This past weekend at San Diego Comic-Con 2023, I had the wonderful opportunity to swing by Hasbro’s booth and talk with two members of the popular toy company’s Star Wars team, namely Patrick Schneider and Chris Reiff, about the big new toy announcements coming out of the convention from A Galaxy Far, Far Away, including the highly anticipated Ghost HasLab project in the 3 ¾-inch scale The Vintage Collection and new action figures from Star Wars: Ahsoka.
Mike Celestino, Laughing Place: I’m always curious about the Hasbro booth at events like this. How do you decide which preexisting toys you want to highlight and emphasize?
Patrick Schneider: It’s a good question, and it is different [from Star Wars Celebration, which is] obviously all Star Wars, so it’s a very different process. We’ve got a great display here at SDCC, but [it’s] part of the larger Hasbro family. The process is interesting– like the toy line, it’s very collaborative with Lucasfilm and Disney. We internally have brainstorm conversations [about] what we think are the biggest beats. It’s really the full team’s input; we get some ideas, we certainly also talk with Lucasfilm and Disney about what their focus will be. Obviously if you’ve walked through the Lucasfilm booth, Ahsoka is a huge focus, so we knew we wanted to focus on that as well. Return of the Jedi’s 40th, we’re right in the midst, we’re two months after the actual 40th anniversary, and it continues to be a big beat throughout the year. And then of course [The] Mandalorian season three just ended a few months ago, so those were the big focuses for us here in the booth.
Chris Reiff: And our HasLab!
LP: Yes! Of course, and I will get to that for sure. But speaking of the Return of the Jedi display, you had already announced The Book of Boba Fett’s Bib Fortuna throne room for The Vintage Collection, and now you’re releasing a Jabba the Hutt on a dais that can swap out with that. Was that always the plan?
Reiff: Well, we knew we wanted to do Jabba for the Return of the Jedi 40th celebration. I mean it’s Jedi. Jabba’s a quintessential character as part of that. We addressed him in The Black Series and in TVC, and it was just a great opportunity and a great mesh with The Book of Boba Fett throne room to be able to do that.
LP: I’m super excited that you keep building out that playset.
Schneider: Yeah, we’ve talked about it in the displays here. It’s amazing– five years ago we didn’t have any of that. 2019, getting that first [Jabba’s Palace] Adventure Set, then the Boba Fett throne room last year, obviously the dais as you mentioned. A lot of the characters there have been released recently: the Jabba’s Denizen pack, Yak Face, and Klaatu [are] all in our re-release wave, so it’s been great building out that scene, that first third of Return of the Jedi– one of the most epic setpieces in Star Wars history.
LP: Getting into your panel announcements from this SDCC, one of the things that got me and some of my friends the most excited was the Life Day Chewbacca. I feel like Lucasfilm has been embracing Life Day a little bit more in recent years. Can you talk about the decision to bring that into The Vintage Collection?
Reiff: Well yeah, it’s an important holiday for the [Disney] Parks. Now at Galaxy’s Edge we celebrate Life Day at a location– we have a place to do that, and for fans to embrace that weird part of our history. We love it, and the figure’s a great way to help celebrate that with the parks.
LP: Then there’s some new live-action Star Wars coming up very soon with Ahsoka on Disney+. Tell me about the figures that you guys announced in correlation with that show.
Schneider: I’m super excited. It looks amazing; I can’t wait. I loved Rebels when it was on, so seeing that trailer last week, having that Rebels reunion [was very exciting]. Yesterday both The Black Series and The Vintage Collection got some characters from Ahsoka, which I’m trying to remember the last time we have revealed figures before a show launches. I guess we did it with Andor last year, but these figures will be on shelves during the show, which it’s been years since that’s happened, so that’s cool. We’ve got Black Series Ahsoka [Tano], Black Series Sabine [Wren], Black Series Hera [Syndulla], and then Vintage Sabine and Vintage Ahsoka. They look amazing– obviously they look great in the trailers, and these won’t be the last.
LP: I love the boxed sets of the Retro Collection figures that you’ve been doing. They’ve been selling at Disney Parks, and there were the first two boxes representing the first dozen Kenner Star Wars toys that came out in the 1970s. And now you’ve skipped to Return of the Jedi, which is great for the 40th anniversary, but I’d love to see you go back and do that for The Empire Strikes Back as well. Tell me a little bit about what’s happening with the Retro Collection.
Reiff: Well, we’ve released [individual] Empire figures in the past. With the A New Hope ones, we really wanted to do Artoo and Threepio, and [the trick was] finding the right time to do that. To do that six-pack in partnership with shopDisney and the parks, that was just a great way to get that out. Now we’re in a Return of the Jedi celebration, so doing those figures– we’ve already revealed and shown earlier Return of the Jedi stuff. They’re great, and getting to do those deep-dives on characters, and [even] unproduced characters– Mon Mothma– for me that was a great one to be able to do, a figure that Kenner could have easily done back in the day and didn’t, so kind of a missing hole from people’s collections from back then, in a way. And then to do stuff like Yak Face, a figure that was very uncommon in the US, especially, to be able to deliver that for people, it’s super meaningful.
Schneider: I think it also tracks the growth of Retro, [which] launched in 2019 with those six Episode IV figures. It wasn’t an anniversary year; it was to celebrate the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga. When we were planning 2020, Retro hadn't even launched yet, so we didn’t know how big it was going to be. We planned those six figures, [and] we were able to finish the original twelve for Episode IV in its 45th anniversary year, so we’ll see what happens in the future.
LP: Let’s get into the Ghost HasLab project. I just checked and it’s ¾ of the way funded. [Note: as of this writing, the project has been fully funded, becoming a success within four days of its announcement]. Do you feel like this is a return to form for Star Wars HasLab, and what have you learned from the previous two that didn’t make their goals?
Schneider: It’s definitely a return to form. Star Wars launched HasLab in 2018 with the [Khetanna Jabba’s Sail] Barge. We had a then-record-setting campaign with the Razor Crest, you mentioned the past two– we won’t talk anymore about those. [laughs] But [with] this one, we knew it was time for HasLab to come back to The Vintage Collection, and these things work perfectly when everything syncs up. The Razor Crest, a beloved vehicle, super cool, during Mandalorian season two, the right size and right scale for The Vintage Collection, and everything is lining up here with the Ghost as well. We do a lot of research; we know that this is the most-requested dream item from the Vintage community, Rebels is beloved, it’s timing up with the Ahsoka entertainment. We’re able to show it here– this is the first time ever we’re showing a fully deco’d model at launch, first time ever we’re showing all the tiers here in person at SDCC. Everything came together and it’s tracking [really well]. On the first day, we had more backers than the Razor Crest did in its first day, so we’ll see where it ends up, but we couldn't be more pleased.
LP: What do you think it is about The Vintage Collection that connects with fans so much? Is it just because that’s the 3 ¾-inch scale that we’re used to going all the way back to the beginning of Star Wars action figures?
Reiff: I think that’s part of it. I also think it has to do with the fact that at that scale, we can do a lot of worldbuilding. We can immerse people in scenes and deal with vehicles in a way we can’t in a larger scale. For the same reason that Kenner ended up doing 3 ¾ figures: it opened up a world of vehicles that Star Wars is all about– and playsets, all that. And I think that still holds true today with the 3 ¾-inch line– we can do things that we can’t elsewhere, and it really lets people connect emotionally to that. The Ghost is a great example. We’ve got four seasons of relationship with the Ghost already. That pulls at people’s heartstrings as it is, and then knowing that it’s coming in Ahsoka, getting that reference of what the [live-action] version of the Ghost looks like, instead of the animated version, we could lean into that and really make the Ghost as it’s going to appear in Ahsoka, and get all that detail down.
Schneider: And I will just also say, this is our third Vintage HasLab. We’ve only done one in The Black Series six-inch scale. It clearly wasn’t what the fans are looking for, but those fans are just as passionate as our Vintage fans, and in the future, when everything syncs up, I’m sure we’ll return [to The Black Series] again.
LP: I want to wrap up by asking about Indiana Jones. I love what you did with the Adventure Series, but we didn’t get any new Indy announcements at the panel. With Dial of Destiny having already been released and that campaign over, is there a chance we’ll get any more Indy toys from Hasbro?
Schneider: As always, we can’t say anything that’s not [already] revealed, but [with this convention] the focus was on Star Wars here, obviously with Ahsoka a month away [and] the launch of the HasLab. So we’ll see what happens in the future. A lot depends on how the [Indiana Jones] line does. We’ve heard a lot of passion here, I personally would love to see more Indy toys in the future, but we’ll see.
Be sure to visit HasbroPulse.com for more information on these announcements and to pre-order many of the new Star Wars toys from Hasbro. The audio version of this interview is included in Episode 163 of Laughing Place’s Star Wars podcast “Who’s the Bossk?”