Back in March over at Star Wars site Galactic Hunter Adam Pawlus set out to get some sort of near-definitive count of how many "different" Star Wars action figures had been released by Kenner/Hasbro since 1978 (you can read his results/method of counting here). The number he arrived at was eye-opening to say the least, but a number of people questioned what he considered "new" or "different enough" to be added to the tally. I actually had a different reaction; I didn’t think that he took the definition of "figure" far enough in his count. I thought about my method of accounting "figures" which I know would lead to a much higher number the way I would count it. Admittedly I haven’t even started my own count because I just can’t get myself to actually settle on what rules I use to define a figure… When I do get around to doing my count I want to try to do it right the first time and I want to put it together into a database format so that by pulling different parameters a user could get a count based on their own definitions — a daunting task to start with, I’m sure, but once started it should go quickly and be easy to keep up-to-date (well, that’s what I think right now, anyway…).
Right now, here are my "rules" for what defines a Star Wars figure: Any human, alien, droid or creature counts regardless of size, articulation or pack-in status. My reasoning for such a crazy rule?… Why, for example, should a pack-in Pit Droid not count if there is a basic carded release that features two of them? Why shouldn’t a pack-in Gonk Droid count separately from the Jawa when it was later sold carded as the main figure in the pack with another pack-in droid? Why should Jabba not count as a "figure"?… Is it because he was sold as a "beast"?… If that’s the case, why should the Nexu count as a "figure" even though it was sold as a deluxe figure since it is obviously a "beast"? Why shouldn’t the patrol droid packed with the Sandtrooper in the 3D Cantina count as a "figure"?… It’s a small droid, does that mean that R2-D2 shouldn’t count because he’s a small droid?… What of Wokling Nippet from the just released Leektar and Nippet pack?… Sure the Wokling doesn’t have any articulation but it gets "name credit" on the package, so why shouldn’t it count? The original 3 3/4" sized hologram figures that were sold at Wal-Mart weren’t articulated but what should keep them off the list when the other hologram figures that have articulation would make the cut? Why would an articulated Pit Droid count when the folded one packed with Jar Jar wouldn’t, they are both the same type of droid after all? What of the droids in the Episode I accessory packs, shouldn’t they count as figures? How about "dedicated" (non-removable) figures like the Cruisemissle Trooper or the Ammo Wagon Gungan (admittedly I did stop counting starfighter droid domes as figures — although I still count the R2 and Luke in the FX X-Wing, and I never counted the Battle Droid that gets "battle damaged" in the ATT)?
As you can see, my reasoning is a bit on the "creative" side and that’s what’s going to make the list a challenge to put together and put together right. I know that many of you will laugh at the lengths I’ve gone to in defining what is a "figure" but I just have a hard time with saying that a pit droid is a figure but the folded pit droid isn’t… Why is an Astromech droid a figure but a Hailfire Droid isn’t?… I think that the only places that I’ve really drawn the line beyond the droid domes is with the little hologram figures (like the Leia that came with the CommTech R2, not the bonus pack-ins from 2006), the chubas that come with Gragra and the skeleton that’s packed with Amanaman (they are dead, afterall), those aren’t figures by my definition (but that may change by the time it’s all done). Hmmm,… That brings up another question,… Should the brain in the jar and the spider droid that make up the B’omarr Monk figure be counted seperately?… Hmmm…
So by my counts,…
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Rancor?… Figure.
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Treadwell Droid (the one packed with Aunt Beru)?… Figure.
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Tauntaun?… Figure.
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IT-0 Interrogation Droid?… Figure.
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Faamba?… Figure.
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Dead Chubas?… Not a figure.
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Wal-Mart Holographic Qui-Gon Jinn?… Figure.
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Accessory pack Sith Probe?… Figure.
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Jedi Starfighter Droid Dome?… Not a figure.
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Ammo Wagon Gungan?… Figure.
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Hailfire Droid?… Figure.
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Destroyer Droid from the R2 Carry Case?… Figure.
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B’omarr Monk brain jar?… Not sure…
All right, you’ve seen the madness to my methods, what say you?… (Psst,… you don’t have to limit discussions to Star Wars, I’ve got these kinds of crazy ideas about Mattel’s DC stuff, too…)
(Gotta give a thanks to Cantina-Dan for giving me the inspiration for this blog.)
Milestone Comics. I’ll admit, I’ve never read an issue of any of the series. When they came out, I was burned out from trying a number of independant series only to be disappointed in one way or another. I also had been through a cost cutting round that left me with no Marvel comics left. I’d come full circle back to DC. Now, Static Shock the cartoon? I am a huge fan of that. The fact that Static teamed up with Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Batman Beyond, and the JLU cemented him in the DCU in my mind.
It wasn’t the title of the book that intrigued me. It was the subtitle: "A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel." The author, Michio Kaku, was interviewed on a local radio show and when he started mentioning Star Wars and Harry Potter I cocked an eyebrow. For his high school science fair project, Michio Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his mom’s garage. He went to the Westinghouse company and gathered 400 pounds of scrap transformer steel. Over Christmas he wound 22 miles of copper wire on his high school football field. Eventually he built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator, which generated a magnetic field of 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. His goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter. Uh-huh. He eventually went on to cofound string field theory. Yeah. Super nerd? No doubt. Geek like us? Definitely! See for yourself.. 
The entrance to the Mattel booth was Castle Greyskull. That was pretty cool. My wife went to a panel with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly for the new "The Day the Earth Stood Still" remake and, as a surprise to everyone, Hugh Jackman shows up at the end, thanks the fans and shows a new Wolverine trailer. Really cool. Oh, and she got me a free tee shirt they were giving out that says "Klaatu barada nikto" across the front. Nice. At the Mattel panel Friday we were shown so many new JLU figures I wept. Mark Shultz gave me the poster he was selling for free, I demoed the new Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, I ran into Seth Green cruising through the Hasbro Star Wars area, and I got an inflatable He-Man power sword. Yet for me none of these were this year’s highlight . . . 