Captain Brutus

That's no moon... so stop howling at it, already! When four kids make a mysterious discovery on their seemingly safe home planet, they get lost in a strange, dangerous galaxy - and finding their way home will be a greater adventure than they ever imagined. Ah, so we see that the Skeleton Crew toys are one of the groups that get generic text about the source material, rather than anything about the character specifically. How bogus. The official Star Wars site says "An intimidating and ruthless captain, Brutus leads a crew of greedy pirates around the galaxy, in search of valuable cargo and treasure." So it's not like Hasbro would have even had to pay a copywriter for this one, just someone with the basic ability to cut and paste. But there's nothing Chris Cocks hates more than paying a professional for necessary work. Captain Brutus is a Shistavanen - you know, "a wolf man," like we saw in the Mos Eisley cantina until it was decided he wasn't "alien" enough for the Special Editions. While a lot of the pirates in Skeleton Crew are named after other fictional freebooters (Jod/Silvo, the robot SM-33, the Nikto Vane, etc.), Brutus isn't one of them. Maybe he's supposed to be a species reference to how longtime sailors are called "sea dogs"? Or maybe it's that, like another famous Brutus, he betrayed his leader. We have yet to receive a Black Series Lak Sivrak or Voolvif Monn, so Brutus' head is a new sculpt, with his bushy fur trailing about and a snarl on his snout. Even if it weren't, they'd still have to make a new body, because no one else has worn anything like this. The figure is identified as "Pirate Captain Brutus (Port Borgo)," but it's not like he had different costumes for different locales; he wears boots with accents that suggest folded cuffs (a feature duplicated, in its own way, on his coat sleeves), regular pants, a long coat, and a vest over that. His hands and neck are the only exposed body: those things on his shoulders are feathers or scraps of leather or something, not fur. Taking a cue from Edward Thatch, Cool Borkus wears a bandolier of pistols across his chest. Of course, the reason Blackbeard did that was that pistols in his day were good for one shot before needing to laboriously be reloaded; so you'd fire, drop it, and draw a new one; hard to imagine a Star Wars laser gun working the same way. Maybe he can't afford good weapons, and the ones he can scrounge up have faulty power packs, making them unreliable for too many shots in a row? Yeah, that works. He carries two more in the holsters on his belt, and all five of them are not only removable and able to be held in his hands, they're all unique sculpts, too. How about that! We've pointed out before that, forced to cut their quality because Chris Cocks refuses to cut his profit, the Marvel team chooses to remove shin joints, and the Star Wars team chooses to remove thigh joints. Or at least turn them into swivel/hinge knees, as the case may be. That's not a terrible loss in Brutus' case, because the holster on his right leg is actually attached to the thigh rather than just hanging near it, and that would prevent things from turning very far anyway. And maybe it's an effect of the large animatronic head the actor had to wear (the physical actor on-set, not the voice actor; those are two different people), but the legs seem small, and the knees seem placed too low. Someone, at some stage of character design, should have realized that dressing a dark brown werewolf in equally dark brown clothing does not make for the most visually interesting character; either his fur should have been lighter or his costume should have been more vibrant. Yes, I realize that all the pirates were equally drab, but that's not really making things any better. Pirates can wear color, you know. Even Star Wars ones. One of my two local Walmarts actually did get the Skeleton Crew wave of figures, but not either of the ones I wanted: no Brutus, and no Neel. And Amazon, for some reason, seemed to think this figure had an MSRP of $30, meaning I couldn't get him there, either. Otherwise I'd have had this figure months ago. I mean, come on: a werewolf pirate captain? There was no way I wasn't down for that! I'd have been in a bigger hurry to get him if he wasn't one big brown lump, but he's as good as he can be, otherwise, and all the guns he comes with are fun. -- 06/28/25 Your task is to give Brutus here some "pop": what color do you put him in? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.