Bandai Tamashii Nations Chogokin 1/6 Perfect Model R2-D2 Review

After decades of producing mostly crappy science-fiction toys for kids, manufacturers have now realized that there's a sizeable collectors' market of ageing adults who want to cling onto their childhood memories by applying heavy doses of consumerism.

Bandai have produced a couple of Star Wars related products to sell to this 15+ market: C-3PO and R2-D2. This is a review of their R2-D2. It was released in late 2017, though I think it may now be discontinued. At time of writing in 2020 it's still readily available from retailers and auction sites and whatnot, though.

What's up with the crazy long product name?

Bandai Tamashii Nations Chogokin 1/6 Perfect Model R2-D2 is quite a handle.

Bandai is the corporate parent - the massive Japanese toymaker. It's pronounced "bahn-dye", incidentally, not "BAN-day".

Tamashii Nations is a division of Bandai that caters to adult collectors, selling detailed and expensive figures and characters. Tamashii in Japanese means "soul".

Chogokin, or Chōgōkin, is a fictitious metal alloy from a Japanese manga, or comic book. The term became a marketing word used to refer to diecast metal, as used in toys.

"Perfect" is a marketing term used by Bandai to denote their high-end products, such as the "Perfect Grade" model kits.

R2-D2. Well, you know what that is.

Chogokin

So this thing is a really impressive and heavy chunk of metal. This isn't a lightweight plastic modern toy, but a solid diecast thing (mostly) that has a surprising and pleasing heft. I say mostly since the dome is, disappointingly, plastic. Some of the finer details are also injection-moulded plastic. The product is designed in Japan but built in China.

It's fairly purist in design, in that it's supposed to represent a specific droid - the remote-controlled (RC) R2 that was built for 1977's Star Wars, retroactively renamed A New Hope (ANH).

Fun stuff

• Delightfully heavy - the body and legs and feet are solid diecast metal.

• The whole thing just feels solid, and exudes high quality vibes.

• At a normal viewing distance the thing looks really convincing. It's clear this is a superior quality toy.

• Rolls pretty smoothly.

• The outer feet have rollers, and the middle foot has offset ball bearing-type casters. These are designed to resemble the feet as they appeared in 1977, following the ILM modifications. (ie: this is the wheel/caster configuration immortalized in cement outside Mann's Chinese Theatre, but not how they would have been in the Blockade Runner scene)

• The legs click in detented stops as you adjust them.

• The middle leg can extend down on a spring lock.

• It's pretty accurate to ANH and isn't overloaded with gimmicks.

• You can extend the legs slightly and add plastic pieces to simulate the Kenny leg hoses.

• The top shoulder button on each leg is correctly angled. And it's button front, of course! The proper ANH way.

• The inner shoulder hubs are stacked, not smooth. This is a rare thing for toys/replicas to get right.

• The front holo is offset to the left, correctly for the RC R2.

• The manipulator arms open, the arms have claw ridges, and the arm interiors are correctly silver on the inside back and sides.

• The openable compartment doors close really flush.

• The ANH holochess arm and computer terminal arm are inside the compartments.

• Magnetic restraining bolt supplied.

• The feet battery box covers are present and correct, ANH style.

• Lights and sound. All the things which light up in the movie can be turned on, and it cycles through a repertoire of around 8 different clean R2-D2 beep noises at the touch of a button.

• The front holoprojector can light up white - the rear holo is the switch for it, so it's not on all the time. The front holo can also be moved around, though the top and rear ones are fixed.

• Uses AAA batteries - cheap and long-lasting.

• Comes with a simple black plastic stand.

This promo photo from Bandai shows the diecast metal components that make up this toy. The dome is, sadly, conspicuously missing.

Less fun stuff

It's a great product, but it has its drawbacks.

• • The silver-painted plastic dome is not entirely unconvincing. It's got an airbrushed finish that's been clear-coated, and it doesn't look like metal.

  • The blue panels are just painted a medium glossy blue. They don't have the metal sheen that the originals had. That would've been fantastic if they had replicated that look, or at least gone for a deeper and richer blue like the films.

  • There's no weathering. Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view. Commercially-applied weathering paint jobs tend to look overdone and unconvincing, so I personally don't mind that this is a clean R2.

  • The PSI LEDs are way too bright, and also really focused. They should be diffused. I opened up the dome on my R2 and inserted thin pieces of closed-cell foam in front of the LEDs, which works reasonably well.

  • The logic lights are... okay. The front lights are a single LED which pulses, rather than a bunch of tiny fibre optics that flicker in patterns. The rear lights are four green LEDs which sort of cycle through back and forth. These are obviously a compromise in cost - it would have been technically possible to get more accurate light patterns, but it wouldn't have been inexpensive to produce.

  • When you power the lights on via the slide switch inside the dome (you have to decapitate R2 to get to it) they only stay on for two and a quarter minutes. Then they shut off and you have to press the top holo to turn them back on.

• The diecast metal body is sharp for diecast, but the panel lines are still a bit too deep and very slightly soft.

  • For the price it would've been nice if the head had been motorized.

  • It has a few inaccuracies listed below.

This is my R2 after I put a piece of closed-cell foam in front of the PSI light. It's not perfect, but it's a softer and more broken-up light, and less harsh and spotlight-like than it was before. Plus it looks better when off. Compare to the photo above.

WTF is up with the rivets?

Regarding the rivet hole details... what the hell are they doing there? This is by far the most polarizing aspect to the product, since a lot of people hate them.

The divisive Chogokin rivet holes.

Well, they were there in the film, and they weren't there. All the aluminium droids used in the original Star Wars film of 1977 were riveted and welded together, but most of the time you can't see the fasteners. The droids were finished and painted so they mostly aren't visible. However, the radio-controlled (RC) R2 was reworked partway through filming at EMI Elstree. When this was done the holes became visible on that sole droid. It appears that screws were added to some of the holes to repair damage.

This is why the opening scene aboard the Blockade Runner, which was shot at the very end of live action filming in England, features an RC droid with highly visible fasteners. Except when the scene cuts to one of the Kenny Baker R2s, which lacks most of them. The riveted R2 was also used for a promotional photo shoot (by American rock photographer Bob Seidemann) in late 1977, and photos from that shoot were widely used on posters and whatnot.

The holes as they appear in the movie.

This droid is mostly modelled after the RC droid of 1976/1977. (aside from the optional Kenny foot hoses) It therefore is reasonable to include the rivets if you're trying to replicate the RC droid as it appeared later on in filming. If you're trying to replicate a Kenny droid or the RC R2 during the Tunisian sequences, then rivets would not be correct.

That said, the Chogokin R2 rivet holes are way too big and too prominent. Not only that, but they chose to put dots of black paint into each one, which vastly increases how obvious they look. The black paint was a mistake, in my opinion.

Removing the black dots on the "rivets"

It is, incidentally, not difficult to remove the black dots. They were done with paint pen or something similar. Just take a bit of tissue paper slightly moist from isopropyl alcohol, then use a toothpick tip to rub it in a drilling motion in each hole. That will remove most of the black. And the enamel-painted metal body shouldn't be affected by light exposure to alcohol.

HOWEVER if you try this, note that isopropanol WILL DESTROY THE PAINTWORK on the plastic parts if it gets on them. So beware of the blue manipulator arms and vent surrounds, and the white-painted compartment doors. If you aren't able to be hyper-careful and willing to take on the risk, don't try this trick. I take no responsibility for any paint damage you may inflict on your R2!

Movie-accurate?

Well, it's pretty close. I'd say it, and the Bandai 1:12 model kit, are the most accurate renditions of R2-D2 ever commercially released. Maybe that's not entirely surprising, as most R2-D2 toys and kits have historically been massively inaccurate junk. But surprisingly there are some errors in the product.

To be fair, most of these inaccuracies are only apparent to obsessed nerds, such as yours truly, who have a stupidly obsessive understanding of the original movie props. But given the effort the company put into making this an accurate toy, some of these errors are oddly surprising.

• The rivet holes are too wide, too deep, and generally prominent. If they're there at all they should be shallow and tiny depressions. They also have black dots painted in.

• The rear PSI LED has the wrong colours - it should be green and yellow.

  • The dome buttons are silver, where they should be black.

  • The coin slots are assymetrical, and they never were in the movie. The holes in the slots are also too wide.

  • Surprisingly while the "pause button" panels are correctly spaced for ANH, the front octagon is in its ESB location, not ANH. That's odd, as it's one of the identifying hallmarks distinguishing the droid bodies.

  • The front logic light surround sticks out slightly too far, and is wider on the right.

• The openable compartments have movie-inaccurate notches so you can open them up.

• The side vents are a bit too deep.

  • The shoulder hydraulics are offset horizontally, which is correct. But they're offset slightly too far.

  • The battery harnesses are flat against the battery boxes, instead of standing off slightly. Which isn't surprising, really, as they'd be really fragile at this size if they weren't flat.

• The skirt has kind of a gap at the top where it joins the barrel.

  • The battery box hoses are vinyl coated wires, and the vinyl doesn't look great. The hoses also plug into simulated hexagonal bolts, rather than cylindrical ones.

  • If they were going for the three-legged RC R2 from ANH then the holoprojector colours are wrong. To match the pickup shot era RC R2, the top holo should have had a blue ring.

  • The "radar eye" surround should be bare metal (silver) in the recessed area around the lens.

  • The logic lights don't have black around each simulated fibre - each one has a single clear plastic piece.

Hot Toys

So, why not get the Hot Toys 1/6 scale R2? They've produced a pretty similar model - same size and all. It looks pretty good, lacks the fake rivets, has a metal dome, is pre-weathered, comes with tons of accessories, has a remote control for the lights, and so on.

I chose the Bandai one ultimately for a number of reasons. The killer for me is that the Hot Toys R2 has a middle leg that's way too long. The ugly middle legs were seen only on the cobbled-together Tunisian R5/R2 droids and some Phantom Menace droids. I don't care about the panoply of accessories at all, and I like the weight of the solid metal body. And I do kind of appreciate the purist focus on an ANH droid, rather than a composite "various films in one robot" approach.

However, I haven't seen the Hot Toys product in person and so can't review it. It is funny that nobody makes an all-metal robot, though. Bandai is metal body, plastic dome. Hot Toys is plastic body, metal dome. Supposedly the two domes are the same size, but the fastenings of course are not compatible, so you'd have to engineer some way of sticking the Hot Toys dome onto a Bandai body.