#84: Star Wars Legacy Collection Corran Horn and Whistler

Last year, to usher in the build a droid concept, Wal-Mart had an exclusive wave of two packs. If you collected them all, you could assemble C-3PX. They were pretty easy to find and a lot of them ended up on clearance in my area. This year, the Wal-Mart exclusive two packs are back, but there are some differences. The most immediately obvious difference is the price. Last year these sets cost 10 dollars, which was a really good bargain. Now they cost 17 dollars, which is pretty terrible since that is more than double the cost of a single figure. I didn't get the whole set last year, and I am definitely not going to get the whole set this year. If you do get the whole set, you can assemble a phase III Darktrooper, which looks pretty cool. But if you want to do so, act fast because according to Hasbro they are putting out fewer of these sets than last year. They may not end up on clearance this time around.

So, on to the toys themselves. Corran Horn is one of the protagonists in the Michael A Stackpole's X-Wing novels, which are good reads. As a Corellian X-Wing pilot turned Jedi, he is somewhat of a Mary Sue character. Since I'm a fan of the X-Wing novels, I was looking forward to getting this set as soon as I heard about it. Corran is often depicted sporting a goatee, but often without, but I kind of figured they would make his figure with it. Oh well, no big deal. Interestingly the toy version of his lightsaber has the same hilt as Darth Vader, albeit with a blue blade. Whistler is Corran's trusty astromech droid. For some reason, the packaging refers to him as R2 Whistler. Perhaps some other toy company has the rights to the name Whistler, so this is similar to releases like Autobot Jazz or whatever. Whistler is based on the astromech body that raises a panel on its head when the dome is rotated. Despite being overpriced, I'm glad to have these characters as figures, and with Tycho Celchu, that brings the number of X-Wing novel characters in action figure form to three.

Oh, the set comes with the torso of the Darktrooper.