Hot Toys’ eerily accurate action figures always have something a bit uncanny about them. Sometimes the accuracy goes beyond detail and into almost homunculus-esque territory; in others, it asks us to question some of the weirdness of these fantastical characters when rendered in such realistic action figure flesh. But its latest dispatch from a galaxy far, far away has people talking about eeriness of a very different sort.
Over the weekend Hot Toys marked Star Wars Day with a slew of reveals of new high-end 1/6 scale figures from across the saga. Maul from Shadow Lord, Luke from The Last Jedi, and even a figure of Anakin Skywalker based on early concept art from Revenge of the Sith were all on the docket. But only one figure has gotten people talking, for better or worse: Ahsoka Tano.
The new figure depicts a realistic take on Ahsoka’s debut appearance in the 2008 Clone Wars movie. Featuring her early Padawan outfit, the figure even comes with a backpack containing the young Rotta the Hutt (aka Stinky), fortuitously timed with his own upcoming live-action debut in The Mandalorian and Grogu, as well as the usual things like alternate hands, light-up versions of her lightsabers, and more. None of that is really the issue that’s been causing debate among Star Wars fans—it’s the fact that a version of Ahsoka inspired by her live-action appearances has been given a costume that, by and large, Star Wars has tried to move on from for years. Especially when that figure uses the likeness of actress Ariana Greenblatt, who portrayed the young Ahsoka in live-action.
It’s hard for some fans to even imagine almost 20 years on, but when Ahsoka was first introduced, she was not a universally beloved character. There were myriad reasons—she was a child character acting as the kid audience surrogate in a cartoon series, and she was, as the nickname Anakin quickly gave her, snippy. Unfortunately, she was also a female character, and even back then, that was still something certain people got upset about. But there was also some debate over her appearance: a teen girl in a short skirt and a tube top, showing a lot of skin for a character who was meant to be around 14 years old, let alone someone on the front lines of a galactic conflict.
Clone Wars would move on from the look soon enough; when the series updated its visual aesthetic in time for its third season, Ahsoka received a new outfit more in line with producer Dave Filoni’s original plans for the character—who has by and large credited George Lucas with a lot of the tweaks and changes made to Ahsoka’s initial design to get the first outfit she appeared in. As Ahsoka got more and more popular with fans over Clone Wars and then her appearances in Rebels and eventually live-action projects, that first costume has largely been consigned to memory.
So it’s weird that Hot Toys put an Ahsoka that looks like Greenblatt’s take on her in a costume that Greenblatt’s Ahsoka never wore—especially when, in part, some of the shock of Greenblatt’s performance of the character was the stark reminder of just how young Ahsoka was meant to be during Clone Wars. When the Ahsoka Disney+ series flashed back to the events of the 2008 movie, Greenblatt’s Ahsoka wore an updated costume that got rid of the tube top look, even when it was depicting events where she originally wore that costume—a costume Hot Toys had already turned into an action figure. When the animated anthology series Tales of the Jedi did its own flashbacks to Ahsoka’s early training, it in turn gave her another updated costume for that period—a melding of her Ahsoka flashback look and her original Clone Wars outfit, not quite a full tunic but showing much less of her midriff than the original.
It’s a bit of an own goal for Hot Toys that the news around its May 4 reveals is now primarily about how people are put off by this figure of Ahsoka, rather than necessarily the quality of the figures themselves. It would’ve been easy to reuse their Greenblatt sculpt for a new figure by depicting another costume she wore in those flashback scenes—her getup from the Siege of Mandalore. It would’ve been even easier to just not use the live-action Ahsoka look at all and do something stylized, like they have for figures based on other animated ventures like Into the Spider-Verse or KPop Demon Hunters. In calling back to the original outfit, but with a very realistic rendition, it’s only served to dig up debates about why that costume was dropped in the first place years ago.
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