Yub Nub?

Me n' Big Anklevich were just the right age to love the Ewoks.  The generation before ours equated them with all that went wrong with Star Wars (in 1983-85, as short-sighted as that seems), and later generations had their own problems.  But hey, I like the Ewoks just fine, and had all the action figures Kenner made, except Logray (ironically, one of the least-valuable).

But Hasbro doesn't make a lot of them anymore.  I remember Toys R Us had a boxed set of Ewoks that was worth its weight in gold, even though they were mostly the same figure over and over with different accessories.

Anyway, that is unnecessary backstory that serves to a) provide context, and more importantly, b) to pad out this blog post a little bit.  The point of all this is that, when I was crossing the lawn the other day from parking my car, I saw something that had been dropped in the front yard, and I paused.

To my eyes, the first thing I thought I was seeing was an Ewok.  This looked like an action figure of a random Ewok, random enough I didn't immediately recognize it.  But Hasbro has done a lot of them over the decades.  And some of those figures have become pretty valuable recently (but only to people around my age, but with a lot more money).

So, back to the mysterious object in the grass.  It didn't look like an Ewok that belonged to me, but my nephews sometimes go to thrift stores and have bought Star Wars stuff in the past, so I thought it might have been dropped by one of them.

Of course, let me interrupt the narrative right here with a bit of metacommentary.  It may be that I look and see an Ewok where anybody else would look and see something else, and you, having seen the photos, know exactly where this is going.  But it looked like an Ewok to me, and in posting the picture here, it still pretty much does.

But no, it was not an action figure of any sort, Star Wars or otherwise.  Upon much-too-close examination, what was in the grass in our front yard was merely a dog turd.  Fun.

I don't rule out the possibility that the dog turd originated from the forest moon of Endor, though.

Rish & Marshal Discuss THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU

So, there's a new* Star Wars movie in theatres!  Join me and Marshal Latham as we discuss THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU over at the Delusions of Grandeur podcast!  Find out what Rish would've bet a thousand dollars was going to happen (and didn't), discover what OT Star Wars alien Marshal did not recognize, and hear one of us complain about having to see the movie twice right HERE.

*It's a bit old now, but hey, anything I edit is going to be.

Delusions of Grandeur 107: The New Galaxy's Edge

Hey, the Delusions of Grandeur show is back!

Rish makes Marshal watch the new promos for Disneyland, featuring fake-Han Solo and faux-Princess Leia, briefly calls Big Anklevich a baby, and tries to counter the many, many complaints about this new change.  Does anybody remember the Galactic Starcruiser?  Don't people have a way to tap into their inner child?  Wanna hear the story again about the first Spider-man movie?  And how is Anaheim, California like Berlin, Germany?

Check it out HERE!

From The Tropical Zone of Hoth

This December has been unbelievably warm.  It got into the fifties last week, the week before Christmas, which was warm, but not the hottest on record.  This week, however, it got into the mid-sixties (sixty-five on Christmas Eve!), which is the hottest on record, not just for Christmas week, but for the entire month of December.  While that is nice for me, who can still go to work without a jacket or go jogging at eleven at night, it's an ominous sign for the future, and devastating to those who want a white Christmas.

The last time I went to the cabin, there was snow there, though it was melting (it's always fun to hear the big chunks break off and slide off the metal roof--and you can hear it happening from the other nearby cabins all around), and I thought to grab some Snowtroopers and the GI Joe HISS Tank Big got for me so that I could turn it into a snow vehicle for the Empire.

I won't go into the work that I put into painting a black vehicle grey, or how it never looked right to me and I should've just gone with white*, but I'm happy I was able to put the vehicle out as the sun was low in the sky (I got low to the ground too, at least as low as I was able without laying down), and get a photo in the snow.  So, here you go:

I might try it again when we next get snow--there are new Snowtroopers that are ultra-poseable and still have all their weapons, maybe I'll grab a couple of them for photos instead of selling them (which is why I ordered them in the first place).  We'll see.

*Hasbro recently announced a white and red repaint of their big HISS Tank, and it looks really good.

Marshal And I Talk Season 2 of "Andor"

After a bit of foot-dragging, I finally watched the second season of "Andor," and just like seeing CITIZEN KANE, GONE WITH THE WIND, THE RISE OF CHUN-LI, and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA for the first time, I kinda had to shrug and say, "Yeah, it was as good as everybody says."

Whoops, guess you don't have to listen to me and Marshal Latham talk about it now over at the Star Wars: Delusions of Grandeur podcast HERE.  Seems like a bit of a waste spending all that time on the episode.

Nice To See A Familiar Face

C-3PO figures tend to be plentiful.  He's a popular, perennial character that requires few paint applications (especially if you're doing a die-cast figure).  His design isn't quite as useful for customs, since other protocol-type droids had different style heads, but the figures are cheap and plentiful.  So I grabbed one and took a picture of it to send to Big, warning him I was going to do something unholy to it.

He seemed excited to see what I'd do with it, and I decided to play it safe and pattern it after the blue droid in the worst-ever episode of "The Mandalorian."  It was an unbelievably beautiful repaint, in a decidedly less-than-beautiful hour of television.

Amazingly, in the more than two years since the series ended, I couldn't find any other photos of it, except the one I grabbed in 2023.

And speaking of lack of photos, I forgot to take some of the work-in-progress.  Which pretty much leaves us with:

I might need to ask Big to send me a better photo, since I gave the repainted Artoo and Threepio to him when he last visited.

Too Much Time On My Hands?

It might have been last year, it might have been ten years ago--that's how these things work--but I grabbed a couple of Star Wars guys and did repaints on them, just for fun.  Now, Big Anklevich is finally creating his space station, and I thought I could make a couple of repaints for him to have walking around his station.  The movies have shown us that the R2 unit and Protocol Droid designs are so good that you can paint them practically any color (or combinations) and they will look good, so I am going to test that theory.

Here's my first one:

This is just a standard late 90s/early '00s R2-D2 with the third leg.  It has a chromed dome, so I put tape over it to protect it from the grey primer that I've been told you should use first, so the paint sticks better to the figure.

I didn't take a photo of him when he was grey, whoops (but I did on the next one), but I decided to put black where there had been white and green where there had been blue (plus a little extra).

It did NOT come out great, but as I said before (and will continue to say as I do more of these), the droids look pretty good even with a crappy paintjob, partly because of the great design, but also because of Lucas's idea of a "used universe," where things were old, beat-up, or falling apart.

Above is the finished product.  It looks awful to my eye, but Big Anklevich, whom I gave it to, said it would be a fine addition to his space station.  Which was nice.

Rish and Marshal Talk About James Earl Jones...

 ...and watch an episode of a show for little, little kids!

The last "Delusions of Grandeur" episode we did was inspired by watching Alfred Hitchcock's movie NOTORIOUS, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and in reading about that, it said that an episode of "The Clone Wars" was a total homage to it.  So, I volunteered to watch an episode of that show*, the one called "Senate Spy" from 2009.  And yes, there are definite parallels there.

Just as we were going to record, however, the great James Earl Jones died, and we spend a few minutes talking about his masterful addition to the Star Wars experience.  Check it out HERE.

*It's not the only episode I've seen, having watched the last story arc of the series at the 2022 Star Wars Celebration . . . but it was the first bad episode I saw.

Star Wars Cantina Patron Wishlist

 I'm back, by unpopular demand!

On this one, I give my five most-desired Cantina-related characters to be made into action figures.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 34: Jawas

So, this is it, the last video. Or was the last one the last video?

Either way, this one's about Jawas.

Star Wars Cantina Patron 33: Garindan

I'm still not sure if this should've been an episode or not. Is Garindan in the Cantina?

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 32: Wioslea

While I'm still not convinced that Wioslea was in the Mos Eisley Cantina, let's take a not-brief-enough look at him.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 31: Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes

Couldn't find my set of the Cantina Band, but I'm sure it'll turn up.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 30: Lak Sivrak

Rish talks about the wolfman, Lak Sivrak, late of the 1997 Special Edition. 

Note 1: The Cantina reshoots were in Los Angeles, not Marin County. 

Note 2: This episode appears out of order because I couldn't find the figure.  Turns out, it was within me all along (ouch).

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 29: Wuher

Rish didn't buy the bartender Wuher, in protest of his No Blasters policy.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 28: Dice Ibegon

Another cool name for a character that . . . wait, is Dice Ibegon cool?

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 27: M'iiyoom Onith

 

M'iiyoom Onith? What, another of these aliens with the unpronounceable, ridiculous names? Maybe we should stop doing this series.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 26: Ketwol

This is the NEWEST Cantina Patron . . . a whole twenty years after all of the rest, Ketwol/Melas.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 25: Bom Vimdin

Ugh, Rish didn't even open Bom Vimdin. What a hockey puck.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 24: Zutton

The flies say this is my worst episode of Star Wars figures yet. Zutton, however, disagrees.