I love Ralph McQuarrie’s art, very few of his sketches or paintings aren’t mindblowing. And I love that Hasbro immortalized some of his most iconic and memorable designs in plastic. Some of the designs are so nice that I’ve turned his CONCEPTS into unique characters with their own stories in my own Star Wars ‘verse.
Well, his earliest design of bounty hunter IG-88 was a total throwback to early Hollywood sci-fi robots from the 1950s with some trippy 70’s influence added… I wonder if Asimov would have approved. Hasbro kind of caught me off-guard with this design getting a toy when I saw the picture of it from SDCC, I knew one more of his ESB concepts was getting a figure but Iggy was a surprise. Some of the other early designs for the droid were more interesting but this one is again the most well-known. Of course I was going buy it though, it IS a McQ toy afterall, eh? Nonetheless I thought it WAS cool that a fringe character got the concept slot from ESB instead of another main character. Well yesterday I stumbled across this Concept IG88 figure at Kmart of all places and immediately grabbed it, in shock, because I didn’t realize it was even shipping yet. After pulling it out of the package, I actually wasn;t sure if I liked it as a toy or not (as I said, not his best design for the droid IMO).
But when I started messing with the figure today for these pictures I realized how bad ass a toy it actually makes. Now I have to figure an identity for the droid to fit my ‘verse too because it’s too keen to let it just “be” and stand around with no purpose.
