Aside from a handful of notable exceptions, I tend to find myself very much against the concept of TransFormers crossovers. They end up either being simplistic retoolings (or repaints) of existing figures or, in the case of the early Marvel and Star Wars crossovers, pale imitations of the mainline toys.
In a lot of ways, given the source material, it actually shouldn't be too difficult to turn sci-fi vehicles into robots, but the results of both of these early crossovers did just one thing right... and it wasn't the transformation or the robot modes. The first batch ran sporadically between 2005 and 2012 with no real highlights (with the possible exception of 2007's Death Star/Darth Vader), then returned in 2018 with just two toys which were only marginally improved.
I never bought any of them, but my best friend did pick one up as a birthday present for me back in 2007, most likely because I've always been a huge fan of this particular Star Wars vehicle. So, let's take a look... How bad could it be?
While the Snowspeeder may not be quite so iconic as a TIE Fighter or an X-Wing, it has the distinction of having had a rather more realistic opportunity to show off its full capabilities in a hostile environment and against overwhelming forces in the early battle on Hoth in the second movie in George Lucas' renowned Space Opera saga. A small, two-man aircraft, the Snowspeeder is described as a model of T-47 Airspeeder fitted out with twin, front-firing laser cannons operated by the pilot, and a harpoon gun capable of launching towcables, mounted on the rear and operated by the gunner, seated behind the pilot and facing backward. It's a small, fast and manoeuvrable aircraft, seemingly designed for low-level flight over a variety of terrains, and may well be my favourite Star Wars vehicle of all time... Possibly because it also reminds me a little of some of the smaller spacecraft from the videogame Elite, such as the Asp, the Sidewinder or the Cobra Mk 1.
And this is a fantastic rendition of the aircraft. Since I owned precious few of Kenner/Palitoy's Star Wars vehicles for use with the action figures (a Speeder Bike, an AT-ST, and the Jawa's Sandcrawler playset, though I found an incomplete Slave-1 in a local charity shop a couple years back, and have vowed to spruce it up), and a handful of the smaller-scale standalone vehicles, such as Luke's Landspeeder, X- and Y-Wings, the Millenium Falcon, a TIE Figther and TIE Advanced, an Imperial Cruiser... Possibly Slave-1 and the Snowspeeder as well, I was initially thrilled to have this version of the craft - the very idea of my favourite Star Wars vehicle, but able to transform into a robot, seemed awesome on so many levels...
...But this very quickly turned to disappointment when, upon handling the toy for the first time, I found it was made using quite a bit of soft, flexible, almost rubbery plastic. To be fair, the majority of it is on the underside, but the raised engine shells at the back of either wing, the central section in front of the cockpit, the barrels of the laser cannons and the harpoon gun are made with the bendy material, and even the cockpit canopy feels quite soft compared to the usual translucent plastic you'd find on TransFormers toys. Additionally, while there's a single landing skid which folds out from below the cockpit, the designers left the snowspeeder resting on its wings at the back - the rear landing skids are sculpted details to the rear of the large wing sections rather than being independently mobile - and the airbrakes are represented only by sculpted panel lining. However, while some of the sculpted detail is shallow and somewhat fudged in places, most of it is actually excellent, even on the softer plastic parts.
The paint job, while not exceptional, does the job quite well since the Snowspeeder isn't exactly overburdened with decoration in multiple bright colours. The main coloured stripes - along the raised section at the rear of each wing and down to the front, ahead of the cockpit - are a very flat orangy-red, which makes it looks aged or weathered. On top of these are splotches of white paint designed to emphasise the weathering, though I don't quite understand why the choice was made to apply additional paint on top for this, rather than just leaving holes in the stripes. Further weathering and battle damage has been applied all over the main body and wings of the craft, using a very washed-out grey-brown, which has also been applied over the small grille just in front of the cockpit. A cooler grey paint has been applied to the front faces of the gun mountings and the raised wing sections, and then the large, protruding engine at the back has been painted with a dark gunmetal, which really helps to highlight some shallowly-sculpted details between its vertical panels. The frame of the section of cockpit canopy that's hinged to open for the pilot
mini-figure is naturally just grey paint - closely matching the
surrounding plastic - over the transparent plastic, but the gunner's
section has the transparent plastic sat within a grey plastic frame. The
inside of the cockpit is completely unpainted, but at least has some detail, albeit quite simplistic - the seat is there, and the rim of the console has some detail but, despite the fact that there's a gap between the pilot figure's legs, there's no joystick or any other obvious controls.
The guns themselves (actually spring-loaded missile launchers, with the majority of the barrels forming the missile) have not been painted, but the plastic of the launcher sections has yellowed quite dramatically with age. The lefthand launcher has discoloured almost entirely - just a thin strip on the underside remains the original plastic colour - but the righthand one has only discoloured on one half, almost as if the 'clean' part was molded in a completely different type of plastic, more resistant to UV light. At the back of the craft, the harpoon gun and the afterburners have neither detail paintwork nor weathering.
Robot Mode:
I genuinely do not recall any of the original Star Wars TransFormers actually looking good but, even by their standards, this 'mecha' version of Luke Skywalker is a hideous mess. Probably the only thing I can say in its favour is that it kind of reminds me of G1 Scourge because of all that wing mass hanging off his back and the engine section folding down behind his head. However, where it differs is that Scourge had a certain flair to his appearance, where this thing... doesn't. The robot's body is essentially just the cockpit section of the vehicle, with arms sticking out from behind/below the gunner's section and legs growing out of the front. The proportions are utterly bizarre, and the fact that the pilot mini figure can stay in the cockpit makes the robot seem like some disturbing kind of pregnancy simulator.
Since the torso is basically just the cockpit section of his vehicle mode, there's not a great deal of paintwork or sculpted detail to speak of - pretty much all of it appears in a small trapezoid section directly in front of the robot's head, though the white, blue and silver paintwork means it looks more like something borrowed from R2-D2 than the intended reference to the life support unit strapped to the pilot's chest. What little sculpted detail there is appears on the arms and legs, but there's not even a lot of that. The arms are pretty squared-off blocks of armoured shell, molded in orange and grey plastic, but the grey is a bit of an error, considering the pilot's uniform included white gloves that extend about halfway back down the forearm. The hands, molded in the rubbery plastic, have been thickly painted white, which causes quite a bit of paint to rub onto his weapons. The legs fare a little better - at least at the very top and bottom, where the vague sculpted detailing features black paint to highlight the tubing on the inner corners of the thighs (though I'm not quite sure what that's supposed to represent), while the grey boots have panels and strips of white paint, seemingly to represent the hems and straps on the uniform's boots. The middle of the leg - from the lower thigh rotation joint, through the knee to the calves - is an unmitigated disaster of loose joints and gappiness, with the lower legs being hollow in the worst possible way.
One of the craziest features of this toy is that his weapons are the Snowspeeder's guns, detached from the wings. They're insanely long with the barrels/missiles attached, and actually look slightly better - or better proportioned for a robot of this size, at least - once the missiles have been fired. On the one hand, I like that actual weapon components of the vehicle mode are repurposed to become the robot mode's weapons... but they don't exactly look elegant, nor are they a stylistic match for the sort of firearms wielded by characters in the movies. They attach to the robot's chunky fists via stubby pegs on one side and feature short loops of pipe - molded in a soft, flexible black plastic - matching similar loops on the sides of the robot's waist. It's not clear what purpose these serve, other than making it that much more difficult to attach the weapons in vehicle mode, since these loops have to be fed into the interior of the wings - toward the cockpit - before tabbing in and being enclosed at the back. They toy also came with a light sabre which, sadly, I seem to have misplaced. It was a fairly simple rod of translucent blue plastic with only rudimentary detail sculpted into its black and silver painted hilt. If I ever locate it (I have a sneaking suspicion it may be in a cardboard box at my parents' house) I'll add a few pictures at some point.
The head sculpt here is pretty strange, because the idea - or so I gathered - was to make the robot's head look somewhat like the human character they represented, with a handful most closely resembling the character's animated incarnations from the CGI TV shows... but this Luke Skywalker 'bot looks particularly gaunt within his pilots' helmet. The level of detail overall is pretty good, but the gunmetal-painted face is just plain ugly, with pronounced, downturned lips and an oversized chin strap with vertical lines running down the white section in the front. The overall effect makes me think of a sick and emaciated Thanos from the Marvel universe. The helmet is nicely designed and features linework in red, grey and black, while the central crest and 'ear' pieces are painted yellow. The visor is a separate piece of translucent yellow plastic covering the robot's cyan-painted eyes. On the downside, the white plastic on mine looks a little lumpy in places, and some of the paintwork is quite sloppily applied.
The parallel to G1 Scourge is very apparent in the Snowspeeder's transformation, since the wings and engine section fold out from the body and onto the back in much the same way. The only difference here is that it's the arms, rather than the head, that need to be folded out from the body (quite an awkward process in itself), and then the legs are entirely separate from the wings rather than being a continuation of the section of the craft the robot's wings fold into. The 'nose', such as it is, simply folds as a wedge, up onto the robot's backside, their corners clashing with the panels connecting to the wings. The legs swing down on a wobbly ratchet joint - made out of the horribly soft, rubbery plastic - and then the lower legs extend by sliding the boots down, with the upper calves' hollowness caused by the crummy design of the slider joint. This is very much a shellformer on a par with Galaxy Force Chromia/Cybertron Thunderblast, but without the benefit of a halfway decent action figure at its core, or the shell becoming semi-convincing wings. Here, the majority of the vehicle mode just becomes a jumble of panels that, no matter how they're positioned, never look right and just make him very back-heavy.
And if his transformation is ill-conceived, then it's his articulation that really pays the price for the lack of consideration that went into this toy. While he has a small amount of forward/backward ankle tilt due to transformation, he has surprisingly little range in his knees. The hips would have decent range if it weren't for the fact that they clash with a transformation hinge at the back and the cockpit at the front, effectively limiting their total forward/backward range to less than 90° when their outward range might as well be the same 135°-ish as they have for transformation but for the wings and arms getting in the way. There's also a rotation joint just above the knees, but they're effectively useless because it's so loose, the rest of each leg is so poor, and the ankle articulation isn't sufficient to let his feet provide a stable base in most poses. There's no waist articulation (but it wasn't really a thing for the most part, back in 2007) due to the cockpit occupying most of the torso, and then the arms are just diabolical. Some bright spark felt that the shoulders only needed to be able to swing a fraction over 90° forward from their vehicle mode position and outward only about 10-15° - basically only what's required for transformation - so he can't have his arms down by his sides or outstretched in any direction. The arms can rotate a full 360° at the very top of the bicep, but that's of little use without more movement at the shoulder. The elbows are double-jointed, but the joint itself is made of the rubbery plastic so, even with what feels like soft ratchets, it feels loose and floppy. The wrists rotate, but not very freely, and have an alarming tendency to creak despite being quite wobbly in their fitting - it's not clear whether there's a ball joint or a loose mushroom peg in there. The head can rotate the full 360°, making it about the only part of the robot with the level of articulation expected of a figure from this era.
Luke Skywalker Mini-Figure
The best I can say about this tiny figure is that it's well-painted, but ugly. Standing at about an inch and a quarter in height (33mm), it's still better painted than any of the larger format Human Alliance mini figures that came out a couple of years later. I guess this must have been required under the licensing agreement with Lucasfilm. Even so, the paintwork isn't strictly accurate - the gloves and boots are painted black rather than white or grey, and none of the paintwork is particularly well-applied. Despite its small size, the head is probably every bit as detailed as that of a Human Alliance figure, but the shape of the helmet is off, and the less said about the face, the better (although I've always thought it looks more like a guy I used to work with than it does Mark Hamill). There's no paintwork beyond a few touches of red and yellow on the helmet and a slathering of skintone paint on the face, but the sculpt is detailed enough that the shadows the face casts on itself fill in some of the blanks.
I generally feel that, in spite of its huge potential, a Star Wars/TransFormers crossover was - and still is - a terrible idea. There are so many iconic vehicles that could be used, but the requirement to make them precisely to Lucasfilm/ILM spec would always hamper them as transforming toys. However, in my opinion, it's the base concept of the toys, as they were produced, that let down the Star Wars TransFormers sub-franchise all along. The idea that these iconic vehicles must transform into giant robot versions of their pilots/crew was nonsensical and counterproductive. Since most of the Empire's vehicles were piloted by nameless, faceless mooks, many of them ended up as alternate versions of Darth Vader, including the colossal Death Star, and it was really only the vehicles from the prequel movies that brought any real variety (and colour) to the line. This Snowspeeder is a prime example of why this concept does not work, and the robot mode only barely resembles the pilot's flight suit and its proportions are a parody of mainline TransFormers toys, though (arguably) marginally better than the Luke Skywalker/X-Wing toy.
As mentioned at the start, this line saw a handful of new releases right up until 2012, then took a break of about five or six years, after which the engineering hadn't improved appreciably. Only two further toys were released at that time, both remakes of existing vehicles/pilots. I have to admit that, for a while, I was tempted by the Death Star toy from the earlier run (2007) and the second attempt at the Millennium Falcon (2018)... but the former is a simplistic robot figure folded up inside a spherical shell that just hangs off various parts of the robot, while the latter lacked the electronic features of the first version, and its cockpit could only accommodate one of the two mini-figures included.
I think I also came to the conclusion that, all I really wanted out of it was a decent model Millennium Falcon... and there are far better options available for that.
The bottom line here is that, while I'm grateful for this as a birthday gift from a lifelong friend, it's a terrible toy and just doesn't fit anywhere in my collection. Since I moved into my flat, it's been sat on top of an Ikea Detolf cabinet, literally gathering dust. Playing with it again for this write up reminded me how much I like the Snowspeeder as a vehicle, and how much I loathe this interpretation of it.
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