Hasbro Star Wars Q&A – October 2010 Answers

You asked and Hasbro answered! Hit the jump to see the answers from Hasbro and Hunter PR!

What prompted the decision to make the upcoming ROTJ R2-D2 smaller than the current molds? I’ve always noticed that the modern R2-D2 figures were a little larger than realistic scale should have them at, but this honestly never bothered me enough to want a “proper to scale” version, even back when it was rare to get a non-R2-D2 Astromech figure. (The difference wasn’t as bad as it used to be with Leia compared to Chewie, for example.) But now we’ve got nearly 40 individual Astromechs using the Droid Factory and Vintage bodies, including the recently-announced pilot-pack Astromechs. Plus most of the R3s and R4s are already using a different mold that stands out badly in terms of proportion, and the odds of any of these being redone are basically nil.I appreciate the dedication to film accuracy, and the amount of gimmickry in the new mold is amazing… but shouldn’t scale have taken one for the team so the Astromechs can keep a pretty consistent look even if the minor details in sculpt differ?
With the new versions of vehicles and Jabba, we’ve also seen figures released (or announced) that fit right in, such as the Cloud Car and Cloud Car Pilot, Jabba and the upcoming Barada, possibly more. But you could also make the case that last year’s Slave Leia works well with the new Jabba even though there was a year between releases. Now, I’m sure that was no accident, but perhaps you could give our readers a bit of insight into the process of planning figures and display sets/vehicles. It’s a great undertaking to revamp a large piece like the AT-AT or Slave-1, so one might think that any additional figures are planned once the go-ahead on the vehicle is given. But maybe it’s also the case that “Hey, we’ve got X and Y out, and if we get this vehicle out there, we could make E, F, and G from our to-do list.” Is it more of vehicle first, figures later, or is it that since we have these figures available, now would be a good time to get this vehicle out? Or is it a bit of both?

This has been the subject of some discussion on the team as well. The decision to make R2-D2 smaller was done to produce a more screen-accurate version. Thought was not necessarily given to how the the rest of the astromech droids might be seen to be out of scale, or whether this means that future astromechs might be produced a smaller scale which means that there would be inconsistency. In our opinion, the differences in the new R2 and previous ones is slight and not enough to contrast strongly against all other droids. However, it may be best to treat this one as a 1-off rather than the new norm, because folks have more astro droids in the previous size. If it ain’t broke….
We generally have very few opportunities to plan programs or complete scenes so we don’t usually try. In the case of Jabba, we didn’t plan any other figures to go with it; Barada was just happenstance, just like if Jabba came out next year we’d have a couple of his henchmen out then as well. When it comes to vehicles, though, we are giving more thought to making sure we have additional figures tied to the theme to make the battle a little bigger. When we next come out with a B-Wing, to pick a random vehicle, if it does not come with a pilot we want to make sure there is a pilot available somewhere in the line at around the same time to complete the play pattern.

Thanks to Hasbro and Hunter PR for the answers! Got more questions? Keep watching for your chance to submit them!