September 16, 2003
IG88 Wuz Robbed!
The minute I saw that somebody compiled the
Top Eleven Strangest Star Wars Action Figures (spotted via
Pop Culture Junk Mail), I had to check and see if that boxy robot with two legs was on it. Sure enough, the Power Droid is listed first! This was one of my favorite SW figures, perhaps because it had a simple design. A box with legs. Another favorite of mine was the droid that looks like C3P0 but is silver instead of gold (okay, Kenner never issued that one. It was just a regular C3P0 whose gold had faded away in the sun).
Posted by mhinrichs at September 16, 2003 09:40 PM
Back before fancy Web browsers, when we nerds relied on newsgroups to entertain us, there was a faction of the alt.starwars group that developed a "religion" around that power droid. We (and I do mean we, I was part of this group) called him Gonk, due to the noise he made. There were many rules of Gonk worship, mostly having to do with the number of exclamation points that could follow his name (I believe it had to be an odd number) and something to do with spatulas (don't ask me, I was only a college freshman).
Thanks to the joy of newsgroup archiving, you can find far too many posts on the subject (including many overly-sigged posts by yours truly) through Google. The Internet will never let me live down my shame.
I was always puzzled why Governor Tarkin (played by Peter Cushing) never had an action figure. Sure, it would have been a little boring but at least he was better known than some of the others.
There might not have been a small Grand Moff Tarkin figure ,but there was one that was 12" tall. Almost 4 times as large, but only half a boring.
I have to admit that 2 1-B (the medical droid on Hoth) became my droid of choice when my Star Wars figures went on their adventures--his claw hands were too cool.
And could you style the hair on that Grand Moff Tarkin 12" figure? That would have been the bomb, whipping Peter Cushing's hair into a nice bouffant or something.
