General Grievous - ROTS - Basic (III 9)

General Grievous is the supreme commander of the droid armies and a brilliant military leader. He hunts Jedi for sport and wears their lightsabers as trophies on his belt.

Every new villain introduced in a Star Wars film always is the center of attention for Hasbro, and it seems to be especially true for those characters from the Prequel Trilogy. Darth Maul and to a lesser extent Count Dooku saw plenty of action figure incarnations of their characters so that demand could be meant during such a huge multimedia event as a new Star Wars film. Episode III was really no different. General Grievous was the short-lived villain in Episode III. And although he was first introduced officially in the Tartakovsky Clone Wars micro-series, Star Wars fans didn’t see him “organically” until after the opening crawl of Episode III. First “teased” as a Sneak Preview figure in early 2005, the very first “basic” figure release was 2005’s ROTS General Grievous (III 9) with the boasted “Four Lightsaber Attack!” call out action feature right on the front of the figure’s packaging. You know our feelings on action features and you probably know even better how important accurate scale is to us, but we have to admit that Hasbro made a very fun figure for the kids here. And it goes without saying that a whole bunch of adult collectors are going to find it hard to not like “something” about this version of General Grievous. This figure is definitely more a toy that anything else. If you don’t play with your Star Wars action figures, you can easily skip over this figure. This figure was designed to be manipulated and played with in your hands.

General Grievous comes with nine points of articulation. The action feature is all in the upper body, but you press his head down to flail his four arms while each holds one of the four lightsabers included with the figure. You get two blue and two green lightsabers and a droid blaster. All of these weapons fit flawlessly into any of his hands and they even stay in place (within reason) while utilizing the action feature. General Grievous is nicely decorated and decently articulated. We feel the ball-jointed knees were completely wasted here. Ball-jointed articulation isn’t necessarily cheap to produce, so it should have been saved for a Collection 2 version of General Grievous (or collector-focused version). On the other hand, the ball-jointed shoulders were definitely required to help with posing his arms in a variety of ways since it’s the only articulation they possess. Grievous isn’t without his issues. He is much too short in scale. He should tower over Obi-Wan Kenobi and they are “peers” in the height department. And it still appears that his color is much too yellow (even though the paint job looks spectacular). Lastly, this isn’t an action figure for collectors. The Sneak Preview is much more accurate aesthetically and you get a cape and a few other important accessories that work better overall with that figure.

Obviously a big portion of people who buy Star Wars figures will affect the performance of this General Grievous figure. There are plenty of General Grievous figures in the Revenge Of The Sith line and we think each brings a special “something” to the basic figure line. You obviously won’t get accuracy with this figure. But it serves a purpose and Hasbro had to find a way to grab the kids to hopefully create a new generation of fans. We still think scale could have been better represented here. We know that Hasbro had to work months in advance with incomplete reference material. But it seems that scale was clearly set in Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars micro-series, especially during the capture of Chancellor Palpatine. Even the General Grievous animated figure is larger than the other figures in that line. Oh well, it was missed by Hasbro. We’ll just have to wait until they can bring collectors a truly impressive version of him in the future. (Editor’s Note: Hasbro updated a movie accurate version of this character as 2008’s TLC General Grievous (BD 25) figure. And then Hasbro released an update to this figure and released it as 2010’s TVC General Grievous (VC17). They added wrist articulation and an all-new soft-goods cape.) General Grievous is a staple character from Revenge Of The Sith, so expect to see frequent releases of him in the future. But it’s safe to assume that future versions will be sans action features thank goodness!