SIDON ITHANO & FIRST MATE QUIGGOLD
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

Would you look at that? I’ve made it through a whole week of post-Christmas reviews! Go me! For day 7, I’m going back to that galaxy far, far away. You know what the backbone of Star Wars merchandise is? You might think it’s Darth Vader, or Stormtroopers, or even R2-D2 or C-3PO, but you’d be wrong. No, the actual backbone, the thing that’s kept the franchise afloat with a near endless supply of tiny action figures is all of the split-second appearance, no-name characters peppered in to fill out the backgrounds of scenes. Need to fill a slot in a wave of figures? Here’s Willrow Hood! Worried the boxed set doesn’t offer anything new? How about Snaggletooth? Need something unique? Elephant Mon, anyone? Heck, people will spend good money to get a complete set of the bounty hunters from Empire, despite the fact that most of them only appear in that one single scene and only one of them gets even a single line of dialogue. That’s commitment from the fanbase right there. Of course, as the prices of oil have risen, these obscure figures are getting fewer and further between. Fortunately, The Force Awakens provided a great new selection of background characters, which Hasbro in turn took advantage of in order to get some fun new action figures. Two such characters were Sidon Ithano and his first mate Quiggold, who I’ll be looking at today.
THE FIGURES THEMSELVES
Ithano and Quiggold were released in the second series of two-packs from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens line.
SIDON ITHANO
Sidon Ithano is the captain of the Meson Martinet, the ship Finn almost transfers to prior to Rey’s capture by the First Order. That’s pretty much his whole character (okay, not entirely true; like almost every background Star Wars character, he’s got a whole elaborate backstory, which most people will never know). He was playable in a side mission in Lego The Force Awakens, which is how I became familiar with him. His figure stands about 4 inches tall and has the standard 5 points of articulation. The sculpt is unique to this figure, and is quite impressively rendered. The helmet is nice and clean, with lots of really sharp lines, and his clothing sports some incredible texture work, which really makes him stand out. Easily one of the best sculpts from the smaller Force Awakens line. Ithano’s paintwork is fairly straight forward. The application is pretty clean, and the basic colors seem to match up pretty well with what’s seen in the movie. The color scheme is also rather on the unique side of things, which adds a nice bright splash of color to the shelf. Ithano is packed with a blaster rifle…for all you blaster rifle needs? It’s a cool design, I guess.
FIRST MATE QUIGGOLD
What good is a captain without his trusty first mate? I don’t know. I guess it depends on the quality of the captain, and, by extension, the quality of the first mate. So, there’s like, a lot of potential variance there I suppose. Anyway, here’s Quiggold, who’s a guy who gets just as much screen time as the last guy. He’s also playable in the same Lego game level, where he gets a cool mini gun thing. So that’s fun. The figure stands about 3 3/4 inches tall and has 4 points of articulation. Where Ithano is tall and lean, Quiggold is short and squat. The figure’s sculpt does a pretty solid job of conveying his design from the movie. He looks suitably like a big puppet (which is pretty much what he was) and the details on his skin and clothing are quite nicely rendered. I wouldn’t mind if he had some more texturing here and there, but he’s certainly reasonable for the scale. The paintwork on Quiggold is okay, if maybe ever so slightly imbalanced. There’s some really great work on the face, which makes his skin look quite lifelike. I just sort of wish the details continued onto the other exposed parts of his skin, but he’s not awful. Quiggold includes a large missile launcher version of his big gun, which is…well, it’s not as far off as most Hasbro missile launchers, so I guess it’s got that going for it.
THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION
I received these two as a Christmas present from my Super Awesome Girlfriend. We’ve been playing through Lego The Force Awakens together, and I quite enjoyed the Crimson Corsair level. She happened to spy these figures at retail and grabbed them for me. I very much enjoy this pair of figures. They’re solid renditions of solid character designs, and you can’t really ask for much more.