MOMAW NADON (HAMMERHEAD)
STAR WARS: POWER OF THE FORCE II (KENNER)
The smash success of both A New Hope and its tie-in line of toys in the late ‘70s created a demand that Kenner was having trouble meeting. They needed more figures for their toyline, but had produced the major players, apart from the less exciting likes of Tarkin, or Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. They were out of named characters. How do you solve this problem? You give names to unnamed characters, specifically the very unique crop of aliens seen in the Mos Eisley Cantina. Along the line, Lucasfilm decided that Kenner’s names weren’t quite cutting it, and introduced their own. Thus, for his second figure, Hammerhead became Momaw Nadon.
THE FIGURE ITSELF
Momaw Nadon was released in the 1996 assortment of Power of the Force II figures. The figure stands 4 inches tall and has 6 points of articulation. As an earlier entry in the line, Momaw has a fair bit of pre-posing going on here. With that being said, there’s something about his more alien nature that makes it seem like less of an issue on this figure (though he has some slight difficulty with standing). As far as detail work goes, Momaw’s actually pretty solid. There’s plenty of texturing on the skin, which makes for some nice variety. I quite like the hands, which are uniquely posed and very full of character. His vest is an add-on piece, split at the sides to allow for removal. It’s a little difficult to get over his head, but once you due, there’s an undergarment of some sort, which I suppose is a nice touch. In terms of paint, Momaw is rather on the monochromatic side, being mostly shades of warm brown. It’s more or less accurate to the source material, so there’s that. No random turquoise or anything, like his original figure had, but that was what people wanted at the time. The fools! Momaw was packed with a big blaster thing, based on nothing he has in the movie, but I guess he needed something, and it’s fun in a goofy sort of way.
THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION
Momaw was another figure picked up from the Farpoint charity auction. Slowly but surely, I’m putting together a complete collection of Power of the Force II figures. It didn’t start out that way, but here I am now, buying Momaw Nadon. Once you buy a Momaw Nadon, there’s really no going back, right?
If there’s one staple of Nerf blasters that always comes back, it’s revolvers, ok, revolvers and jolts, but let’s stick with the revolvers for today. All things considered, it’s a good design. There’ve been so many iterations that pretty much any issues have already been ironed out, but if you look at Nerf Revolvers over time, they have this odd trend of steadily getting smaller and smaller cylinders, and in turn, lower capacity. Today’s blaster is the first example of a 4-shot revolver I can think of, but as we’ve seen from Toy Fair last month, it won’t be the last.
Ok, first things first, I know I give Nerf a decent amount of ribbing over the naming conventions for their blasters, but when the other 3 blasters in a line have names containing “falcon”, ”hawk”, and “raptor”, there’s a pretty clear theme that they’re going for. With that in mind, what the double deuce kind of name is Quadrant? I get the name references the 4 barrels in the cylinder, but it throws off the whole bird-of-prey thing they set up. Anyway, the Quadchickadee was released in 2018 as part of the Accustrike series. As mentioned before, it is a 4-shot revolver that works more or less like any other revolver at this point. The construction is all new and pretty solid, like you’d expect from a Nerf blaster of this size, and the ergonomics are good. The proportions are kind of weird, what with the top half of the blaster being rather large and bulky. 
At the very least, it’s not terribly top heavy which is a concern I had before it was released. What I don’t quite get is why the barrels are so far apart in the cylinder. Typically, the benefit of lower capacity in a revolver is a lower profile, but the cylinder for the Quadbearded-tit is barely smaller than the one in the Hammershot, which holds 5 rounds normally. But in addition, modders have shown it can handle 7 rounds in the same space quite handily. It just feels needlessly limiting to cap the capacity at 4, especially when it doesn’t even enable some other gimmick or function in the blaster. The performance is on par with other Nerf pistols. It doesn’t have the most power or range ever, but no one expects it to. Being in the Accustrike series, there’s nothing mechanical that separates this from any other blaster, all that means is it’s orange and comes with Accustrike darts as opposed to standard Elites. The darts do actually make it a little easier to hit targets from further away, so they’re good for surprise pot-shots at your younger siblings, with or without busting into their room first. The QuadAndean Cock of the Rock (it’s a real bird, look it up) comes packaged with 4 Accustrike darts.
The Figure In Question 