B’OMARR MONK

STAR WARS: POWER OF THE FORCE II (KENNER)

So, these days, I fear, like, nothing, but other people do fear things, and one of those things, at least pretty consistently, is spiders.  Seriously, when I bring up my lack of fears, it’s like a 50/50 chance that the next question that follows is “Even spiders?”  Why am I talking about everyone’s fear of spiders?  Well, I wanna be kind to my readers who aren’t so big on them, so I’m gonna give a little bit of a content warning on the pictures that go along with today’s review.  Enter at your own peril.

Seriously, look at that thing.  Did you really want to see that?  I mean, probably, because you’re here.  And so am I.  Because I fear nothing.  Not even the B’omarr Monk, a robot spider thing that’s been freaking out audiences since Return of the Jedi hit in 1983.  It’s so freaky that they didn’t even give it a proper retail release.  And it’s even in a blank white box, allowing completists with arachnophobia to still be completists, I guess.  That seems nice of Kenner.  They really did care.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

The B’omarr Monk was added to Kenner’s Power of the Force line in 1997, a year with a lot of Jabba’s Palace focus.  They were offered as an internet exclusive.  You could download the form for them from Kenner’s site, and mail it in with the appropriate fee.  Yes, internet exclusives worked really differently in 1997.  So archaic.  Just one step up from stone tablets and smoke signals, really.  Further adding to this archaic feeling is that the Monk shipped disassembled.  You had to pop those spindly little not-spider legs on there yourself.  Once that’s done, the figure is about 5 inches tall and has 8 points of articulation.  It’s not exceedingly agile or anything, but all of the legs can move around to aid in some slightly more stable standing.  Very exciting.  The sculpt was new to this figure, though Hasbro did get one more release out of it a few years later.  It’s a pretty solid one.  The details, especially on the core body, are pretty spot-on, and also rather sharp.  The brain in the jar is certainly cool looking as well.  The paint work was generally pretty simple; they’re mostly just basic molded plastic, but there are a few painted details.  The blue in the jar is cool, even if it’s technically inaccurate.  There were no accessories included with this figure, though, given its size, that’s not terribly surprising.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

The Monk is another one of those rather recent additions to my collection.  I got it back in the fall of 2019, from a big Star Wars collection that came into All Time.  I never got t experience most of the mail away figures as a kid, so it’s been fun getting to do that.  The Monk is really more of a background piece than anything else, but it’s cool in the Jabba’s Palace playset, so that works out pretty well.