Toy Fair ’20: Star Wars Reactions |

I don’t envy the fellows who hosted the Toy Fair ’20 Star Wars presentation, going out there knowing everything you are showing has already been revealed by previous presentations, early store releases, or by rumor sites. As a viewer it makes for a fairly dull watch, but I did see quite a few things that I’m excited to buy.

There was very little news about the Galaxy of Adventures line, so it did make me wonder if that was winding down. They did show a new Ahsoka and Ahsoka themed Clone Trooper that looked nice.

The Vintage collection is getting a GNK droid and Jedi Luke that also look pretty solid, if not terribly exciting. I would buy a Black Series GNK if they made it. The new paint job on the Vintage Collection Slave I was pretty impressive looking too, but I really liked the flight stand.

The The Retro reproduction line is also continuing with some ESB figures. I’ll try and pick up that Fett for sure. It’s crazy how much product they are putting out this year with vintage style boxes.

The mission fleet line was revealed a couple of days prior at a Baby Yoda themed event. These are smaller scale figures with vehicles that recall a less super-deformed take on the Imaginext line. Again, not really to my taste, but I may pick up a Fett or Mando if I see one.

Now that I got those preliminaries out of the way, I’m going to talk about my main interest, The Black Series. These reveals were all The Empire Strikes Back related starting off with the return of the 40th Anniversary series. These are six inch scale figures on vintage style cards.

Wave one is Bespin Han and Luke, Hoth Leia, Yoda, and an AT-AT driver. These are pretty much all re-releases and are interesting to me in so far as I’d like to hang a carded collection of these in my toy room if I come across a set. The only critical buy for me is the Bespin Luke looks to have an all new portrait and face printing that’s an improvement on the original release.

Wave two of 40th anniversary is a little more exciting because it comes with Hoth Pilot Luke, A Hoth Soldier, a dirtied up Dagobah R2, Lando, and a TIE Pilot. These all look lovely on the card, but I really only feel like I absolutely need Lando, Luke and the Hoth Soldier.

Hoth Pilot Luke has a fantastic new portrait and an altered cold weather flight suit. The only downside on this figure that I can see so far is that it looks to me like he’s sporting the new “elbro” style swivel/hinge knee that looks a little awkward when bent. I’m very curious to get one in person.

Lando has the new facial print that I think improves nicely on the original release.

Finally, the Hoth Soldier is a figure I’ve wanted for a long time in this line I’m a huge fan of army building and I love the extra mile Hasbro went to include different display options for this figure. He comes with two different face plates and can wear his scarf and goggles over the face for a bit more intrinsic variety in your army. The kicker on this is the face plate stores in the back pack in most Zartan toy-like fashion. I don’t think I could expect any more from Hasbro on this. They exceeded my expectations here and I love it.

Also for the Black Series, the Imperial Probe droid was shown. It looks very good and in fact, you can get a great close-up look at this guy in Robo’s excellent video review of the figure.

I had completely forgotten this had leaked to retailers, so when they started talking about deluxe figures, in my mind I was anticipating them finally releasing the Zeb figure. Alas, no. Hasbro, seriously. I’m begging you. Don’t make me sit through another presentation with no Zeb figure.

Yes, I was disappointed that there was no Zeb, but the confirmation and pictures of the six inch scale snow speeder eased my pain quite a bit. The sculpting on this thing is fantastic and I’m so glad to see they are continuing with the vehicles in this scale. I’m over the moon that they are including a Dak figure with this speeder too.

The Hoth Trooper and Snow Speeder were pretty great reveals, but the focus on ESB felt weird to me even though it is the Anniversary. Don’t get me wrong, ESB is one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but I’m really excited about a lot of new Star Wars stuff like The Rise of Skywalker, Fallen Order, Battlefront II, New Clone Wars, and all of the Mandalorian creatures and characters, so the ESB focus felt really disconnected to what is currently going on with the franchise. I like to see them draw from more disparate parts of the franchise for new figures.

Also. Zeb. Really need my Zeb, fellas.

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