Only one section lights up
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Even in ROTJ, it's just one section
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And when it's horizontal, it's on a white floor base, no blue lights
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The main takeaway is. . . why not just make it a Freezing Chamber base that is circular with orange lights. Why make it square with blue lights, and an orange overlay? Just make it orange to begin with. "Because we wanted to add features"??
It's like giving Darth Vader a green lightsaber because "you want to give the customer options". Okay, I appreciate the effort but, A) it's wrong and B) not needed
The pattern of the lights is clearly based on the Freezing Chamber steps, even though the actual pattern is wrong. Why make them blue in the first place, and not just make it orange to match their existing bases and not worry about the extra parts?
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Harumph!
And don't get me wrong, I get it.
Why is the base not larger? "If we had a large circular base with room for multiple figures, it would lead to a drastically larger box and increased shipping cost and increasing the price further"
Why blue lights? "Blue LEDs are less expensive than orange LEDs, so we just used an orange transparency to simulate the effect"
Why is it so expensive? "We are a large company serving a niche market, and we have to hit a minimum price point on each product we bring to market to provide a fair wage to our employees"
The uppermost/top panel (the screen-type ones) should light up on BOTH sides of the carb block but also, the other lower panels do have a few less visible lights (one has rows of small red LED's.) The SSC one seems to have a light up screen on one top side panel only.
Do you have a source showing all the light up panels?
I can only find kits that have only 1 light up panel. SSC's life size only has one.
All the replicas and kits I see only have the one 'screen' type. It looks SSC may have come up with the best solution seeing as how you never see both screens lit up at the same time, but having to address that you can see the screen lit up on the panel's right side when it's standing up and on it's left side when it's horizontal.
I like it. Is that allowed?
BTW - I didn't mean there weren't other panels with lights, I mean there was only 1 hero panel as we know it with all those light effects we've come to like. This panel was then used to swap sides on the carb slab for specific shots. I guess technically what they were trying to do is make it appear that it was on both sides? So if we want to go by what the movie makers wanted, even though it was only ever present on one side at any given time, technically I guess they wanted it on both sides, so having both sides light up I guess isn't terribly wrong, but not accurate to the prop. For other panels with lights, I believe there is at least one other panel with confirmed light effects just much too small to grab screen time. It's the one with the square lens piece.
However things were fudged (and there's a TON of fudging that goes on in moviemaking - tweaking/mirroring sets, costumes and props for reuse) what's actually visible onscreen is really all that matters. And what's visible onscreen is that there is very clearly two "screen-type" light-up panels visible on the carbonite block - one on each side.
So that's what Sideshow should have made. Anything less - including making it supposedly "prop accurate" - is just a cop-out, especially given the price. If this was $150, you could maybe overlook the single light-up panel, but for $250 this should be the mega-DX of 12" by 6" plastic boxes.
Taking this train of thought to its logical end, should every ROTJ Boba Fett come with alternate sets of armor so you can recreate how his scene was flipped once?
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