Chewbacca - POTF2 [FB/CT] - Action Collection

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."
The adventure continues with this exciting introduction of figures from the Star Wars trilogy! Each figure is authentically styled with incredible detail and is fully poseable.

Luke, Han and Chewbacca discover that Princess Leia did not return form the speeder bike chase in the Endor forest.

Let’s face it. Some things get lost in translation. And when it comes to the Star Wars Action Collection line, Chewbacca is the greatest example of this. Chewbacca has not been lucky with receiving Hasbro’s love, but maybe it’s not their fault. Designing a Wookiee has proven difficult throughout the years. In the modern line, the first Chewbacca Action Collection 12 Inch Figure was designed with a wired frame with hair attached to it, or a solid plastic sculpt. Either way, the character suffers from horrid aesthetics. To date, the greatest “large-sized” version of Chewbacca is 1979’s Star Wars Chewbacca figure. That’s not a good sign that Kenner/Hasbro today cannot make figures better than the ones they made with the technology of the 1970s. While we appreciate the effort taken on Chewbacca, the figure ultimately fails because of its wonky frame and disproportionate features. When inspecting the figure, you’ll notice his likeness is fairly excellent, while the shape of his head is obtuse and inaccurate. Chewbacca is a very confusing Action Collection 12 Inch Figure.

The packaging of Chewbacca boasts that he is over thirteen (13) inches tall. It’s a lovely gesture for Kenner/Hasbro to consider this figure’s scale, but when the proportions and articulation of the figure suffer, we have to wonder if they shouldn’t have restarted this figure from the beginning. The final figure won’t meet most collectors’ expectations. And what makes this so frustrating is that we feel they’ve approached Chewbacca in the right way, which is a solid plastic sculpt WITHOUT real soft-goods fur. Chewbacca should have turned out better than he did. Had they tweaked his torso and limbs to be fuller and not so thin or spindly, we believe a better result would have been achieved here. Instead, Chewbacca barely resembles the onscreen character, and that is very unfortunate. And to make matters worse, not only does this figure not look like Chewbacca, the articulation they included isn’t very functional at all. The figure is a complete mess.

Chewbacca comes with twelve points of articulation. You’d think this would be an adequate amount of articulation for this figure, but it doesn’t help with achieving a nice amount of various poses. Most of the joints here, save for the shoulders, are ball-jointed points of articulation. This single plane of movement prevents freedom of the parts, and you’re severely limited with what you can do with the figure. And to add insult to injury, the hip joints are cut at an angle and utterly useless when trying to make the figure run or walk and for any other use of his legs. The hinge-jointed elbows and knees do very little to assist you in posing the figure also. Chewbacca comes with two accessories: a bandolier with soft-goods pouch and his signature bowcaster. Although his hands are designed to accommodate the bowcaster, he isn’t able to hold it with both hands, and we find this to be a major setback as well. As you can see, Chewbacca is a mess, and it makes us sad because we wanted to love this release.