Q and A of the Day: Day 38

Welcome to our next Q and A of the Day post! This column will be published daily, weekly, monthly, or just based on how many questions I get emailed – but no more than one a day. Feel free to send in your questions and I will put them in the queue. Click through for Q and A of the Day: Day 38.

Q: Hi Paul. I have a question you probably know the answer to. The 2010-2011 line of figures seems to go by many names: Saga Legends, Blue Skies, Shadows of the Dark Side. "Saga Legends" makes sense because it's written on most of their packages. However, at the time, the name was used previously, including as a sub-classification to the "30th Anniversary Collection." And right now, we have another "Saga Legends" line. So it's not a good unique identifier. "Shadows of the Dark Side" seems to be the most commonly used name. But, I've always wondered, where does it come from? Thanks. (Jub Goobles)

A: Hey Jub! See the image of one of the slides from Hasbro's 2010 Toy Fair presentation (It's the fifth bullet point.). It clearly describes the 2010/2011 line look as "Shadow Of The Dark Side". (Make sure you don't make "shadow" plural now.) When categorizing Star Wars products, it's first most important to define the line look first, and then all of the sub-lines within that line look second. Otherwise, things can become exponentially confusing at a very brisk rate. When working on The Ultimate Action Figure Collection book, I campaigned for this line look to get this designation (based on this very same slide), but the others didin't feel the same way and decided to call it "Dark Skies" instead. As you can imagine, the decision sticks in my craw a little bit, because there has been public proof that Hasbro has called it "SOTDS". Oh well, you can't win them all I suppose. Technically, the "Shadow Of The Dark Side" line up comprises The Clone Wars (often separated out by itself due to its sheer size of catalogued products – we have it separately listed in our archives too), Saga Legends, Comic Packs and a few other products that are escaping me at the moment. To call this collection "Saga Legends" is very wrong. I will go to my grave saying that. Saga Legends has been a sub-line that has crossed multiple line looks since its inception in 2007. You can see all of the SOTDS products in our RDRs HERE (for Star Wars products) and HERE (for The Clone Wars products). When Hasbro doesn't give the collecting community an easy banner name like The Legacy Collection, or Power Of The Jedi, it certainly makes things difficult for archivist fan sites like ours. But we make the best of it.

But the slide below is where it all originated. You'll notice that JTA has followed similar suit with the most recent line looks. It was I who decided to call the "Darth Maul" line look "Star Wars [The Phantom Menace 3D]". We likewise tried to be consistent with the "Yoda" and "Darth Vader" line looks too.We hope in the future that Hasbro just makes it easy and names the collections themselves, otherwise it will be a crap shoot, and there likely won't be homogeneity within Star Wars fan sites as we're a fickle bunch and can rarely agree on anything as a group. (Not that there's anything wrong with that....)

    Search Q&A of the Day

Most Recent Q&A of the Day: