Man, I had so many of those Droids humans and the Duloks as a kid, I think they were all 99 cent purchases at KayBee once the lines were winding down but I still needed my Star Wars figure fix. They were never my favorites, but they got mixed in with everybody else.

The Mini-Rig purchase that kicked off my adult collecting was at the end of last year, when I found the ISP-6 in a shop...the kid selling it didn't even know what it was, so it was at a better price than it probably should have been with all of its pieces intact. I never got the ROTJ Mini-Rigs as a kid, but this one was always tempting to me back then.

I haven't gotten hung up with details like this.  To my mind, if you're focusing on this kind of a detail, you're not immersed in the story.  Star Wars has never been so much about the science than it has been about the story - witness TESB, where the Millennium Falcon travels at sublight speed from the Hoth system, to the Anoad system, and on to Bespin.  That's a trip that should have taken YEARS.

Okay Nick, but next season when Din reveals his rocket pack can travel in Hyperspace, we will only have you to blame.

On the Falcon's trip to Bespin: It has been established in the old EU that every ship with Hyperdrive has backup hyperdrive engines that--while they move at a fraction of the regular hyperspace speeds, still far outclass sublight engines. It is still a point of mystery as to exactly how long they travelled / Luke trained, much the same as how my mind was blown to read an interview with Favreau stating in his mind there were two years between the end of Mando Season 2 and Season 3, most of which Grogu spent with Luke.

The first time any of this really "broke" for me to take me out of the story and I couldn't get past it was during "The Last Jedi" when the First Order had to resort to a sublight chase, rather than somehow flanking the Resistance with lightspeed maneuvers, which was then only further complicated by the jaunt to Canto Bight in the middle of said low-speed chase. Even then, I like the movie more than I don't, it just really really took me out of the moment.

What took me out of Mando even more than the rocketpack to space (which I poked fun at nonetheless) was the fact that Axe did that because the sky is scorched and no transmissions can get off the surface, a fact we have been told numerous times this season. So when it was revealed that Gideon's secret lair was underground on Mandalore itself, I had to question how he was chatting with his spies on Coruscant or the Shadow Council at all from there? It was sloppy for them not to address this with a line of dialogue somewhere.

And while I get where they were going with the clones, did they have to be 65-year old looking clones? At max he has only been growing them two years (see above, that's when he finally got Grogu's blood) and the master cloners on Kamino were impressed with themselves to have clones that aged at twice the speed, those things were not going to have a very long life if they aged 30x regular speed.

I thought the last two episodes this season lived up to my expectation of them being in the vein of those Transformers or GIJoe mini-series events where the status quo gets reset and new toys are introduced. I liked plenty in the finale, the laser gate gauntlet being a highlight for sure, and R5 vs the Mouse Droid felt like classic Star Wars at last.

I am hopeful season four sticks with the promise of bounty hunting Imperial remnants in an episodic nature. I think that is where the show will do its best work.

Butterfly in the sky
I can go twice as high
Take a look
It's in a book
A reading rainbow...

That looks so great Rob, I envy the dedication and cash it took to get there...even at $40 each I was unable to pursue that set!

But I really wish Hasbro would pay attention and figure out a way to do something like this in their Retro line. They could pull Kenner collectors who have been done for decades back in to cough up some cash that they are otherwise not receiving, I think to an exponential rate over what they are getting with straight up Retro rereleases.

It might not be as profitable per figure as a nonpainted "prototype" variant like they are doing currently, but I think they could do higher runs and get more sales overall by doing droid and trooper repaints that fill out the Kenner line a bit. (As well as the occasional variant, I know I will buy the Retro Jedi Luke again with the black cloak, but not the Mando with Darksaber in the same wave.)

The season-spanning story in season 3 has been the weakest yet. Also, the standalone stories have had baffligly poor structure.

That said, in outline form the season looks far better than the result. We got a whole lot of connective tissue in Episode 7, withheld from the viewer as a poor excuse for surprise and shocking developments. It's like the antithesis of Hitchcock's famous ticking bomb. Where we could have had rising tension in the viewers, instead we have a sudden surprise because the filmmaker withheld information. It would be like leaving out the scene where Tarkin blows up Alderaan so the viewer could be surprised that it is gone when our heroes arrive. It's a choice, bit I would argue a poor choice.

Again I liken the storytelling here to the old GIJoe cartoon, except they had dozens of episodes a season to meander wherever they wanted story-wise, and kept their season-long story development to a multiparter that reset the stakes at the beginning of the season. (And in full disclosure, I haven't watched that show since they originally sired, so this is some old anecdotal recollection. )

My biggest point of contention with the way the story unfolded this week was the reveal that Gideon was responsible for bombing Bo's castle. If this was what that mystery was set up to reveal, that was clunky beyond belief. Maybe if Din and Bo had discussed it since or been worried about figuring it out it would have been a good reveal, but as far as I can tell they forgot all about it. Or the writers did.

And to anyone championing well-crafted storytelling, please explain to me what happened to the 3 baby birds that were adopted by the covert. The tribe has moved twice since the adventure that culminated in their rescue, now living in a Cruiser in space. Are we waiting for the surprise scene where they fly in to the rescue fully grown? Because if that us the kind of dot-connecting you find to be quality, I have to disagree.

Oh, he got doxxed in 2020 or so when some customers discovered he had bought a new house while refusing to give refunds for the preorders that he reclassified as crowdfunding donations.

I was happy to see the BOBF wave Retro Luke is not a straight repack...he has a black cloak in this version, much like the original 1983 promo picture from the cross sell. And I am sold on it!