Review – Star Wars Legacy Collection Jodo Kast

“Wearing Mandalorian armor, this cunning and ruthless bounty hunter lets everyone assume he is Boba Fett to take advantage of Fett’s notorious reputation. Unfortunately, the real Boba Fett is not flattered by Kast’s impersonation and intends to stop him.”
— from the back of the card

In the late 1980s, during high school, we played West End Games’ Star Wars Roleplaying Game. And we played it a lot, weekday evenings, weekends . . . we loved the game (at least, I did and the others were willing to play with me) so it got a lot of mileage with our group. Usually, as we did with most games, we played the adventures that I created. This went well and worked for us but every now and then, just to keep things different, we also tried out pre-published adventures.

Adventures like Tatooine Manhunt.

Jodo Kast

In West End Games’ Tatooine Manhunt adventure we were introduced to the bounty hunter Jodo Kast, a character described at Wookieepedia as a character who was:

“. . . created as a stand-in for Fett, to be used in roleplaying game scenarios when an equivalent to Fett was needed, only scaled down in power to be an appropriate challenge for novice players, or who could be safely killed without drastic effect on continuity.”

Jodo was a failure for our game and, eventually, a recurring joke. The instant the players knew he wasn’t Boba Fett they no longer feared him; something I’m sure happened in many game sessions.

Well, Jodo Kast is back and, unfortunately, Hasbro also treated the character as a joke. The paint job, while attractive and suitable for the character, is the best part of the figure. Once you get beyond the paint, and actually pick the figure up and start looking closely at it, you quickly realize just what a piece of junk this toy is.

Jodo’s arms flop around, loose, because of the gimmick used for the toy; push down on the rocket backpack and the arms raise up. Big deal! And because of the gimmick the arm articulation is weak, with the elbows simply rotating and not bending — what you see is basically what you get in terms of arm positioning because between the elbow articulation and the floppy arms he’s not gonna do anything special.

I grabbed Jodo Kast at Wal-Mart as soon as I saw him solely out of nostalgia; the idea that a character created for a roleplaying game adventure made his way into plastic was exciting, as well as the idea of owning another Mandalorian warrior. And up until I opened the package I was very happy with Jodo Kast.

Save yourself heartache and cash and skip this chunk of plastic garbage.

After two negative reviews of Star Wars toys, Philip Reed thinks it may be time to dig out a classic Star Wars toy from the 1980s for his next Star Wars review.