Palpatine - ROTS - Basic (III 35)

The Supreme Chancellor encounters questions about his ultimate motives. During a confrontation with Mace Windu, he uses his deadly powers and experiences unexpected and frightening results.

The Revenge Of The Sith line had some great moments, but other moments were quite disappointing. Take for instance the Palpatine (III 35) figure. What in the world was Hasbro thinking making a salt or pepper shaker with a stupid action feature? Because that’s exactly what Palpatine is. His “feet” are actually a fused-together lever to activate the action feature. By leaning him forward on his feet his arms swing to imitate what swinging a lightsaber would look like. But the action feature fails. For the Revenge Of The Sith line, collectors want authenticity and accuracy in their action features. But Hasbro has decided that kids would be ore interested in an old man with the ability to swing a lightsaber around. As a result, we’re a bit disappointed. There are some saving graces with this Palpatine action figure however. But we doubt that you’ll find them reasons to warrant the purchasing of this figure. Palpatine isn’t a quality action figure. In fact, it’s hard to call him an action figure at all. In fact, we see him as an action gimmick.

While Palpatine will never be one of the greatest action figures of all time, Hasbro did placate some collectors with the inclusion of some interchangeable parts. Palpatine comes with interchangeable post-disfiguration head and hands as well as pre-disfiguration “handsome” (not our words) head and hands. He also comes with Force lightning which is more obligatory than anything else here. No matter how we slice it, Palpatine is just not for us. We understand the need for some of us to collect one of every figure, but Palpatine is just a nightmare at every level. We don’t want to discount what the Revenge Of The Sith line has brought collectors. Many Collection 1 and Collection 2 figures are very impressive and many more won’t ever need a revisit in our eyes, so Hasbro did a pretty great job overall. But because Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious action figures aren’t common at all, we’re concerned how long we’re going to have to wait to get a definitive update at this point.

You’re probably aware that there is also a running change to this figure. There were many running changes in the Revenge Of The Sith line. Hasbro wasn’t given the full spread of reference materials to create details that would give away major plot in the film, so some things were guessed and one such thing affected Palpatine. He was first shipped with a blue lightsaber blade. Perhaps it may have not been part of the original plans to attack the Jedi during his attempted arrest with his own lightsaber. Maybe he was able to wrangle one away from the Jedi instead. Who knows? But then Hasbro updated this figure to include a red lightsaber (the one shown in our gallery at the moment). But since Darth Sidious has a unique lightsaber hilt, even the red blade is technically inaccurate. So really this figure just needs a complete revisit from the ground up. We’d love to have this version of Darth Sidious in super-articulated form. But we wonder how long it would be until that happens. After all, this would be a definite collector-focused figure for sure. It never should have been made with kids in mind.