The Vintage Collection - A Comprehensive Overview

JTA presented a detailed breakdown of the 6 in Black Series a few days ago. Now it’s time to look at The Vintage Collection. The line was only resurrected a few weeks ago, time to look at the line as a whole. How many figures are there? How many exclusives? How does TVC compare with the Black Series? Click through to find out everything you want to know about TVC!

Before I start a disclaimer: I don’t collect TVC. So I had to gather all the data from the JTA review archive and a few other sources. I hope everything is correct, since I have no way of actually looking at a TVC collection to check a few things for myself. Should any of you find an error, please say so in the comments or contact me and I’ll be happy to correct it!

With that being said, let’s head right into TVC! And if you are very lazy and hate nice graphics, there is a summary at the end!

The Vintage Collection Sets

Exactly how many sets are there? And how many exclusives? I included TVC 2.0 up to the exclusive Rey (Island Journey) in this overview.

Number of sets (including vehicles) for TVC

Of the 122 TVC cards, 3 are exclusives (Salacious Crumb, Mouse Droid and Rey (Island Journey)) and one is a Mailaway, they were counted in these categories. The other exclusive sets are mostly retailer exclusive multipacks, SDCC exclusives and the retailer exclusive vehicles. Online exclusive figures (available at several etailers) were not counted as retailer exclusives. The three non-exclusive vehicles were counted in the “Basic” category.

Total number of sets: 186
The Black Series has 161 sets at the time the article is written. 13.5% less than TVC.

2/3 of all sets were available either at brick & mortar or etailers, less than 1/5 were exclusives and around 13% of the sets are Chase variants.

How many exclusive figures are there in total, when you consider all figures and vehicles in all sets? For this all the figures and vehicles are counted individually. This also means that the pit droids that came with the pod racers also count as individual figures.

Total number of all the figures, vehicles, accessories in TVC is 249

Of the 92 figures/vehicles that are part of an exlusive set 12 figures are also Chase figures and another 6 were the Lost Line which were available at retail. So in total there are 74 figures which were only found in an exclusive set.

29.72% of all vehicles and figures are only found in an exclusive TVC set.

Hasbro seems to like this ratio since roughly 1/3 of the Black Series figures are exclusives also.

And finally, how many figures and vehicles in total are there? The Speeder Bikes that came with the AT-ATs are counted too, as are the pit droids.

Jar-Jar Binks in Carbonite and the Ewok Catapult count as accessories. TVC is mostly about humans and aliens, which should be no surprise.

• approx. 82% are humans/aliens (Black Series more than 86%)
• approx. 9% are droids (Black Series less than 7%)
• approx. 7% are vehicles (Black Series approx. 3%)

Total number of all the figures, vehicles and accessories is 249.

The Black Series has a total number of 194 figures, vehicles and accessories. Which is 22% less than TVC. But the ratio of humans/aliens to droids is actually not that different. However, most droids in the Black Series are exclusives.

TVC New and Re-used Figures

The Vintage Collection didn’t exist in a vacuum and had lots of pre-existing figures that it could tweak, unlike the Black Series which had to tool everything. How many completely new TVC figures are there?

Number of new and re-used figures

For this statistic I only counted Unique Figures, these are figures which are visibly different because they are either costume variants or repaints. Straight repacks within TVC were not counted, so any Chase figures etc are disregarded. Vehicles and Accessories were not counted either.

Note: a kit-bashed figured could also be a repaint, but any repainted kit-bashed figure counts as kit-bashed only.

Let’s look at percentages:

Share of new and re-used figures

So, all in all, only a little more than 1/3 of all Unique Figures are new figures. Approx. 60% of all the Unique Figures used a pre-existing figure in some way.

Of the 18 vehicles in total, not a single one was new. 10 are repaints, 5 are repacks, 2 are kit-bashed and 1 is a retool.

TVC Figures per Movie / Show

For this category I only consider the figures, not the vehicles. Of all the vehicles, counting Speeder-Bikes as well, five can be used for Prequel era displays, 14 can be used for Original Trilogy movies.

But what about the figures?

Click for larger graphic

For this statistic I considered Unique Figures only, these are figures that are visibly different, either because they are a paint or costume variant.

ROTJ has the most figures available. ESB is a close second and ANH is already lagging behind the other two OT Movies. The Prequels have good representation. As expected the Disney era has few figures available.

How many Unique Figures are there for each trilogy? Let’s see:

TVC figures per trilogy / show

The Original Trilogy is clearly the favorite trilogy. Disney era movies have few figures available, and the Stand Alone category mostly uses figures from the Lucas era.

A look at percentages, considering only figures that originated in either the Lucas or Disney era:

TVC is about the Lucas era

To the surprise of no one TVC is about the Lucas era. It remains to be seen how many Disney era figures TVC will add in the coming months and years. But it will be a long time before Disney era figures have some representation in TVC.

The Vintage Collection Gender

How many female TVC action figures are there?

Number of male and female TVC figures

• Unique Characters disregard any costume or paint variants for a character. So all the various Luke figures count as “1”.
• Unique Figures counts all visibly different figures
• All Figures counts just everything, even repacked Chase variants

As you can see TVC is mostly about male action figures. The total number of female figures is almost identical to the Black Series. It has 11 unique female characters (plus 1 female Porg figure), 22 unique figures (with Porg) and 25 female figures (with Porg) in total. It’s somewhat surprising perhaps that despite the focus on female characters in the new Disney movies the Black Series actually has less unique female characters in the line. But they have quite a lot of costume variants.

The percentages paint a very clear picture here:

TVC gender share

Around 90% of all the figures are male. I considered the Mouse Droid genderless.

The Black Series also has 90% unique male characters. This may come as a surprise because of the many new female main characters in Disney Star Wars. But the increased number of female characters in the new Star Wars movies does not really reflect that much in the number of female figures in the line compared with TVC.

The Vintage Collection Species

How many Aliens and Droids are in TVC?

TVC species

• Unique Characters disregard any costume or paint variants for a character. So all the various Luke figures count as “1”.
• Unique Figures counts all visibly different figures
• All Figures counts just everything, even repacked Chase variants

TVC is still dominated by humans, but there is also a sizeable fraction of aliens and quite a few droids in the line.

The percentages are as follows:

TVC species percentages

Looking at Unique Figures, a little more than 1/4 of all figures are aliens. Not bad, considering that Star Wars has so many great alien (background) characters.

The Black Series is much worse in this category. Around 12% of all Black Series figures are aliens and less than 7% are droids. However, the Black Series actually has more creatures. But still, TVC is more diverse and the Black Series mostly focuses on human main characters.

If you want to have colorful background characters for your display TVC is the better option still.

The Vintage Collection Heroes & Villains

Star Wars has many great heroes and villains. How many are there in TVC?

Heroes & villains in TVC

• Unique Characters disregard any costume or paint variants for a character. So all the various Luke figures count as “1”.
• Unique Figures counts all visibly different figures
• All Figures counts just everything, even repacked Chase variants

Note: a character can both be a hero and a villain. Darth Vader is one example, Commander Cody another.

Let’s look at the percentages:

Share of heroes, villains and neutral characters

TVC has a lot more neutral characters compared to the Black Series, another indicator that TVC has more neutral background characters. The Black Series focuses mostly on heroes and villains.

The Black Series also has much fewer unique hero characters than TVC. Shares for the Unique Figures and All Figures are similar though. Which shows that the Black Series relies on fewer heroes in total but gives them quite a few costume variants.

What’s the situation with female heroes and villains? Let’s take a look!

TVC heroes & villains by gender

For this statistic only Unique Figures were counted!

There are only few female heroes and villains, since TVC has a lower share of female figures compared with the Black Series.

And it will surprise no one that the Black Series has more female hero figures! 20 Unique Figures compared with the 14 TVC has on offer. Jyn and Rey leave their mark.
However, TVC has more female villains, 4 instead of just the 1 lone Phasma in the Black Series.

The Vintage Collection Troopers

In the final category let’s take a quick look at how many troopers there are in TVC.

Troopers in TVC

Despite TVC having more Unique Characters and Unique Figures at its disposal than the Black Series, the Black Series has more trooper figures, roughly 50% more!

And a look at the percentages:

Share of trooper figures in TVC

In comparison, the Black Series has 42% troopers in the Unique Characters category, 33% in Unique Figures and 31% in All Figures.

The Black Series focuses much more on Clone Troopers and Stormtroopers than TVC ever did.

Summary

• TVC has almost 250 figures, vehicles and accessories (Ewok Catapult and Jar-Jar in Carbonite). This is 22% more than the Black Series has.
• TVC has 140 Unique Characters and 173 Unique Figures. The Black Series has 117 Unique Characters and 159 Unique Figures. You can see that the Black Series has more costume variants for its characters but almost no box variants, TVC had quite a few card variants in comparison, hence the much higher number of total figures.
• Hasbro seems to think that approx. 30% exclusive figures is a good ratio, since both TVC and the Black Series have around 30% exclusive figures/vehicles.
• Only around 38% of TVC figures are actually new. The other 62% were re-used, either as repacks, repaints or kit-bashed. The Black Series has a much higher percentage of all new figures due to the nature of the line.
• The majority of TVC figures are humans. But TVC has a much higher share of aliens than the Black Series.
• There are few female figures in TVC. And even though Disney Star Wars has so many female main characters the actual total number of female action figures in the Black Series is almost identical to TVC and the Black Series has even one less unique female character (not counting the female Porg).
• And to the surprise of no one TVC is almost exclusively about the Lucas era of Star Wars. The first few Disney Star Wars characters have made their way into the line though. But it will take years until they have a sizeable share of action figures in the line. This is where both TVC and the Black Series show the greatest difference, because in the Black Series it’s about 50/50 for the Disney and Lucas era.

I hope you found this overview informative and fun!

Taking a detailed look at TVC was fun for me. It makes me regret that I completely missed out on it. I only started collecting in 2013, despite being a lifelong fan since 1978 (the year Star Wars was first shown in Germany). Also, it was curious to see that there is no TVC figure of Princess Leia Organa in her white dress or of Farmboy Luke. You can clearly see that TVC did not exist in a vacuum and built upon other action figure lines and didn’t have to include each and every variant of a character. The Black Series was all new and had to include the most iconic versions of characters.

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