VENDOR DROID Silver
Star Tours Droid Factory Customizable Figure
Item No.: ???
Manufacturer: Disney?
Number: n/a
Includes: n/a
Action Feature: Removable limbs
Retail: $12.95
Availability: April 2017
Appearances: The Clone Wars
Bio: A vendor droid, also known as a shopkeeper droid, was a type of droid assigned to sell merchandise. (Stolen from Wookieepedia.)
Image: Adam's photo lab.
Availability: Click here to buy it at eBay now!
Commentary: I've had a few of these for a while, but haven't reviewed them - but I hear parts bins are supposedly making the rounds again in some parks. So let's check out the
Silver Vendor Droid, or Shop Droid, or whatever the cool kids are calling them. Is there some reason to bring it up now, to showcase it, is it appearing in something, somewhere? No. It's just a build-a-droid, made from a parts bin, and it's more of a souvenir than a part of this complete
breakfast action figure collection. My pal Shannon put it together for me since he's able to go to Disney more than I am. (I think I was last at a theme park in 2016?)
It's funny calling anything obscure in the age of the internet, but the Disney droids made of parts from bins with no names are somewhat difficult to identify and how many were "manufactured" by fans is hard to know. Given that Disney allowed fans to create what they will, these are likely some of the rarest mass-produced droids in the entire history of
Star Wars collecting. Aside from Vlix.
While neat, I increasingly find that I don't know what to do with some of the droids. The Vintage Collection lacks open-ended playsets or new environments, and we've never really gotten shop or street playsets of note. As such, this guy is just sort of taking up space - but he's pretty cool. This particular configuration uses CZ-style arms, a Shop Droid head, a C-3PO body, and C-3PO legs. The end result is pretty decent, especially since the right shoulder has some blue metallic silver paint on it. It's a subtle accent, but it gives the figure a sense of having been repaired.
He's got standard articulation for one of the Disney droids, with swivel wrists and jointed ankles. It's kind of funny to think that the body is riffing on what was more or less standard for Hasbro's build-a-droid releases in 2008, and here we are 18 years later with some of these molds still in rotation... without a price drop. If you look back to the 2000s and earlier, old molds usually gave us cheaper toys too - that doesn't seem to happen anymore. At the time, $13 for a single droid was still kind of expensive but not horrible for a theme park souvenir. Given how hard these are to get outside the parks, you'll probably pay considerably more for a junker made of random parts, and good luck to you if you can find something cohesive. I like this droid because I generally like droids, but the yellow eyes and blue scanner do little to really add zing to a pretty bland gray/silver chassis. It is a perfectly fine robot, but nothing about it is likely to stand out in a pool of over 3,000
Star Wars action figures in an era where there's no single complete tome of reference allowing any collector to see them all in one place.
Collector's Notes: I got mine from Disney Hollywood Studios. Thanks Shannon!
--Adam Pawlus
Day 3,368: August 4, 2026
