TVC Naboo Royal Guard

A lot of the Phantom Menace themed product released for TVC really fell flat. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan for example are just repacks of older figures, and with an entire line of TPM figures out at the same time, I really can’t see what place these had in TVC. Many of these aren’t really bad figures, but they just don’t stand out, and the line was priced too highly for figures like that. I would like to almost say the episode one stuff is really what killed the Vintage Collection. But in a costly line with the worst distribution I’ve seen from Hasbro, that wouldn’t be totally true. Either way, it is true that these were some slow movers, and sure fire clearance fodder to boot, the Naboo Royal Guard falls into that.

The Royal Guard comes off somewhat forgettable to me, as a figure released in a flood of Phantom Menace product, but he is fairly nice when you take a deeper look at him. The sculpt is pretty good, I like his blaster a lot too, and the character serves an interesting purpose to me. That is, for being a soldier unique to Naboo, he helps develop his planet in a way like the Bespin Guard do for theirs. It adds a little more life to him than something like a species that could end up anywhere; he’s doing a job and wears a uniform for it. In that way, the figure sort of tells a story in a way others don’t always, though maybe that’s giving this one too much credit.

So with that said, this is a pretty cool figure in my eyes, but the bad is that there isn’t much to him. You get a figure, a helmet and a blaster for ten bucks. It seems like with other figures they were able to toss in just a little more to make them feel worth it, but this guy doesn’t have anything like that. You can find this guy now for a lot less than retail now, I’ve even seen them as low as three dollars. For that much, it’s hard to pass up a fairly cool figure like this one, but he definitely isn’t up to par with the rest of the line.