Movie Mania: Executor fleet!

 

I once again needed a quick post, and I was remembering just how much material I have backlogged in photos alone. A lot of these were taken before I had set up this blog, when I was posting toy pics to oblivion in online forums. When I have looked through these old pics, I have far too often concluded that they weren't of suitable quality for the blog. For this post, I finally fished out a set I was satisfied would work. Here is the Executor, the most awesome yet least merchandised Star Wars ship.

To back things up, the Executor is a Star Wars ship first featured in The Empire Strikes Back. Per semi-official specs, the model built by ILM was 2.6 m long, almost certainly the largest built for the trilogy. The lighting was done mainly with fiberoptics, creating tens of thousands of separate lights without separate bulbs. The ship featured very prominently in the second film, and returned for Return of the Jedi, where it was shown destroyed after crashing into the second Death Star. Its actual size was a matter of literally decades of arguments among fans and writers . Despite this pedigree, it never figured in the original trilogy's toys and merchandise, except for a single playset that loosely portrayed the bridge of the ship. This undoubtedly had much to do with the failure of Kenner's diecast ship line, as well as the general absence of Rebel capital ships prior to ROTJ. But even in the much more favorable environment of the 1990s, the Executor remained scarce compared to other large ships, with only three different releases including the very rare and decidedly wonky Collector Fleet ship.

For me personally, what I find most fascinating is that I don't really remember the Executor until relatively late in my Star Wars fandom. While I didn't have regular access to a TV or video until the dawn of the '90s, I can remember watching the Star Wars movies plenty of times as a kid, particularly the second and third movies. Yet, I seem to have a reverse Mandela effect about the Executor; I must have seen it on-screen but I can't remember noticing it until my family finally got the boxed VHS set in the 1990s. Once I was really paying attention, I found the Executor especially fascinating.  I eventually bought the Micro Machines diecast version, and saw the Collector Fleet on the shelves once, but by the close of the millennium, the Executor just dropped off the map. There were releases here and there for collectors, including a giant Lego set, but none of them were in my price range or the kind of "collectible" I would want myself. I continued to look for examples of the Executor, but only picked up a Micro Machines re-release. Then, in 2019, I finally saw a Bandai snap model kit that satisfied me, and ordered it online after a wait for it to become available. Here's a few pics I took immediately after assembling it, with the Micro Machines thrown in.

Obviously, I didn't paint the model, because my eye-hand coordination is that bad. At first, I rationalized that I might do that later, but after taking a closer look at the very fine contours, I concluded that putting a brush to the model would only obscure or even damage the finer details. In any case, I got in some good fun putting it together, and I genuinely liked the color, lighter than the ship as shown on screen but not quite pure white. It went up as a nice addition to my collection, and that was where matters stood until I caught wind of another release last year for the Hot Wheels Star Wars line. I had enough trouble finding it that I finally paid off a scalper for one, "only" about twice what it would have cost in the stores. Inevitably, it came out of the package soon after. Here's a few pics of the thing unboxed, taken with my phone.

Compared to the Bandai model or the Micro Machines ships, this latest addition is definitely on the clunky side, though not quite as thick as the old diecast specimen. There's some further awkward details that might not quite be visible in the pics, though one that definitely shows is a piece of the nose that's metal instead of plastic. All in all, it's something that would have been awe-inspiring in the 1980s or even the early '90s, now just okay.

And that's the end of this random meander down memory lane. If nothing else, it's a glimpse of what I was doing before I got this blog in gear. As always, more to come!