PRINCESS LEIA with SPORTING BLASTER

STAR WARS: POWER OF THE FORCE II (KENNER)

“Her ship under attack from Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer, Princess Leia downloads the secret Death Star plans into R2-D2 for safe-keeping . After being stunned by a stormtrooper blast, Leia became a prisoner of Darth Vader. R2-D2 avoids capture by fleeing with the valuable data in an escape pod.”

When The Phantom Menace hit in 1999, its tie-in toyline took over the main focus of the toys, but, while Power of the Force was winding down, it didn’t go away right away, and in fact ran concurrently with the Episode I line the whole time.  It was, however, a far more scaled back approach, and almost a different line, revamping the heavy hitters from the Original Trilogy to fit better into the slightly updated style of the new movie line.  A New Hope was really the focus of this last run, so we got all of the major players in updated versions of those looks.  For the fourth time, Princess Leia showed back up in the all-white get-up with the hair-buns, albeit with a slightly different approach than earlier.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Princess Leia with Sporting Blaster was added to the Star Wars: Power of the Force II line in 1999, as part of the first portion of the CommTech offerings, concurrent with the early Episode I line.  This was the fourth white dress Leia in the line.  While the original and Princess Leia Collection figures were more all-encompassing, and the Freeze Frame figure was post Detention Block, this one is specifically based on her appearance at the start of the movie, which was a unique approach at the time.  The figure stands about 3 1/2 inches tall and she has 6 points of articulation.  She followed the trend of scaling Leia down a bit.  She was still a little too tall for proper accuracy, but was certainly better scaled than the rest of her figures in this line.  Movement wise, she’s okay, but you can’t really move the neck joint, due to how the sculpt is set-up.  Her sculpt was all-new to her, and remained unique to this release.  It’s not bad.  The hood is sculpted up, which is a nice change of pace, and means it meshes better with the torso sculpt.  The skirt is cloth, which doesn’t look as consistent, but it means that she has less limitations on her hip movement, meaning she has an easier time sitting than most Leias.  Her paint work is fine, with quite a bit going on with the head, since it’s all molded in white.  The application’s a bit thick, but overall pretty clean.  Leia is packed with a blaster pistol (accurate to the scene she’s based on), as well as a CommTech stand.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

The CommTech figures in general aren’t as common as most of the earlier run of the line.  I only got one of them actually new, and the rest I’ve been slowly piecing together since.  This one was ultimately the last of the set that I tracked down; after finding Wuher on a dealer’s table, I dug through some of the other PotF figures there, and this one was there, letting me knock two figures off my list at once, which is always fun.  She’s more limited in her application than other versions of Leia, but she’s not a bad figure, and an interesting exploration of the direction the line was going before its end.