Despite my best efforts, there are always gaps in my collection - figures I fail to find the first time around, or that I pass up on in the interest of keeping my collecting budget intact. You can see a full list of those products here. Fortunately, I occasionally get a second chance at picking up one of these items. That happened this week when a figure that'd been on my hunt list for the better part of a decade - The Legacy Collection GH04 Imperial EVO Trooper - turned up on Amazon.com for a very reasonable $15.00US ($21.87).
Debuting in the Force Unleashed video game, the Imperial EVO Trooper was a must-have given my predilection for trooper variants. Featuring fourteen points of articulation, a blaster rifle, two blaster pistols, and a removable backpack, the EVO Trooper comes from the very heyday of 3 3/4" figures. This was also an era when Hasbro knew how to include a ridiculously desirable pack-in accessory. Instead of oversized missile launchers or highly unreliable digital gimmicks, Hasbro instead packed each of these figures with a unique "build-a-droid" part. Not only did this allow us to boost our figure collections (essentially being able to build an extra figure for every 4-6 figures we bought), but it also encouraged us to buy less desirable figures that might otherwise have remained pegwarmers. The opportunity to build my very own HK-50 droid was enough to incentivise me to buy that entire wave of figures - even though it contained a couple of characters that I might have otherwise ignored.
In sum, hunting down older finds like this is always bitterwseet. While it's a fantastic addition to my collection, it also reminds me how far the line has fallen since the golden days. However, with the quality of five-point-of-articulation figures improving and the return of super-articulated figures in the Vintage Collection, we can only hope that we might slowly be seeing a return to form for the line.
