I was talking with a friend over email and it came up that nobody was talking about the Star Wars The Vintage Collection Boba Fett’s Throne Room, which came out last September and Hasbro Pulse has in stock right now for $229.99.   I took some pictures of it for our Tumblr as well, outfitting it with various aliens from Return of the Jedi over the last 46 years of toys.

It's a pretty good piece.  I haven't opened up all of the accessories still, mostly because I was less interested in setting up The Book of Boba Fett gear.  Why? Not enough figures.  Hasbro delivered a really excellent multi-purpose playset that can be used with either that show or Return of the Jedi, but as they didn't deliver many of the lesser members of Boba Fett's entourage... why would you want a $230 playset to sit empty?

Instead, I dug out a smattering of favorites like Nikto, Yak Face, and Ree-Yees from The Black Series' forgotten 3 3/4-inch line as well as The Vintage Collection, Power of the Jedi, The 30th Anniversary Collection, the 2002 Saga line, and there are even some actual original Kenner guys in there.  Droopy McCool is from a Walmart exclusive The Power of the Force 2-pack that came out when I just started college a very long time ago.  Sure, I have newer and better versions of some of these guys, but shouldn't my 2004 Ultra-class Jabba the Hutt get to have some fun?

If you were a new collector from the past five or six years, you wouldn't have enough The Book of Boba Fett guys to trick out this set as of yet (because there aren't any) and you probably wouldn't have enough from Return of the Jedi because most of the best creatures came out before 2010.  That isn't a slight against Hasbro's quality, as their recent Saelt-Marae and Klaatu figures are absolutely tip-top and I would say roughly worth the increasingly high asking prices at retail.   Sure, the articulation is completely superfluous for a guy who just stands around with a drink, but when you really get your hands around a massive wad of themed figures you are all but guaranteed to feel a sense of actual satisfaction.   From where I sit, adding this playset to decades of figures was the icing on a cake (of which I keep eating too many slices.)   Playsets like this aren't a bonus for the fans, or something we should have to earn - it's the reason we've been hoarding figures all these years.   We wanted to play with them, we want somewhere for them to go, and the likes of this playset and Hasbro's excellent Sail Barge from HasLab are the what keep collecting interesting.

This is why I'm also a big fan of The Retro Collection - I can pull out an old Kenner Slave I or Mini-Rigs, and it all fits together.  It's part of a bigger, greater whole that's rewarding, fun, and worth writing about on the internet.   Conversely when looking at recently announced The Black Series figures - high quality, to be sure - I don't know what to do with them. There's no great playset to kit out, nor is there a legendary scene I can expect to build.  We're not getting awesome throne rooms or display stands that can recreate a famous duel or a movie scene.   The 3 3/4-inch figure scale allows fans to buy more, fit it in less room, and - if Hasbro is so inclined - build out a fun scene or diorama.  This means we may spend more total money, but not more money per item purchased.

The next HasLab is slated to be next week, and it's Transformers, and if you read between the lines/hashtags it looks like it's probably Omega Prime or Optimus Prime (Super Fire Convoy) from Robots in Disguise.   After that, there are no known plans for Star Wars or any other brands, but there are mutterings about G.I. Joe in the ether.  I was happy to see The Ghost from Rebels and Ahsoka last year, but if Hasbro is reading I would like to ask for another big scene that I can use with my figures, and also buy some new ones.  A Star Destroyer would let me take advantage of Stormtroopers and make me want to buy more Imperial Officers, maybe a new Darth Vader, and the bounty hunters.  A big Cantina would be a dream - we haven't had a new diorama since the cardboard one in the 1990s, and we had some piecemeal stools and bar chunks in 2002, 2004, and 2007.  A big scene would give fans an excuse to buy new versions of Greedo, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi while letting Hasbro reissue dozens of existing molds and maybe giving us our first new, never-before-released Cantina creature in at least a decade.

I know this shows bias toward the original trilogy, but that's where we tend to go.  Older fans are likely to show their kids the original movies, and today's 4-11 year old kids may have parents in their 20s to 40s - thus putting them in (or just after) the VHS era of fandom.   They're an easy mark, and so am I.  Mattel executed on not-quite-reissues of Masters of the Universe Origins from 2020-2023 that looked a lot like the old toys they remembered, and Playmates continues to clean up with low-cost retro reissues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.   The pre-prequel Star Wars kids who are now parents (and grandparents) are in peak "let's buy toys for our kids (but are actually for us)" ages, so it's my hope that we can all be exploited between now and the time where we stop being profitable.