Clone Commander Cody - SW [DV/ROTS] - Saga Legends (SL12)

Clone Commander Cody serves under Jedi General Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Clone Wars. Cody is part of the Kenobi's fateful mission to the planet Utapau to take down General Grievous and deliver a decisive blow to the Separatists.

You’ve heard it before from us. It’s our decision to remain as neutral as possible with regards to our stance surrounding the new Saga Legends line. At face value we’re not fans of Hasbro’s new vision. And we do our best to look at what’s inside the package objectively. Sadly, the proof is in the pudding and what Hasbro is shelling out for the new action figure line just isn’t coming up to snuff. We’ll elaborate on that in a moment. Hasbro started off the line with a Prequel Trilogy inaugural case assortment, but subsequent waves seem a little bit more balanced and it appears as if Hasbro realizes that they need to start bringing everyone more of a variety if this line is to sustain itself. As a result, they’re starting to bring Original Trilogy characters and The Clone Wars characters into the line also. Clone Commander Cody might be another Prequel Trilogy, but he’s a decorated clone and he may just be one of the most popular characters in both Revenge Of The Sith and The Clone Wars television show. It only makes sense that he is in one of the first waves of a new basic figure line.... again. As you might expect, Clone Commander Cody comes with five points of articulation. Certainly nothing new is with that, but it’s his paint operations that hurt the most.

Before you itemize what’s wrong with the paint job, let’s talk about the sculpt a little bit more first. Clone Commander Cody has been posed where his head is looking downward a little bit (almost as if he is looking at a nonexistent hologram of Darth Sidious). As you might imagine, this severely limits how much you can do with the figure. They should have gone with a simpler and more generic type of pose for him. Hasbro also might have been better to not sculpt his left shoulder antenna either. It’s flaccid like a wet noodle and unless you do the boil and reposition trick, there is no way it’s going to stand upright. (We personally couldn’t be bothered to waste our time doing that for the photo gallery. We apologize.) In a surprising move, Hasbro designed a separate removable jetpack. The nice thing about it is that it firmly stays in place thanks to a thicker attachment peg. This won’t fall off at all which is a very nice thing. Clone Commander Cody also comes with a DC-15 blaster. But even with two separate accessories, we feel that he’s a bit too light. This is a Star Wars character that is known for having a arsenal of accessories, so it definitely feels like things are missing here, well, because they are.

So, one would reason that if Hasbro has decided to save money by creating simply articulated action figures that they might have a few extra pennies to put towards the deco. But you would be wrong about that. In a very, very disappointing move, Clone Commander Cody suffers the most cutbacks in its paint operations of all the figures in the second wave of Saga Legends. The biggest eyesore is his utility belt. Shockingly, Hasbro has managed to sculpt the belt upright, but his right side of the belt is white, where that “buckle” should be colored the same orange as the rest of his color flashes. If that’s not disappointing enough, his posterior is even worse. It seems as if Hasbro didn’t even acknowledge that the figure has a reverse side. You cannot see any of the black body glove at the joints, and his jetpack has been completely ignored and contains no deco whatsoever. Even his helmet is missing many details that many will find very disappointing. Still the argument remains. Will kids care about these missing detail? Maybe not, but collectors will and that could translate as a “no sale” for Hasbro. Don’t they want as many sales as possible? Don’t they need volume to make these new sculpts cost effective? We don’t claim to have all of the answers, but we know that this will be a less that desirable way to go for the collectors’ line, which again, Hasbro claims there is no difference between the two anymore. They create figures for everyone.