Now that we’re in the final stretch of the 2023 holiday season, I had the terrific opportunity to sit down with Hasbro’s Star Wars team (including Brand Manager Jing Houle and Design Manager Chris Reiff) to discuss the popular toy company’s current offerings from A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
Mike Celestino, Laughing Place: To start things off, which items from your Star Wars lines have proven the most popular with consumers this holiday season? And which do you personally wish to highlight that are available right now?
Jing Houle: There’s so many great figures that are hitting shelves right about now, like the N-1 [Starfighter from The Mandalorian] for example, was pre-ordered a while ago, but it’s hitting shelves now. It’s an amazing vehicle. I think the fan community knows about that well. Chris designed it, and I love that. I love the mini Grogu in there with his shift knob. It’s just so cute.
Chris Reiff: Tapping on the glass. [laughs]
Houle: We’ve also had Ahsoka– the Ahsoka show just wrapped up, as you know, on Disney+, so we have great figures tied to that entertainment. That’s on-shelf now. And for us, another item that really hit was the Starkiller. That was also an amazing figure for The Black Series from gaming, as well. So that was a great one to have out there, and of course– I like to highlight it because I think they’re so fun– but the holiday figures are just great stocking stuffers for this time of year. They’re so fun, they’re whimsical, they’re a great way to celebrate and get into the season. Eric [Franer] does such a great job letting his creativity spew out onto those figures.
Reiff: Plus all the great Gift the Galaxy stuff that just got announced.
Houle: Yeah, there are some that are dropping for pre-order today. Definitely check those out as well.
LP: Speaking of Gift the Galaxy, How has this Lucasfilm product campaign helped to get the word out about Hasbro Star Wars toys?
Houle: It’s definitely great to have StarWars.com take the lead in pulling together all these giftable toys and holiday items for the fans in your lives. We actually had some reveals [yesterday] morning from Gift the Galaxy. It’s just a great time to get that news out in partnership with Lucasfilm. It’s relevant, it’s giftable, and it’s a good conversation to have during this time, especially. And Hasbro, luckily, gets to be a part of that. We love to have fans take a look, and there’s more information to come in general about everything that we’re revealing across the board, but it was good to work with Lucasfilm on Gift the Galaxy for this holiday season. So definitely check out StarWars.com if you haven’t seen what we have cooking– it’s a lot of prequel stuff in celebration of the [25th] anniversary [of The Phantom Menace] that we’re celebrating next year, as everyone knows.
LP: Regarding the recent Clone Trooper announcements, can you talk about how these products will help fans and collectors build out their Black Series and Vintage Collection troops?
Reiff: For the Vintage Collection releases, the new pack offers Clones that use the latest, more articulated Clone body that we’ve done, but they also have a great new updated helmet design. We saw some comments on a previous helmet, so we went back and tweaked it. These have that update. They are non-removable helmets on these, so we’re able to do a very in-scale approach on the Vintage Collection ones. For the announcements for Black Series, it’s very much the same sort of thing. It’s the new body of the Clone Trooper, so it’s a way to get those out for people again to get more of those in the collection and really build those troops up.
LP: I'm curious where the inspiration came from to create a Black Series figure for the R4-6D0 droid from The Mandalorian. How do you guys select which background or side characters are introduced into the line?
Reiff: We had it in our heads that we wanted to do a droid, and we have been playing with our new R2 body– the larger one. We hadn’t done an R4 head yet for [The Black Series] at the time, and that [character] showed up in our reference deliveries from Lucasfilm early on as a main character’s [Greef Karga] companion droid. So it made a lot of sense, with all that color and stuff on him, as a way to do something new. That one was also [a Wal-Mart] exclusive, and it answered a request to have new and exclusive stuff for that retailer, so it was all these things coming together, and really a way to get a new fun droid in there. That’s the story on that one, but it’s a similar thing every time. We’re always trying to weave the perfect tapestry of answering a retailer’s request, answering fan requests, working with the reference we have, and building things [out] to make a more complete offering for everybody.
LP: Lastly, can you talk about how you feel the Holocomm Collection has been received? Is there anything else you'd like to highlight about that series?
Houle: It’s a new execution that we thought would be super fun to do, because it’s so key to Star Wars lore, those Holocomms. We’re always looking for opportunities like that.
Reiff: Yeah, it was something we thought would be really fun. It came out of some other brainstorming and just really made a lot of sense to us. I think the response to those has been pretty good. For me, it’s a really great way to display a figure– even a figure [that’s not transparent] displays great on those little hologram bases. It’s fun to see that. We were experimenting, and it made sense to answer some of our own challenges to ourselves: ‘What can we do? How can we plus this up and make something cool and unique?’
Houle: The different lighting modes, for example– the team talked quite a bit about that. Honestly, [the reason it] came about, also, was just as fans on the teams like, ‘Man, it would be so cool if we could have a hologrammed figure sitting on our shelf.’
Reiff: When we were doing that, it was coming out of The Mandalorian– that’s how we meet [Din Djarin], a whole bounty thing. So thinking of those figures as FOMO figures or chase figures– the figures themselves, for fans, are kind of a bounty, playing into that and throwing a bounty value on them, in-universe, that kind of thing. It was all a fun way to play.
Be sure to visit the official Hasbro Pulse website for more information on the company’s numerous Star Wars releases.