Star Wars Figure of the Day: Day 2,999: Grogu (The Black Series)

GROGU at full price
The Black Series 2020 Line Look Orange The Mandalorian Packaging
Item No.: Asst. E8908 No. F4357
Manufacturer: Hasbro
Number: #26 - The Mandalorian
Includes: Storage box, frog, knob, bowl, Beskar mythosaur skull necklace, cookie tube, floating pram
Action Feature: Connecting lightsaber parts
Retail: $24.99
Availability: December 2022
Appearances: The Mandalorian

Bio: A mysterious alien pursued by bounty hunters on behalf of Imperial interests. (Taken from the packaging, which occupies a fair amount of space in six languages.)

Image: Adam's photo lab.

Availability: Click here to buy it at Entertainment Earth now!

Click here to buy it at Amazon now!

Commentary: You should be insulted. Hasbro and Disney and Lucasfilm and everybody have been milking the popularity of The Child to the point of the absurd, but you also get to see so many riffs on the idea. Baby dolls, Pop! vinyl figures, 1980s-style collectible figures, games, clothes, and just about everything. With The Black Series (and to a lesser extent, The Vintage Collection) Hasbro elected to push for premium pricing. Just a Grogu by himself with some gear was once $10. Target's exclusive Grogu was $35 - but it also included a lot of accessories and Mando with him. Retro and Vintage Grogu were $10 and $15, and some were packed in as accessories with other figures. But this is $25 - and that's absurd. Hasbro has a 6-inch scale "toy" one with pram for $5, a 9-inch scale one for $10, and so many other toys that offer more for less. If Hasbro put all of this on a Vintage cardback for $18, you'd complain about the value. It's basically an accessory pack with no action figure, but priced as a full-blown action figure. And it'll sell, because it's Grogu, but it's just one more figure that people who are still collecting-them-all will begrudgingly buy in the name of completeness. It is not a bad product - it is just a wildly poorly priced one.

The Retro Collection Grogu gave you a similarly sized figure minus a couple of accessories for about $10. You could buy that figure, plus the first The Black Series Grogu (which features the same accessory box in this set), and it'd only be $20. Not included in the overlap are the cookies or necklace, which at best would be around $1 or $2 - and both of those other Grogu figures were also overpriced for what you got. I'm being repetitive now. My expectations for this one were low, and that turned out to be appropriate.

The figure itself has your little green buddy sitting down with jointed arms. Each hand has open fingers, and the right hand can hold his cookies. The head and each hand are jointed, and some brown paint over the brown garment is barely visible. His black eyes have a little pink around them, as do his ears. You wouldn't miss it if it were left out, and it's good that they did something with the deco to make it not seem like the most cynical product in the line.

Accessory interactivity is not fantastic. The clear box of gear is good to not lose the tiny accessories, but no such love was given to the other stuff. He can't wear the necklace without popping off his head, and I am hesitant to do that. The cookies can be held just fine, and the hands are not posed properly to make use of the bowl or the shifter knob really. Alternate arms or a bonus alternate figure would have helped. He can sit in his pram just fine, but getting the pieces on it to align and shut properly has proven difficult. It won't fully close - the form fit is awful on mine. The deco is nice, I appreciate the weathering and orange tripes, but it seems poorly manufactured. Having said that, the interior is nicely painted and sculpted.

What I wish Hasbro would've done was to include more than one Grogu in the set - there's so little going on here that they could toss two or three uniquely posed figures, with different expressions, and it would still feel like something of a bad value. But not this bad. If this were the only way to get the character, I would say hold your nose and buy it. But it's not - you have a lot of options and almost all of which can be had at a better price. (Surprising no one, my favorite is the "Kenner" one.) Making money is important but I think Hasbro really whiffed this one. Including a Grogu with a lesser character (say, the Client) to boost sales as an "accessory" would have made sense. Throw in other accessories as bonuses with other slower-selling figures to encourage collecting, or alternate Grogus, also makes sense. If this figure included droid parts or extra gear for Mando or just something that would make this seem like you got more plastic than a 3 3/4-inch scale figure for $10 cheaper, I wouldn't complain. But this did not happen. And it won't matter, because this will fly off the shelves as a 1-per-case figure during the weeks before season three of The Mandalorian premieres. The character's popularity will probably make this a critic-proof product unless people are over The Mandalorian or season three of the show winds up turning people off. I expect they'll be confused given how many people skipped The Book of Boba Fett, but such is life.

Collector's Notes: I got mine from Entertainment Earth.

--Adam Pawlus

Day 2,999: January 31, 2023