1. What's the cheapest option for getting Star Wars toys if you're living outside of the continental United States?
--Derek

This shouldn't surprise you, but the rest of the world is generally outside my area of expertise. I've heard rumblings that stuff might start being cheaper overseas due to how tariffs and costs are being handled, but I haven't been able to confirm that. This is due to my not buying toys outside America as a consumer.

Presumably, the cheapest way would be to set up a business in your locality, contact Hasbro sales in your region, and start some sort of co-op to order direct. But having never set up a business in Japan or England or anywhere, that's just a wild guess because maybe VAT is enough to sour the whole thing. Thanks to tariffs, going through a US seller is probably no longer a cheaper option and I'd recommend connecting with businesses in your area to ask if you can buy using their wholesale accounts or starting one of your own.

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2. I took a 3-4 year hiatus from displaying my figures while I went through the process of building and getting settled into a new house. I recently started setting up my displays, and discovered something about the last few years of Vintage figures. I found out I really dislike articulated/rocker ankles. Besides undoubtedly adding cost, this change seems to have (IMHO) eliminated a more important feature—functional peg holes. The peg holes are now too shallow and narrow to fit any peg I've yet found. I've considered using removable mounting putty to stick them to stands, but am not sure what that may or may not do to the figures over time. Do you know of stands that actually work for these figures or have any suggestions on how to set these figures up in a stable way?
--Todd

There are small doll stands - the round bases with the pile and clips that go around the neck or waist - that are good for multi-jointed figures with a proclivity to sag over time. These are expensive, and it doesn't scale well to dozens/hundreds of figures. I bought a few at hobby stores that are pretty close to these on Amazon, but they aren't pretty to look at. They are functional, though. I've bought some similar contraptions for select 6-inch figures and found them effective.

I agree with you - but most collectors that scream the loudest want the best figures, with the most articulation, and the best paint, and they aren't price sensitive. The price sensitive fans just quietly stop buying, and that is not always taken into consideration as we are now at a $19.99 "premium" collector figure with useless shallow vestigial foot holes.

I'm not sure what to suggest other than this: people other than me need to complain to Hasbro. I don't think ankles are usually of much value. They cost more, require more labor, and increase the price of tooling these toys in exchange for limiting stability and ruining the use of foot pegs. But I assume collectors in their 40s or 50s are far more likely just to shrug, buy fewer figures, and slowly fade away while the product - which has incredible portraits and look better than ever - boils the metaphorical frog alive.

This is (say it with me) why I'm a big fan of The Retro Collection. They stand. They sit. They fit in vehicles. They work with nearly 50 years of foot peg playsets/stands/vehicles. The Grand Inquisitor Retro figure is hanging out on my desk... and a lot of what stays here does so because the figure won't fall over easily.

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FIN

This will make you feel old - or "hello, dwindling audience of aging Gen-Xers and Baby Millennials." I was thinking about what aged better - the prequel trilogy, or the sequel trilogy. The Force Awakens turns 10 this month. Revenge of the Sith turned 20 in May, and The Phantom Menace is 26. It seems like a good time to consider that, and also anger people in the process.

I'm voting prequels. I watched them earlier this year and while there are bits that have iffy dialogue and some of the CG green screen sets look more than a little dated, they're a heck of a lot more interesting. Maybe it's because I got to know them better. One movie every three years gave us time to spend with guide books, waves and waves of action figures, video games, and comic adventures that really pushed the story forward in ways the sequels just didn't do. Sequel figures got a little less than a year in the spotlight, with no real video games, and the tie-in fiction was mostly backstory or flashbacks. My interest there is, ironically, low - even though that's what the prequels were.

The emerging CG of The Phantom Menace still looks charming in spots, and the real costumes and most miniature sets look just as good as they did back in 1999. I like the vehicles, and the performances are all over the map. You can really see why they want to cast Liam Neeson, Ewan MacGregor, and Natalie Portman to prop it up because some of the alien voices and young performers may make you cringe. The funny thing is Jar Jar Binks doesn't seem more grating - Ahmed Best was given a specific kind of direction, and he did a good job. Was it great direction? Not really. But nothing about it makes me go "yeah, he didn't do what he was asked to do well." With all the vehicles on Naboo and the Pod Racers, you can see why they kept building video games around it. The art may have been a little soft, but the craft? I have no complaints, people turned in great work.

What really made the prequels sticky, though, was the Clone Wars. Way back in 2003 Lucasfilm orchestrated a Shadows of the Empire-esque tie-in with comics, a cartoon, novels, and a toy line that kept people coming back to following Jedi. The story moved ahead, we weren't dealing with "this story took place off-camera during the movie" or "here's what Ki-Adi-Mundi was doing with Ephant Mon." We really got to see Anakin and Obi-Wan go have an adventure. We got new villains, just like we got with Luke, Han, Leia, and Lando back in the 1970s and 1980s. That really helps!

Letting fans live in the world of a movie or TV show makes a huge difference, and that was explicitly denied to us with The Force Awakens ending on a cliffhanger. We knew Rey was going to meet Luke next. We just had to wait two years to see the next scene. There was no reason to tell a story in the comics about her going back home, or to a space casino, or much of anything like that. With the sequels it felt like we were bad and were grounded. Disney told us we couldn't imagine the future adventures of these characters, and immediately distracted us with a Rebels vs. Empire adventure in Rogue One that also got about eight months of fun before that was yanked for The Last Jedi, which didn't even really get six months before the messy roll-out of Solo. And since they killed everybody in Rogue One we didn't give that a heck of a lot of thought. There's a lot to like in all of this stuff, but it's overwhelming to have a lifetime of Star Wars films and TV in five years. This stuff used to be very slowly rolled out, which is great in making obsessive fans who demand more and will buy any little book or figure to keep it going.

I quit buying the comic books shortly after The Clone Wars entered its third season because I was getting free cartoons every week. Why buy $4 slow-roll-out comics too? I still kept tabs on the summaries of plots but I had so much to enjoy that I didn't need to pay up for more. That's where Disney put me now - the movies are good, but we're looking at getting another movie in May 2026 with another in May 2027. And let me tell you, figure fans, I have zero faith Hasbro is going to deliver a good figure-and-vehicle line for that. (LEGO, Mattel, and Jazwares probably have a better opportunity.)

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I miss my pegs of $5-$7 Jedi, clone troopers, and other weirdos. I miss off-years with Expanded Universe stuff and Hasbro backfilling aliens that fans had wanted for decades. And mostly I miss just coming to terms with whatever movie we got, good or bad, and accepting it - and then living in (or around) that world for a few years. It's a shame Disney didn't give us a chance to get more involved with those stories - I'd have loved a The Mandalorian game (or a show that had a new season each year), and maybe The Book of Boba Fett could have been something special if it had some follow-through. And I guess we're less than a year from finding out if Ahsoka has a real story there, beyond just showing us official cosplay of fan-favorites.

--Adam Pawlus

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