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My mother’s favorite “toy hunt” story revolves around R2D2. Back in the early 1980s, Star Wars toys were massively popular, none so much as R2D2 himself. He was funny, he was lovable, he had a great, kid-friendly design. He was almost every kid’s favorite character. (Except for that weird kid who couldn’t get enough of Amanaman. Okay fine, it was me!)
The year was 1982. I had just seen Star Wars for the first time at the Braintree drive-in that summer,¹ and I wanted nothing more than an R2D2 action figure. But the Empire Strikes Back was two years old and Kenner’s big push for Return of the Jedi was a year away, so Star Wars figures were a bit hard to come by, particularly popular characters like Artoo. My parents searched high and low for him, and one day, returning from a visit to my grandparents, they stopped at a small Child World in Quincy. There was no Artoo on the pegs, but there was one of those carriages full of returns in the aisle, and lo and behold, buried at the bottom of the carriage was none other than Artoo. My parents inform me that I danced through the aisles saying, “We found him! We found him!”
One interesting fact about Artoo-Detoo: he always has been and always will be totally awesome. He escaped the prequels smelling like a rose – arguably the only character to do so.
The vintage R2D2 I had was the one with the pop-up “sensorscope.” As much as I loved that little toy, it always bugged me he didn’t have the third leg and the feet couldn’t be moved to put him into his proper rolling posture. It would be nearly twenty years before Hasbro finally made an Artoo with both the extra leg and articulated feet.
Now, with Star Wars Black, Hasbro is attempting to give us the definitive R2D2 figure. Did they do it? No, I don’t think they did. The design team’s heart was in the right place, but the execution failed in a few ways.
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