. Instead, it looks like a poncho that was fresh from a locker instead of one that was worn through a sandstorm.

The pack includes a backpack accessory that is black with green and cream-colored accents. I’ve found that this actually fits very few of the figures, at least from Episode I. Moreover, it does not match the color scheme of any of the figures that I have found!

The Tatooine Accessory Set also includes a datapad, much like Watto used in his brief scenes in the film. The datapad is ¾” wide by 5/8” tall and 3/16” thick. Very few of the figures from this line actually have hands wide enough to hold the datapad.

There are also two gun accessories in the Tatooine Accessory Set. One is a 1 3/8” blaster pistol and the other is a 3 ¼” long blaster rifle. The blaster rifle does not fit into any of the figures’ hands; it does not have a definitive grip. The blaster pistol easily fits many of the figures, though it is a bit larger than most of the guns and figures, so it is slightly out of proportion with the 3 ¾” figures. Both are made with speckled black gunmetal plastic.

Playability

The pull-back droid does not work at all well; mine does not actually spring forward like it used to, but the truth is, I don’t recall ever really playing with it.

Collectibility

The Tatooine Accessory Set is a supplement to the 1998 "Episode I" collection of four-inch action figures. This series of Star Wars action figures was generally overproduced. The Tatooine Accessory Set was exceptionally overproduced and can still be found fairly cheaply even now.

Overview

An unremarkable supplement to one or two of the figures produced around the same time (and pretty much none of the newer ones), the Tatooine Accessory Set is pretty much worthless.

For other Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace action figures reviewed by me, please check out my reviews of:
Ody Mandrell
Chancellor Valorum
Ric Olie
Rune Haako
Captain Tarpals
Tatooine Darth Maul

2/10

For other toy reviews, be sure to visit my Toy Review Index Page!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

| | |

No comments:

Post a Comment