Retrobots Revisited: Droids!

 

At this writing, I'm closing on 2 years since I started this blog and about one year since it really got going. I've again been reminded that I have again gone a while without doing much with my robot features. To make up for it, I decided to do an extra post on something I'm surprised I didn't cover a lot sooner, the droids of the original Star Wars Kenner droids. These are the definitive representations of the most iconic and influential pop culture robots in history, and as we will see, the strange thing is that there really weren't that many of them. To start off, here's the tallest and arguably greatest of them all, IG88, with the Voltron mystery red guy and C3PO; he's okay, I guess.

 And here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and Ken R. Wampa, plus a Rock Lord. Note the rock bot is about the same height; with both at full height, I think IG is still just a little taller.

Now, it's time to back this up. The lineup here represents about 3/4ths of the Kenner "vintage" droids I have. The other two are a worst-possible-condition R2 and an R5D4 I'm sure I have but couldn't find on short notice. The further backstory is that I picked up most of these, including IG, in mid- to late elementary school, well after the end of the Kenner line. I also recall I lost or broke specimens of IG and R5 then bought them again. (The latter was a victim of a carbon freezing accident.) IG was certainly the coolest, notwithstanding the fact that we never saw him in action in the movies. He's tall and streamlined, outside of the unnecessary molded detail. The one problem is that he isn't made the same as other figures. The arms are a bit rubbery, and need to be watched for breakage, while the legs feel slightly and unpleasantly sticky with age. Still, he's easily among the very best of the vintage line, and I'm sure kids put him through a franchise worth of adventures. Next up, C3PO and his weird cousin, the alleged Death Star Droid.

"Trust me, you're lucky you weren't in the cartoon...."

What I remember about these guys is that they were among my later acquisitions. I got C3PO second-hand in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, and didn't get the other guy until as late as high school.  I can further recall seeing the bug-eyed droid in an image in the Star Wars story book, as one of the broken-down droids in the Jawa sandcrawler. That in turn brings up one of the wonkier moments in the "Expanded Universe", when the droid handbook tried to explain the "Death Star droid" name as a "thing" in the Star Wars universe. Per the actual movies, even kids could work out, he was just a droid, and if it showed up in both the junk piles of Tatooine and the corridors of the Death Star, then they were already everywhere. And that brings us to what I suppose was my favorite, the power/ "Gonk" droid, pictured with Threepio and a Tomy bot for feature continuity.

As a kid, I absolutely loved this guy, and I still can't say why. He didn't really do anything in the movies, he looked silly, and the only things the toy added were the clicky gimmick in the legs and the antenna that's always missing. I can further recall deliberately pulling the antenna off mine because it annoyed me in some way, then throwing it away when it turned up in a sweep for loose accessories. To me, that just made him look more like he does in the movies, so I was happy. Here's a couple detail pics.

Finally, we have the medical droids from the Empire wave of the line, 21B and FX. Here they are together.

21B is besides R2 the only droid I'm absolutely sure we got new. I picked up the other droid already missing a couple arms. They were both awesome in my eyes. It's intriguing in hindsight that they made figures this detailed out of robots that were specifically shown as made to help people. (An extra factoid, 21B is the only droid besides Threepio to get any lines in English in the first two movies.) Of course, this went out the window in playtime. FX especially was great as an evil robot/ supercomputer, and it actually made sense for him to sit around while the evil scheme played out. Here's one more pic of him.

The thing about all this is that this brings us not only to the end of my collection but pretty close to the end of the droids in the Kenner line. The only droid I haven't covered released on card in the vintage line is Zuckuss/ 4LOM (I really don't care...), which I know my big brother or I must have had simply because I remember having his triple-barreled gun (which I usually gave to Bossk). The only new droids released for Return of the Jedi or the last-ditch Power of the Force wave were 8D8 and EV-9D9, and then mainly as add-ins for playsets. Throw in the probe droid from the Empire Hoth turret playset (which I was so unaware of I built my own to fill the gap), and you have only a dozen unique droids in the entire vintage line.  It would barely fill one wave of the Transformers or Gobots line, but clearly, they had influence far beyond their numbers.

Then fast-forward to the 1990s, when all things Star Wars were rebooting, and it was so... much... better. R2D2 looked like he did in the movie, 8D8 was findable, and we even got a probe droid. Here's a few pics of just a few I have lying around with vintage figures for comparison.

And one more...

"Did you say something about mini rigs?"

Now, I'm ready to wrap this up. If there's a lesson, it's that things can and do get better, but what came first can still hold its place, especially when you're old enough to remember when it was new. That's all for now, more to come!