1. VC300 has yet to be announced but the Star Wars team at Hasbro has stated that their choice for that milestone slot was very deliberate and that fans will be happy with whoever "he or she" is. They've also said that Leia in her metal bikini isn't off the table.

Given that a TVC Jabba is being released in 2024, do you think there's a chance that a "Hutt-slayer Leia" will be released as a tie in for that VC300 slot? Would they be better off simply reissuing the VC64 with photo real deco? Maybe reissue the Sandstorm Leia (VC88) to avoid an offensive descriptor and cover up the figure at retail?
--MisterPL

Forgive me if #300 has since been revealed, but my assumption is this specific figure would not be it. Since multiple flavors of metal bikini Leia exist - including Revenge and Return variant cardbacks - I don't think it's necessarily something they need to go back and revisit. It would be great to see done - I think the bootleg market will find another way at some point if Hasbro and Disney and Lucasfilm don't do it as some sort of "this is obviously not a toy HasLab sort of thing." To do something truly special for #300,

The most sensible things to do would be something that would be appealing to absolutely everybody - farmboy Luke was never released in the numbered The Vintage Collection series, for example - or a missing long-requested update (Sim Aloo Imperial Dignitary would probably get some applause.) It could even be the debut of The Power of the Force figures with coins, if Hasbro really wants us to feel like we're getting our $17 (or possibly $18 or $19) worth.

I'd probably say do Sim Aloo before the line gets further price increased/budget cuts/fans get too old to care. Or if you just want to watch me be ridiculously happy, Danny Trejo would be fun.

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2. Do you know offhand if this [R2-D2 with battle damage] figure fits in the socket of this [2019 Star Wars The Vintage Collection Luke Skywalker Red 5 X-Wing Fighter 3 3/4-Inch Scale Vehicle] ship?
--Shawn

It sure does! Hasbro originally sold the burned-up blasted R2-D2 as a Walmart exclusive, but later packed it in with an X-Wing (and Luke and Vader and a Vader's TIE Fighter) in an exclusive boxed set at what would be an obscenely low price by modern standards.

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FIN

One of my favorite comic panels - I keep it on my desktop - comes from Transformers and it has one robot saying to another: "Listen to me. Never hope. Hope is a lie." And that's more or less how I feel after Ahsoka and New York Toy Fair 2023. I think we're going to be coasting for a while, and it's kind of fascinating that despite their being more Star Wars than ever before, there's certainly not more discourse and more hype.

New York Toy Fair has been around for over a century. It will be skipping 2024, running in New York one last time in 2025... and that's it, it's over and moving to New Orleans. This year's show didn't really have much new to show from what I saw reported but there were background whispers of some neat licenses coming up in 1-2 years, and some cool products for later, and presumably a ton of goodies to reveal at New York Comic Con in a few days. Normally I walk away from these shows with something I just can't wait to tell you, or something you saw by now that I can say was very exciting, but this time? No. Maybe the industry really just changed in 3 1/2 years to the point where this trade show has escaped its former trappings of relevance thanks to Hasbro and the rest of the world releasing what they want on their own schedule as needed. It's arguably a better way to do things, and we're seeing E3 and other centers of their industries slowly losing their importance. Part of this may be related to the material - maybe it's not as great, but they're definitely keeping it so tightly under wraps that there's little hype and not much reason to be excited months (or years) in advance like we got for the prequels, The Force Awakens, or Rogue One. You need a hype machine, and last-minute trailers ain't gonna do it.

When it comes to Star Wars - the original movie and probably the original (and prequel) trilogies - are spokes on the wheel that keeps us going forward. You watch the new movies (or shows) because you liked the movies when you were a kid. You buy the toys because you liked the then-new movies as a kid. You buy the new toys because you (or your kid) liked some flavor of Star Wars as a kid. Ahsoka tried really hard to land a winner here, but the show felt like connective tissue more than a great show unto itself. I don't know if it was by design or just how it landed, but the show seemed like 8 45-minute exposition drops for another, better show. I liked a lot of it - the song on Sabine's bike, the star whales, some glimpses into the New Republic - but so much of it was so slight that it just didn't leave a big impact. The fact that you build an amazing piece of new exploratory tech to go to another galaxy and somehow immediately end up to the right planet on your first stop - twice, because the whales did it too - is ludicrous, particularly that "get lost and explore a new galaxy to find your friend" is a spectacular premise for a new show to meet new friends, new enemies, and of course, new toys. And they just hand-waved it away to go to another sad beige Star Wars planet with a Tusken Raider analog and a Jawa analog. Despite the fact that there was clearly some good craftsmanship in the acting, props, costumes, creatures, and so forth, I am reminded of a night roughly 4 years and 10 months ago where I left The Rise of Skywalker and got progressively crankier as the night went on.

The big question from where I sit is will these things have a cultural impact. We saw "This is the way" and "One way out" achieve some level of "May the Force be with you" cultural impact in recent years, but this show seems to exist solely to be a pretty good pageant for existing fans. And then I remembered Sturgeon's law which says, in short, "ninety percent of everything is crap." And it's true - good sequels are rare, most TV and movies are forgotten without your ever having seen or heard of them, and long-running beloved franchises have their share of misfires. Also if you believe that ultimately Star Wars is truly for children and the remaining old fans are merely stuck on it and along for the ride, perhaps our time hanging out in a galaxy far, far away should have ended. Maybe there's something great just around the corner but they haven't told us enough about the next show's plot to know if we should really be excited or not. In the case of Ahsoka, most of what we needed to take from it was in the trailers. One story spread over eight weeks stretched it pretty thin.

The next live-action Star Wars is scheduled to be Skeleton Crew and its official release date is still 2023, if you still believe such things. I don't think you'll see it this calendar year if there's no release date, but it seems the current era of entertainment seems to like a "surprise" to cause everybody to scramble rather than to set up a nice big event that everybody can plan around. Whatever it is, I hope it's great, because going from planet to planet only to find riffs on barren wastelands and similar nomadic tribes of space peoples is getting pretty tiring. And as someone in the business, not having toys on shelf before each new movie or TV show seems to be real bad for the bottom line.

--Adam Pawlus

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