Star Wars: The Black Series Scarif Trooper Commander, Scarif Stormtrooper and Imperial Hovertank Pilot

 Oh boy! The day has finally arrived! Tonight, we are going to see Rogue One, the first Star Wars spinoff or standalone movie, after over a year of waiting and hype! What better way that to kick off the big day than with a review of some Rogue One figures?

This trio of figures is getting a single review because, aside from some paint, belts and helmets, they are the exact same toy. Two of them are store exclusives, while the one that would have made the most sense to be a store exclusive is the mass retail release.

Being set just prior to A New Hope, Rogue One brings us back to the old familiar Empire, which naturally means Stormtroopers. As we know already, new types of Troopers will be introduced in the movie, including these two, who for the time being, we know little about (since I’ve been working so hard to avoid spoilers) other than what their designations or packaging reveal about their functions. Some of the movie will take place on a planet called Scarif, where our Scarif Troopers will be stationed.

First up, let’s look at the Scarif Commander. This is the one of the three that is available at mass retail outlets, although practically everything about it screams “should have been a store exclusive.” The Scarif Commander is a slimmer bodied figure, as I wrote about with the Deathtrooper a week or so back, but I think that this is a trend of the line in general, moving towards more slender bucks. I recently (yesterday) got a shipment of figures from the Darth Revan wave, and they are more slender of torso as well, even the Stormtroopers. But, that’s for another time. The Commander is a light tan with brown shoes and pants, whereas the standard Stormtrooper has that black undersuit. The packaging says that these Troopers are essentially security guards for some facility on the planet Scarif specifically, so they aren’t just Stormtroopers. Some of the promo material has been calling these guys “Shoretroopers,” which to me at least conjures up a commando vibe, and they do look that part. Their armor is lighter, consisting of the chest plate that the Deathtrooper has, and they look the part of more commando-y than do standard Stormtroopers; it is a soldier more like the Scout Trooper in appearance and application than the standard guys. They don’t have any thigh armor, which I think is a pretty interesting change. All of this really does shout rapid, agile soldier to me, and I think it’s a good look. 

The Commander has some extra paint on it to distinguish itself as the commander, a swath of blue across the shoulders and chest. The blue is a nice shade, but it is a pretty odd look on an Imperial figure. There’s something about it that looks strange, and on a few occasions I’ve caught myself looking at this toy and wondering, rather seriously, why it doesn’t have the orange pauldron if it’s some commander or officer. It also has a skirt where the regular Scarif Trooper has a belt with a fairly large pouch. The skirt piece made me think of the Clone ARC Troopers almost immediately, which got me thinking about whether or not some more Black Series Clones or Clone Commanders may be in the future plans for the line. Perhaps not for a while, as there will probably be at least one more wave of Rogue One characters, the Revan wave has just released, and we know that a future (the next?) wave of non-Rogue One specific figures is supposed to be Lando and the Royal Guard, but there again is some hope that more Clones may be in the future. The Commander also has a new blaster, which is great, since the other two Troopers here come with the standard Imperial blaster rifle. I really do wish that figures would come with new or different weapons, and was actually pretty disappointed to find out that the regular Scarif Trooper came with the regular Imperial weapon. Well, a slightly different version of it, but basically the same old, same old weapon. 

 The Commander is precisely what the store exclusive figure ought to be: a slightly different version of an existing figure that’s basically non-essential to a collection. Commanders and stealth versions and such are prime store exclusive material: see last years’ First Order Snowtrooper Commander, exclusive to Toys R Us. See Emperor’s Wrath Darth Vader or Prototype Boba Fett, both exclusive to Walgreens. Why make the base version of a figure the store exclusive? I know, we can argue that the general toy buying public doesn’t care and, as collectors, we are going to go to whatever lengths needed to get the items we desire, but still. A year later I still see First Order Snowtroopers hanging around, but haven’t seen the Commander in a store since the single time I did when I bought one. Seems to me this doesn’t make sense. But a lot of things didn’t make sense in 2016, so.

The regular Scarif Trooper is a Walmart exclusive figure, so we know what that means: if you haven’t already gotten one, you’re going to end up paying inflated after market prices. This is the regular, ‘plain’ release of the Shoretrooper, and differs from the Commander only in the lack of blue paint and skirt. The standard Shoretrooper comes with what looks to be a modified version of the standard Imperial blaster, having some added piece on the side of the barrel that looks like it could be a flashlight or maybe laser targeting system. Possibly, the movie will clarify this. But otherwise, it is the same figure as the Commander. This should have been the mass retail version. If you’re going to army build these guys, or even just buy two or three (“sane” army building), their exclusive status is going to make that costly and/or difficult, outside of happening upon a full peg of them at a Walmart. 

The Hovertank Pilot is the Toys R Us exclusive figure this time around, and is the Shoretrooper body in white with a different belt and helmet. You know, about two months ago I was thinking, “There aren’t any exclusive figures for Rogue One the way there were for The Force Awakens.” I chalked it up to Rogue One being a spinoff. Over the course of the next probably two days, I found out about the Tank Pilot, and the regular Shoretrooper, and the Entertainment Earth Order 66 Clones set. And that Target three pack. So we went from “oh, no exclusive Black Series stuff, no bigs” to “holy shit, all these exclusives to track down” in the course of a couple hours. 

The Tank Pilot is pretty cool. The biggest difference between the two figures is the helmet, and the Tank Pilot helmet has a real thin visor, which doesn’t seem like a very good idea for a guy driving a tank. The figure is identical in every other pertinent way to the Shoretrooper. As of right now, we don’t know how much a factor in the movie this soldier will be, so it may be the case that this is another example of the classic Star Wars marketing strategy of “seen onscreen, will get a figure,” but this toy feels more like what a store exclusive should be than the Shoretrooper does. Even if you army build, a pilot is a pretty specialized unit, so the need for multiple – or even one – starts to diminish. But it makes me wonder if there is another use of this figure in the plans, the way Toys R Us got the Snowtrooper Commander and a standard version was released at retail later. I suppose anything is possible, and again the current lack of knowledge of the movie is making all of this nothing more than postulation, fairly weak postulation at best. I suppose even a single frame of a Tank Pilot with a shoulder pauldron on splash of additional paint will ramp up suspicions on another use of the figure, but we won’t know that until tonight. 

The helmets are, once more, the real separating features among these figures. They are both possessed of a large forehead piece that sort of looks to be a blast shield, but it is clearly a solid part, not shaded or translucent at all, or perhaps a crash pad. That makes sense on the Tank Pilot from a practicality standpoint. Both helmets have long faceplates, radically different from any other OT Stormtrooper faces. Even the Deathtrooper has a more detailed faceplate than these guys do. Aside from the Imperial Snowtrooper, these may be the most faceless Imperial Troopers around. I have always seen a face in the Imperial Stormtrooper helmet, that black grill under the eyes approximating a mouth telling forced into a scowl. These helmets lack that, rather having a vertical rectangular part that, if it were a mouth on a standard Stormtrooper, elicits thoughts of an insect mandible on the Shoretrooper. The Shoretrooper helmet is a much more expressive one than the Tank Pilots’, while the Tank Pilot helmet looks more weighty and tough. The Shoretrooper reminds a little of the Scout Trooper helmet, in that is looks more designed for a quicker, mobile unit, more a commando than a stand up and fight soldier, almost designed for functionality over impression. The Tank Pilot helmet is interesting as it relates to the helmets of other Imperial pilots, since it has nothing in common with them. 

Getting ahead of myself again, but I just got figures from the Revan wave, so that includes the AT-AT Driver, and while that unit and the TIE Pilot have fairly clear common notes, and even the First Order Pilot shares some of them as well, the Tank Pilot here is nothing like them at all. And based on the other Imperial pilots, it could be safe to assume that all Imperial pilot helmets would have some commonalities. If you look at the Shoretrooper, or certainly the Deathtrooper, you can instantly tell they are versions of Stormtroopers. Looking at the Tank Pilot, you can tell it’s a Stormtrooper of some kind, but not necessarily a pilot. If that makes any sense. Seeing as Rogue One comes between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, I’ve been racking my Clone brain to see if there’s some through line between Clone helmets and the Tank Pilot helmet, like an evolutionary step, but I keep coming up with nothing. No missing link is actually necessary, but we do expend the mental energies on things we love.

So, given that two of the three here are exclusive figures, how necessary are they? There is not an easy answer to that question, and if I had to choose one of the three I don’t know which one I’d pick. Probably the Shoretrooper Commander, simply because of its being a regular release figure, although we know how hard it can be to find Troopers in the wild. This is already a figure I saw once, which was when I bought it, and at that time there was only one of them on the shelf despite my local Target having obviously just set out a case of the new wave. Troopers, unlike actual characters, never go out of style, and are never purchases you make cautiously: what happens if you buy figures of actual characters and find out you don’t like the characters? That’s not a danger at all with Troopers, so they always go fast at retail. With the other two being store exclusives and thus running the potential risk of aftermarket markups, especially the Walmart Shoretrooper, which is already going for insane on eBay, I’d say that at retail price or close to retail price they are both worthwhile additions. But if the prices on these go up too much, I think their value is totally dependent on what you find them to be worth. Since it’s the same figure three times with minor variation, any of them will do if you’re just in it for the base mold. I like all three of them fairly equally, so I can’t honestly choose only one.