Book of Boba Fett’s New Throwback Has Weird Influence on Vintage Toys

Star Wars loves two issues above all: its personal historical past and its personal metatextual historical past with merchandise. Sometimes, these come hand in hand—and what’s outdated isn’t precisely new once more, but it surely does all of a sudden have extra folks wanting it for more cash.

This week’s The Book of Boba Fett—in reality a stealth episode of The Mandalorian—featured the return of Pedro Pascal’s bounty hunter Din Djarin, catching up with the Mandalorian after the occasions of his personal present’s season two finale. Along the best way of claiming bounties and making an attempt very badly the best way to study to be each a long-distance dad and the potential inheritor to the throne of his personal adoptive folks, Din teamed up with recurring Mandalorian visitor star Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) to exchange his destroyed gunship, the Razor Crest, with a brand new vessel.

His new ship is a lot smaller and faster, in addition to very acquainted to Star Wars followers: the glossy traces of the N-1 Naboo Starfighter, the chosen fight vessel of The Phantom Menace. One in depth rebuild montage later, Din finds himself quite having fun with a stripped down, paint-scraped model of the enduring ship, tweaked sufficient methods to look greater than a little bit distinctive, however nonetheless instantly identifiable as Doug Chiang’s legendary starfighter design, to the delight of prequel-era followers internationally. The fighter’s re-appearance within the episode—full with a improbable little check flight sequence that in and of itself evoked Phantom Menace’s podrace setpiece—has had one quite peculiar impression past prequels nostalgia, although: when you’ve acquired the 23-year-old lights-and-sound model of the ship that launched as a part of The Phantom Menace’s toy line in May 1999, you is likely to be sitting on fairly a fairly penny.

In the previous couple of days since The Book of Boba Fett’s newest episode aired, eBay auctions for Hasbro’s basic Naboo Starfighter toy—or an analogous one launched by the corporate in 2011—have exploded in worth, whether or not they had been listed within the wake of the episode’s airing or had been one of many handful floating across the resell web site within the months earlier than. On common, these new listings—a few of which name out The Mandalorian’s new connection to the ship explicitly, not just in listing name however in some instances, bundling in certainly one of Hasbro’s personal latest 3.75″-scaled Din Djarin figures in as well—are all of a sudden asking for a whole bunch of {dollars}, effectively past the $30 the ship retailed for when it was model new. Old listings for the ship even earlier than the episode aired have discovered their early low provides shoot up in bidding frenzies, and a few are even customizing the basic toy to look extra intently to the stripped-down iteration that seems in The Book of Boba Fett… and anticipating quite the bounty in flip.

Given Disney and Lucasfilm’s tendency to lean toward the absurd when it comes to keeping secrets about Star Wars from fans, it’s likely we won’t see Hasbro attempt to capitalize on the sudden resurgence of interest in the Naboo fighter—and getting to make a new one explicitly styled after Din’s new ride—with new products any time soon. That’s the nature of merchandising some times. The toymaker’s only just gotten around to releasing figures in its Black Series line for Fennec and Boba based on their Mandalorian season two appearances, with a Book of Boba Fett-specific version of the title character still not expected until later this year. The same happened when Grogu, then known as Baby Yoda, immediately exploded in popularity in the early days of The Mandalorian, leading to a desperate scramble to get products out as soon as possible.

But if Star Wars is going to continue to be so utterly fascinated with its own past—and its desire to re-contextualize the iconography of that past in the present of its more recent timelines—it stands to reason that what is old being new again isn’t just going to apply to the narratives the series explores, but the toys it wants to sell you after the fact too. If you didn’t grab them the first time around, a long, long time ago, in a Toys “R” Us not so far far away, that is.

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