Reading those comments it seems like the bots really appreciate his blog!

What a blast from the past!

I saw a social media post from Jayson that the preorders for the Throne Room were already 1/3rd of the way to the sold out milestone.  I'd love to hear what those numbers are, but I also understand the need to protect sources.

Over on Rebelscum someone has been looking at the Pulse order page's source code and gleaned the available quantity was 19,750 with around 7,500 preordered so far. I think that is where numbers are coming from at this point. 20,000 sounds like a realistic MOQ for the set judging by where successful HasLabs have been landing recently.

When I shored up what my OT collection was going to be back in 2008 I broke them down by scene to make themed shelf displays for them all. I wound up with basic scenes: Cantina. Tatooine Desert, Hoth, Cloud City, Death Star/Star Destroyer, Home One, Yavin, Jabba's Palace. I wound up skipping Dagobah and Endor because I just didn't have enough figures for those spots to justify the space. But some of those other environments wound up being pretty big because so many figures needed to fit there. A Cantina playset designed with all the released figures in mind will be really big as a shelf display--I solved this by doing the bar as one shelf and the booths and alcoves on a different one.

The weird thing about this Throne Room is most of the display space in the set is behind the throne. It will look weird, but probably you can keep most of the "floor" figures on display in the Barge if you have that.

Patrick said that Boba Fett has significantly more paint apps as TVC figures go, and there's an associated cost.  Sounded like corporate doubletalk to me.

If you were ever in a position where you need a corporate type to be able to talk their way around a problem, hire Patrick.  But being on the other side of things?  Uggghhhh

Well said. These Deluxe offerings are testing our limits as far as what we will pay. The fact that they still sold out fast means we aren't there yet, but as soon as we reach that limit, the BS justification of the price increase will have to be rolled back or BS'ed around in some other way.

Put another way, if $25 Fetts didn't sell, it's not like Patrick's artistic integrity would stop him from putting a dumbed-down/cost-effective version in the TVC basic line to move units. (Instead, we will have to wait and see what the $30-$35 version will be in the future as Patrick continues searching for the ceiling.)

$34???  What makes this deluxe?

The fact that it is a fully tooled figure with parts that can't be amortized down the line, like Har Jar Binks was. This isn't Yavin Luke with a Walrus Man head, so you gotta pay for the tooling.

That was weird.

My son hooted and hollered at the double-punch of Mando appearing and his theme playing. And the beginning was genuinely thrilling and exciting in a way TBOBF has not captured for me.

It's weird that so much Mando lore now resides in the middle of another series. That would be like the episode where Richie Cunningham goes to college and Chachi moves in with Fonzie while Arnold sells the diner to Al all taking place in a January episode of Laverne and Shirley. It's weird Will this all get a 10 minute recap on the real season 3 premiere?

So then the episode got moving,, and never left Mando. I couldn't believe it, as we had like seventeen mini-episodes unfold including a forging montage, a training montage, a flashback, a battle to the death...seriously I would have preferred these bits to be fleshed out over the first four episodes of the series, and have all the Boba Fett "Daimyo" stuff get crammed into episode 5 instead. I guess that would have been Mandalorian season 3, though. Yeah, that's what I want.

Once it got back to Tatooine I got a little bored or maybe just exhausted, and I will point out that TPM is my 3rd favorite saga flick so it's not like I wasn't enjoying the callbacks. Too much Pelli Motto for my taste. (She had more lines, screen time, and plot involvement this episode than any of the side characters introduced in TBOBF so far. Why couldn't we get a chance to get to know the characters of the 2 Gammoreans hanging around with Bo a like this? Some antics, some history, maybe one of them dated a Jawa..?)

Last week I was resigned to disliking this series because of the strange structure and complete failure of good storytelling. This week I loved so much of what was going on...but the underlying problems are still there. The storytelling is being forgotten and in its place are at best fun skits to watch (and at worst seriously cringe-inducing bad TV.)

If this is them trying to do a large overarching storyline, it isn't working. Build a larger narrative to guide the story, but remember these are individual episodes that at their best should have the ability to be watched and enjoyed on their own.

Great Muftak!  I think we all need to wait on Jesse's review.  He's the RFT authority around here!   

No doubt! Spoiler--still no holsters!  :'(

I could talk about what went wrong in the storytelling for me this week, but I am kind of over it.

I think this show just is not aimed at me, and I am okay with that.