PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA
STAR WARS: POWER OF THE FORCE II (KENNER)
“Held captive in the Death Star, the princess is interrogated by Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin. Leia was ordered to reveal the location of the secret Rebel base or see her home planet of Alderaan destroyed.”
The Power of the Force line with major looks for almost all of the major players in the Original Trilogy. The main trio, in particular, were all presented in their main looks from A New Hope, with figures that were…let’s be diplomatic here and say “very stylized.” All of those looks would be revisited later in the line, as it evolved, including Princess Leia’s hair-bun-sporting debut look, which I’m taking another look at today!
THE FIGURE ITSELF
Princess Leia Organa was released as part of Kenner’s Power of the Force II line in 1998. With four separate single figures released that year, Leia was the most prominent of the main players. Like the “Princess Leia Collection” release before it, this one returns to her main look from A New Hope, now bearing an “All New Likeness!” as advertised by a sticker on the front of the box. The figure stands just under 3 3/4 inches tall and she has 6 points of articulation…in technicality. The legs are, of course, not much use under the rubber dress piece, so they mostly just offer the ability to do some slight tweaking for keeping her standing. Her sculpt was all-new, and as far as I know, it remained that way. It’s not bad. Certainly an improvement over the original release, especially when it comes to the head sculpt. The body has a lot of pre-posing to it, as she’s sculpted to hold a blaster rifle. It does alright, but she’s slightly hard to keep stable. The details are a little sharper than the “Princess Leia Collection” figure, but I t
hink it’s ultimately not *quite* as nice looking. Still certainly not a bad sculpt. The paint’s basic, and pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a figure from this line. It does what it needs to, and it does it just fine. She’s packed with a Stormtrooper blaster, her blaster pistol, and a Freeze Frame showing her during the destruction of Alderan. It’s interesting, because she’s clearly supposed to be a Leia from her rescue, but then they gave her the Alderan destruction Frame. The rifle is modified so that she can more easily hold it, and it was also designed with giving it to the otherwise unarmed mail-away Han Solo figure from Kellogg’s in mind, if you’re so inclined.
THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION
As has been something of a recurring theme with my more recent Power of the Force reviews, Leia is a figure that I bought a few years ago in a batch with a bunch of others from the line, who has been sitting unopened in my office for the entire time I’ve owned her, until about two days before I sat down to write this review. She kind of gets lost in the sea of Leia figures, I suppose. She’s not bad, but she doesn’t do a ton to stand out on her own, ultimately. Still, she’s a marked improvement on the original, and a solid figure in her own right.
The Figure In Question 
Despite owning all of those very stylized figures when they were new, the only one of the main 3 I can give a pass to nowadays is the Luke, as sort of an original poster version of him with the big pecs and open shirt. My biggest gripes were really Leia’s cape (yes, even more than the face) and Han’s weird slit hand that couldn’t hold anything. I wish they had done a version of that first Luke with bent in arms to actually replicate the pose from the poster, holding the lightsaber over his head. POTF2 was obviously no stranger to the pre-pose phase of the 90s
Leia’s cape also recalls the original poster vibes, though the rest of the figure doesn’t at all. It is odd that with all the minor tweaking they did to those molds, we never got a Luke with slightly more bent arms, though.