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See? We told you so.
Celebrate the season with specially designed Star Wars figures from The Black Series.
This Wookiee was the other "Halloween Edition" figure for 2022, meant to be Walmart's exclusive. It was listed on their website for preorder on October 6, with projected delivery the next day. Wow, impressive! Yeah, too impressive: delivery was "delayed," and it kept getting pushed back and pushed back, until the "Halloween" figure finally shipped in the middle of that December. But hey, there's always another October, right? Especially if we've remembered to post this when intended, in October of 2023. Email subscribers who got to read this last December, we're counting on you to remind us if it doesn't go up.
While Target's "Bone Trooper" was a pretty uninspired offering, Walmart's "Were-Wookiee" is a lot better. Like pretty much every Wookiee in the Black Series, he uses that one standard body, with the long fur spilling over the joints. He still manages to look unique though, because he's got grey fur - not a color that's been used before. Brown Wookiees, black Wookiees, white Wookiees... but no grey before now. His hands and feet are painted fleshtone, making him at least look a bit more human than an average Wookiee does.
To further make him stand apart, he gets the chest harness from Krrsantan: the crossed straps, the big spiky shoulder pads, all that. This time it's molded from brown plastic instead of that yellow, so it blends in with the fur nicely. Of course, it also means the same limitations on the articulation (though those are still more about the fur covering the joints than anything else).
And then there's something no other Holiday Edition figure has had: a newly molded part. All the figures so far have been repaints with swapped around accessories, but the Halloween Edition Wookiee does better than that. Just being a new color isn't enough to make this figure special, so Hasbro approached Lucasfilm with a wild pitch: a new head with big tall wolf ears sticking out the top. The basis of the sculpt is the Black Krrsantan sculpt, just flipped horiontally (an easy thing to do, thanks to digital sculpting) and without the braids. The snarling mouth is typical - no long snout or anything - but those ears are molded on, not some separate piece. They look perfectly in place on top of a Wookiee head, almost unobtrusive.
Like we said, the Holiday Edition figures tend to at least get accessories they haven't had before. At last, we get a Wookiee who's not armed with a big crossbow! What he gets instead is a camtono molded in orange, with a black jack o'lantern face molded on one of the flaps - it's a McDonald's pumpkin pail! "McPunk'n," as they were known in back in 1986. Obviously it's not the exact pattern, and maybe they were trying to convey a real pumpkin, but an orange bucket with a face printed on it says "McDonald's" to us! And just like the Bone Trooper, we get bars of beskar painted like candy bars. So fun! The ones here come from the same source as the Boo Bucket, meaning two stacks of 10, not individual bars.
The Halloween Edition figures follow the Holiday Edition figures' lead in including a small pack-in figure. You'd think that Wookiees being so large and this figure needing a new mold would mean "Llykknfvrowhpeee," here, would have something small and simple, like a porg, but nope, we get something (almost) new: a bogling.
Native to the planet Bogano, boglings were introduced in 2019's Jedi: Fallen Order. And the only place to get one before
now was in a GameStop exclusive release of Cal Kestis. Designed by Amy Fry, boglings seem calculated to be as cute as possible, with little bird legs, a fox tail, and a fuzzy round head with pointy ears and large eyes. It even has little arms tucked up in front of its chest, like it's adorably nervous to see you. This one is brown with yellow eyes and blue pants, which doesn't seem particularly Halloweeny, but maybe it's supposed to be a werewolf pup? The ears are similar, after all, and it has painted fangs. Still cute, either way.
According to Eric Franer, Hasbro's product designer for Star Wars, the team had close to 30 different ideas for Halloween Edition characters, but only two of them got made? We want to see what the other 28 are! Yeah, there was a massive delay in getting this figure out (and therefore an even bigger one in getting this review posted), but it's a fun design and definitely the best Black Series Halloween Edition figure of 2022.
-- 10/21/23
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