This week in Q&A: Lightsabers! You know I love 'em. But does Hasbro have big plans for the FX model in the future? Also, Tauntauns - are the XL ones coming soon? And let's also talk Rebels, because we can. Read on!

As always, send in your questions for next time. Read on!

1. Just read your "Droids in Distress" review - thanks for doing those. Not sure if I'll be able to watch future episodes, as I don't have Disney XD, unless maybe they are available on their website or Youtube or something. Do you know anything about that?
--Greg

Your ability to catch some of these episodes without DisneyXD is directly proportional to how much you trust certain streaming video sites I won't name for various reasons. Sometimes they pop up for the cable-averse if you're willing to put in some time to look, but if you're doing that a few times a week iTunes starts to sound good. While The Clone Wars carried a strange thread of urgency for what was effectively an anthology show for the first three seasons, Rebels is a little more meandering and as I watch it I really don't know where it's going or if I care if it gets there. And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of doing side stories for a war where we've seen the beginning and the end was a dubious prospect at best. You might just want to hold off for DVD and Blu-Ray because while it is neat, I find it unlikely that Rebels will be a beloved show. It might pick up fans down the road, but right now it doesn't feel like there's a lot of action to be had from week to week.

 

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2. Hello! I had a question about the Hasbro EFX Lightsabers with removable blades. Do you know if they are going to be making anymore of them? Some of them are now out of stock and now HTF. In addition,there were also a ton of cool designs from the movies that they never got around to making. I have been looking to start a lightsaber collection for a long time,but Hasbro doesnt seem to make them much anymore and all of the third-party saber makers have huge drawbacks(poor quality,no soundboards,high prices). Is this a well Hasbro is going to go back to?
--Jobacca The Wookiee

Since Hasbro hasn't announced anything, I can't say much - I do know that some retailers have expressed interest in reruns of existing sabers in addition to some new ones to renew interest in the genuinely wonderful line of prop replicas, but if there are any new ones on deck they certainly aren't being whispered about in any of my usual back channels. Or front channels. If there's not a slate of them for the Fall 2015 Star Wars midnight toy orgy I'm going to be surprised. I do believe they'll bring them back because it's a solid cash cow - a new group of spoiled kids comes up every year and wants the best "toy" lightsaber money can buy. Having said that, if they show up for sale at a decent price, buy anyway. You never know which ones Hasbro will reissue, or when, or what changes (if any) get made in the process.

I would not anticipate minor movie characters to get their sabers made, but it wouldn't stun me to see Ahsoka or depending on the success of the show, Kanan from Rebels. I'd still like to see Qui-Gon, but then again, I'm not personally collecting this line in full so whatever they do is really OK with me.

3. Any clue as to when the Black Series [6-inch] Tauntauns will be out?
--Joseph

No release date has been given yet, so assuming it's still coming out I wouldn't expect it to be before late February or potentially March. I haven't heard any background radiation on this one, and we now have packaged samples surfacing (those tend to show up 6-10 weeks before the product shows up, sometimes, but not always). I can all but guarantee no 2014 release date for the Wampa with Luke or Tauntaun with Han Solo, and the current roll-out rate of new waves seems to be pretty sporadic - and I'm not sure how much Hasbro is going to juice Jabba and the Speeder Bike for before moving on.

With that in mind, also remember that with Hasbro "last wave syndrome" has been effectively replaced by "wave 1 syndrome" causing subsequent series to not hit shelves because of a glut of the first batch. (You may choose to blame this on Hasbro for making too much or the market for not caring to purchase it. At this point I think it's some of each.) If you're budgeting your collecting dollars or just wondering when to start hunting, look at it this way - no online pre-orders at the major toy shops means no immediate release date. Sit tight, we're getting there.

 

FIN

I've often written that a big part of what drives interest in toy collecting is "See this? You can't have it." It applies to me in reverse - there are some big movies I just plain don't want to see, and after being spoiled rotten with countless action figures, comics, and cartoons the 2012 announcement of Star Tours Detours left me shrugging. Not because I don't find Seth Green funny, or the animation and designs good, but mostly because a "let's make fun of Star Wars" show seemed cynical for the franchise, and even if it's great it's sort of an indicator of what felt like "the end." The narrative would not go forward, but we'd get this other thing.

Authorized, sanctioned, and licensed parody makes me bristle a bit - even if it's good, it just feels so unwholesome to come from a place of tacit approval. I mean, if Lucasfilm was to take money from a project mocking its prized pig, it seems a little toothless. This is why Disney shelving it makes it interesting - I saw it, and I can't have it. Why not? We read some of the official reasons which were somewhat thin, and now we live in a world where there are two "lost" Star Wars TV shows - dozens of unproduced live-action Underworld scripts are joined by dozens of unmade Detours scripts and a whopping 39 finished episodes. 39! For an unaired series, that's a pretty big backlog.

So now, here we are with an honest-to-goodness lost project. Maybe it's temporary - maybe it will be released. But maybe not. We're so bloated as a fan culture where it seems nobody out there is looking to shine a light on the project with a coffee table book just yet, and from my travels in the circles of licensed products (of which there have been too many) I've never seen anything that got close to being presented for solicitation. Typically (but not always) when movies get flushed down the toilet of preproduction, we'll see books, articles, or even a documentary on the project - I'm guessing nobody out there is too curious or concerned about the fate of this show just yet. I'm hoping we see something down the road, but there is something fascinating about thinking we could have a new legend. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the big thing we couldn't see was Biggs Darklighter. That was a pretty big part of the collective fan subconscious - did you see Biggs in the theater? Are you sure? Someone says he did. The legend grew, and eventually we got a CD-ROM that showed us some of the footage. It was a really big deal!

Now we've got hours of a TV show that maybe we'll see, and maybe we won't. I find this to be pretty exciting stuff. We're at the dawn of a new era, and a last hurrah got swept under the rug, perhaps permanently, perhaps just until Celebration VII next year. We know there are unseen The Clone Wars scripts and we saw some partially completed footage. We know there are live-action scripts. And we know there are many episodes of Detours we may not see for some time - Lucasfilm is still sitting on a number of deleted scenes from the original films, so if nothing else it looks like there are plenty of opportunities to move books, apps, and other behind-the-scenes materials down the road when someone, somewhere deems it time to really shine a light on the days before Disney brought the saga back to the big screen. I got a feeling there's a lot of neat stuff behind closed doors that we won't see for quite some time, and hopefully it gets published before all of us are too old or dead to care.

--Adam Pawlus

Got questions? Email me with Q&A in the subject line now! I'll answer your questions as soon as time (or facts) permit.

 

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