Even before i clicked on your link I had a feeling you were referring to him. I came across his channel few weeks ago. I believe he posted years ago on occasion at anotheR Site.
If we're to believe him and his sources, we finally have an answer as to why the Tonnika sisters won't get made.
They're not getting made because Lucasfilm won't allow it. A number of collecting sites have done a lot of reporting on this story over the years. I reported about it at a now defunct site called The Jawa, as well as at JTA before it became a cesspool. And for years the story that has been put forth by Hasbro is that it was about likeness rights.
The most recent site to report on this story was Victoria's Cantina. They had an interview with Angela Staines, the actress who played Senni Tonnika. I've listened to the interview, and her account lends some creedence to the likeness rights issue, and that a lawyer's letter might have made the situation complicated. Based on the way she's described the situation, it sounds like the Lucasfilm people feel as though it's more trouble than it's worth to pursue this.
Christine Hewett, who played Brea Tonnika passed away in 2007. But she was an autograph guest at Star Wars Celebration 3 back in 2005. The whole "likeness rights" issue was the Hasbro line about why they couldn't make the Tonnika Sisters back then, too. So the guys from the Sandtroopers site conducted a video interview with Christine Hewett where she confirmed that she would sign whatever release was necessary to make the figure. When Hasbro had their Celebration 3 panel discussion they did what they always do at the end - open up the floor for questions. Enter the guys from Sandtroopers who present the information about the likeness rights and that Christine Hewett was prepared to sign off on a possible figure. That information was met with stunned silence and someone looking down at the table. You know, that kind of reaction when someone has been caught in a lie and just cannot bear to respond. I'll refrain from saying exactly which Hasbro exec at the time reacted that way, but that is how it transpired. I know because I was there and saw the whole exchange. And the guys from Sandtroopers were not shy about letting people see that video.
So what's the actual holdup? Hasbro has never confirmed this publicly and I doubt they ever would. I could ask the Hasbro rep in question about it now that he's no longer with the company, but I suspect that the terms of any NDA he had to sign with Lucasfilm could still be in effect.
The theory? Lucasfilm won't sign off on this for a couple of reasons. The first possibility is that the characters were originally rumored to have been prostitutes. That bit of EU background has been retconned to death, with even people like Timothy Zahn coming up with elaborate stories about the true identities of these two women from the Cantina.
And the other, most likely issue, is because of how the characters were referred to on set during the production of the first Star Wars film. This was detailed somewhat vaguely in a now archived official site article from 2003 that was about the production of the Cantina scene. It had info about characters, props, masks, puppets, etc. When they got to the Tonnikas they went into background about how the crew regarded them. From the article:
Their production nickname was "Space Girls," though their fashion sense of wearing their underwear on the outside led to a less-than flattering (and somewhat unprintable) nickname.
The article had photos of a number of characters in what looked like mugshot photos. And the one for Brea Tonnika basically spelled out the production nickname: "Star Whores", but with the letters scattered on the placard.
With all of that information to digest it seems pretty clear that a company that has marketed movies for kids and made mountains of money from toys would take the position that these characters just cannot be made into action figures. It could have been massively damaging to the Star Wars brand in the early 2000's when Hasbro was making a lot of figures of Cantina characters. And in the current climate it would seem even more potentially damaging. I still remember the uproar that occurred when a parent saw a pegwarming Black Series Slave Leia back around 2014 and thought it was inappropriate. That started as a local news story in Philadelphia and spread nationally. Now look at how the Tonnika sisters could be perceived after that incident, along with the production lore and what society has been through in the past 5 years since the world became very uncomfortably aware of the Me Too movement. Neither Disney, Lucasfilm nor Hasbro is going to blow up their brands by producing a couple of figures of characters who have this kind of cloud hanging over them.
