Star Wars: The Black Series Dewback and Sandtrooper

The more and more of them that I collect, the more and more and more and more Black Series vehicles I want. And this size class and price point is terrific for them. Not enormous pieces like the First Order TIE Fighter, but larger than the Speeder Bike, this $60 plateau is turning out some excellent, excellent toys. Even things that seem generally bland like Luke’s Landspeeder end up being fun and engaging and worth the price.

Now that we’re done gushing, let’s talk about the Dewback, and its contribution to the line.

The Dewback is a big lizard. The creature looks great and is about as highly detailed as a big desert lizard can be. While the body itself is pretty static, there are jointed appendages and moving parts everywhere. The head and tail move independently, and all four legs are heavily jointed. They are moveable at the hips, elbows, and ankles, and even have jointed toes, although the three forward facing toes on each foot are a single piece, and not individually jointed. The jointed toes let the Dewback be posed on top of something, like it is climbing or walking over an obstacle. The feet are big and wide enough that when standing on a flat surface, or if posed on a flat surface, the weight of the figure does not cause the toes to flex. The tail moves side to side, and is a solid piece without any additional joints, but the head can move both side to side as well as slightly up and down, and has an opening mouth with a moveable tongue. The color on the body also lightens towards the bottom, being slightly browned on the top, and lighter and greener nearing the stomach, as though the animal has been tanned by constant exposure to the sun. This is a neat detail, one that will certainly go unnoticed by many, which is fine. But, if you need a primer on what a real sun tan looks like, if you think that a healthy and natural tan from exposure to actual sun makes you turn orange, let the Black Series Dewback set the record straight.

The entire body is sculpted with scales, and is pretty beautiful. The tongue is all sculpted and textured looking, and the mouth is filled with teeth as well, a detail that is often forgotten. The saddle part is removable, while the bet and saddle belt are not. Maybe calling the saddle removable is a bit generous, as it is totally necessary for the creature to look any good. It plugs in to a rather large gap on the back which is then covered by the saddle, but there is not a plug or anything to take the saddles’ place when not in use, so going without just makes the Dewback look like it’s missing a huge chunk of its body. Figures straddle the animal, they do not insert themselves into the body, as some of us remember from the original Dewback toy back in the 1980’s, where there was a saddle piece, but figures stuck their legs in to a spring panel on the back in order to ride the beast. The Black Series Dewback manages riders in a way that looks so much better than the original, but it would have been kind of neat to have the old school option as well, and I say that knowing full well that I would never display the set that way, and would probably only take advantage of it one time. But I would smile a little every time I looked at or thought of the Dewback, knowing that it incorporated that bad but retro feature.

 

Posing the creature does take a little bit of effort, as all four legs are possessed of multiple joints, and sometimes moving the animal around or putting pressure on one leg or the other will cause the remaining ones to slip slightly. Not an uncommon “issue” with any figure, truthfully, but definitely not with one like this. There is a bit of a worry for the future though, as one hopes all the leg joints stay nice and tight for a long time, or else there is a real possibility that the Dewback will slide under its own weight, and be unable to stand. But that seems quite a ways off into the future, and also would likely be the result of some pretty intense playing, so if the objective is to have a Dewback perpetually standing guard there is probably very little to worry about.

The Sandtrooper rider is another release of the Imperial Sandtrooper, this time with a grey pauldron on the shoulder, but is in every way just another release of the original version. It comes with the same backpack, the same blaster, has different weathering on the armor, and comes with an additional accessory, a staff. The staff is just a staff, and that is literally all there is to it. The figure looks good perched on top of the Dewback with the staff in hand, but it is just a thin plastic stick. If the grey pauldron indicates a different rank or anything is not clear, and it’s not clear that being the Dewback rider is enough to lead to an entirely different rank or status for the trooper. Maybe it means this trooper is a sergeant or a captain or something. The trooper is able to hold the reigns of the Dewback in either hand or both, and sits on top rather securely.

 

Every time one of these deluxe Black Series sets comes along, it causes me to start thinking of what may follow, or of what things I’d like to materialize in the line. The Dewback sort of makes me think that there could be other creatures in the future, like a Bantha or something, an idea that is supported in my brain by the existence of the Black Series Tusken Raider figure. A Bantha would be much taller than the Dewback, but not as long, so it seems like that should be a wash in terms of the size of the piece, and whether or not it would be too large to fit in this price point. I’m honestly surprised and honestly glad that this has not turned into the part of the Black Series that just releases various speeder-type vehicles, as ships  won’t work in this scale, and outside of the original toy line in the early 1980’s, there are not a whole lot of smaller vehicles in universe. Too large a toy ends up being cost and space prohibitive, as we all learned with the TIE Fighter. But maybe smaller things, like the Hoth laser turrets or the Imperial probe droid (or a box set of both. . . . –mr) or maybe the smaller desert skiffs from Return of the Jedi or something. To be perfectly clear, I totally want a Black Series X-wing and TIE Interceptor and all of that stuff, but money and space do need to be recognized here.

Judging from what I see at brick and mortar locations, these sets sell ok, but aren’t really flying off shelves. Yet, the ‘bro keeps making them, so that’s great. If you have any interest in this set, you should totally add it to your collection. The Dewback is pretty obviously the highlight, and it is a gorgeous piece.