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Super Freak
Is the cap rubber or fabric?
Is the cap rubber or fabric?
It's a sculpted rubbery plastic. Not a huge fan of the lines they sculpted on it personally.
It would have been really cool to have seen what HT would have done with a cloth cap, but it would be tricky to get it looking just right.
Krennic with all the Death Troopers is an amazing display! Can't wait
Sideshow did it with Piet.
This cheapens the figure as a whole in my eyes.
Fabric would of course be preferred but what they did looks pretty damn good. Better what we got than a wonky looking cap. They maybe would have had to glue a fabric hat on a plastic swap out hairpiece as I'm not sure you could flawlessly make a fabric hat like his interact with his regular complete sculpt.
They actually used different sized buttons depending on the movie, but I do agree that HT rank bars are not good.Once you'd pushed enough buttons in the Imperial control room, you got promoted and took your buttons with you. The more buttons you pushed, the higher your rank.[emoji38]
That cosplayer rank badge is not hugely accurate - the buttons seem too large in comparison to the backing, and the buttons don't seem quite narrow enough. Though by ROTJ the quality control on the costume rank badges had really gone downhill a lot.
But yeah, it would have been great to have seen HT use real clear/color plastic for the rank badge buttons. They're fine and a nitpick for sure but neither Sideshow or HT have done a great job matching the look of the Imperial rank badge imo. Beyond the pretty basic uniform there's really only the belt and the rank badge that defines the look, so the badge is more important than you'd think.
I think if they hadn't added the texture to the cap it would be open to further criticism for looking like a cheap piece of plastic.
Sideshow did do a standalone fabric cap that came out pretty decent, though the one for Piett worked better than the one for the black uniform officer. Oddly, they included a plastic cap and cloth cap with each of those releases. Those old SSC caps are harder to use these days though because they we tailored to the larger heads of that era.
While I think HT did great job with the Krennic cap shape, this old Sideshow Indy cap pictured below shows what I mean about the "hashed lines" sculpt detail that HT added.
Krennic's cap in the movie is just a regular cloth cap (ie it's not corduroy or something) so I'm really not sure why they added such prominent lines like what Sideshow did on the Indy cap. It looks odd (though better on Krennic vs Indy because the cap is black so hides it to some degree.)
I guess from my experience with action figures goes back to the disliking of ?soft goods? on Kenner/Hasbro figures.I'm really not sure where that "cheap piece of plastic" idea comes from - for example to me the most realistic 1/6 boots aren't the pleather ones (which even when done well have a slight toy-ish look to them, even if it ticks the "quality" box because it's p/leather) it's the really well sculpted plastic ones. Stuff like the sculpted HT Red Skull boots and even older Dragon German jackboots look superb in terms of subtle, realistic wrinkling and sheen.
To me it's like the "heavy = quality" "light = cheap" argument - it's just simplistic thinking.
A really detailed sculpted cap can look superb - without the need to add venetian blind lines to it just so it reads as "look at this sculpted detail" and "it's not just cheap plastic." All I'm saying is Krennic's cap in the movie just looks like normal smooth fabric, not ribbed/corduroy fabric, and the HT cap to me has quite visible lines in most pics I see.
Again, it's black so the color hides it more than a lighter color would, so it's more a nitpick than an issue. For me, I would love to have cast my Krennic cap to use for other Imperials but not sure due to this because the casts will be green/grey and show the lines more. Good Imperial cap sculpts are very rare, that's why I'm going on about this.
Last year I picked up a couple of the 1/6 Flirty Girl "Female Space Officer" hats. They are the black Imperial caps and they actually look good.
I'll try one out with Krennic, once he arrives and see if it works better than the molded cap (which I think looks terrific, by the way.)
Here's a pic I found on Ebay.
View attachment 483247
Two pages of hats. It speaks volumes how well the figure came out. If we are at the level of curves on the hat, then I will take it 10/10 times.
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