I have good news: at that price point, it *can't* be a Republic Gunship repaint.  It's another "Starfighter Class" vehicle so it being anything but an entirely new $25-$30 vehicle would be a real surprise.

Heck, I'd be happy if it WERE a Republic Gunship repaint.  Do you see what those stupid things go for on eBay now, after 6 repaints?  There's still a big market for this stuff.

Got mine.  It's pretty great.  Rolls forward, or does the "reverse and turns a bit".  The remote firing thing is pretty cool, it sort of recoils-- the whole tank jumps back a tiny bit each time you fire a rocket.  Plus it has lights on the front of it.  I don't think any collectors will be happy shelling out $50+ for a toy they bought for $20 a few months earlier, but I have to admit I think it's more fun than the Big AT-AT was.  (But it is significantly less impressive.)

Do they revoke your Q&A Card if you ask about their terrible distrobution?

Because I can figure out any other reason why no one is asking the only question that matters....

I asked something along these lines.

I saw these at a Wal-Mart today.  Fun note: the dates on the back for first availability are generally all wrong.  Jango and Zam were released in 2000 and the Outlander Obi-Wan Kenobi was 2002-2004 in Hasbro's notes.  Since Hasbro labeled Obi-Wan as a 2003 figure as part of the series number, and the assortment in which it shipped was discontinued in December 2003 as it was being blown out... OK, so I'm anal.

These are shipping from Hasbro US now too-- got my case from Entertainment Earth on Friday.  No Hondo, though.  Bane's pretty impressive, but take note: the only articulation on Todo is his head, no matter how the arms look.

For the curious, these are out  now-- $24.99/set.  Pretty great deal.

To little kids, though, especially since they're the only customers Hasbro seems to be trying to please these days, these sets would be an automatic buy if there was a lightsaber-wielding character included in each one. Little kids aren't too into the blaster-wielders (take Han Solo, for instance), they want to get the cool-looking dude with the glowing sword. If the 9-pack was divided into just 3 individual packs, the Luke set would probably be the best seller, because a parent's first reaction would be to get the set with the lightsaber.

I gotta jump in to defend poor ol' Han-- I don't know if kids don't want Han or they don't want *those* Han figures.  Bespin hasn't been on the market for a while, and I don't count a torture rack as something any parent would jump on for their kids.  Every Han since 2006 (save for the pricey vintage ones and the 2006 Cantina one) have had some weird embellishment or otherwise less-than-normal feature, and it seems the Saga Legends ones all are doing just fine, more or less.

Today's parents are more Star Wars literate than 10 years ago-- your 25-35 year old adult today was a child of the toy orgy that was the 1980s.  The toy industry knows this and is marketing to them/us because mommy and daddy love to live vicariously through the kid's toy purchases, hence Strawberry Shortcake and, to some extent, Transformers' post-beast revival. (But not He-Man, because everybody hates him. Even Skeletor.)

...that and if you're going full-on Vintage, you're gonna run out of lightsaber-friendly characters for these sets real quick.  The Vintage line had, what, seven Lukes, Obi-Wan, and Vader?  And of those Lukes, several never had a lightsaber packed with them in the old days, or in the case of Stormtrooper Luke, at all?  I'm curious how strict the 3-packs will be to the vintage figure selections... because if it's all repacks I'm going to have a ton of things to not buy in 2011.  And bless them for it, I could stand to skip a few figures.

Hasbro's been including a lot of "refresh" (yeah right, Hasbro) in their waves - TVC Wave 5 for example, take a look at Han. Same figure we've gotten before, but "just different enough to make you mad." There were only 2 new figures in the ROTS wave, granted, all of the figures in the ROTJ wave are new...

Hey, my favorite catchphrase!

Getting Boba Fett seems pretty difficult lately, and Darth Vader has done extremely well too.  The Sandtrooper, oddly, less so. (Go figure.)  I gotta assume the repacks are reaching a different fan because-- in all honesty-- these aren't here to tickle our fancies.  I'm somewhat surprised Boba's not shipping in any of the wave 3 or 4 mixes so far.  If anything they should be cranking out more of him before people catch on that he's going to be worthless.

Hasbro's really in a great position right now-- fans are paying attention to variations again, talking about name changes, deco changes, and the like, and people are engaged in a way I don't think I've honestly seen since .00 and .01 meant something to the online collecting community.  Plus didn't Rebelscum get some crazy positive response on their "Would you buy the same dang figure you already own on a vintage cardback?" poll a few years ago?  It's a nice way to make rereleases more appealing to the carded community which I thought was drying up lately.

While I agree the "refreshes" aren't necessarily ideal, I was just thinking this week how few repaint waves we get now.  We got a few in Revenge of the Sith near the end, we got (technically) three at the end of The Saga Collection, we got another one in the middle of 30th Anniversary, and we only got one in all of Legacy.   I guess they gotta cut a corner or two somewhere, and R5-D4 is probably recognizable enough that some parents will recognize him.  (Heck, mine did.)

The ROTJ wave did a bang-up job converting me from "grumpy" to "overwhelmingly optimistic."  I know own a movie-style season 2 cartoon Wicket figure.  Can it get better than this?  (Probably not but who knows if Logray will have a cartoon accessory like the blue outfit or the Sunstar/Shadowstone or visible sunberries or something.  [Yes I liked the Ewoks cartoon as a kid.])