Hasbro’s Black X-Wing…the letdown of Force Friday

I have a lot to say about Force Friday. The good, the bad, and the ugly — that is just where I am going to start, with the ugly.  After waiting in line for about an hour at the Target in Plainville Massachusetts, I was able to get my hands on some loot; not much loot, but some gems.  Or at least what I thought was the gem, rather what was left, after the first group of five went in.  So,  as I was scanning the aisle, looking for those awesome treasures to put into my cargo hold (My Jeep), I came across Hasbro’s Black X-Wing — Poe’s X-wing, to be exact. So after an exciting night with my new friend, Tom the FedEx guy, I went home and looked for more treasures online.  Later on Friday afternoon, I noticed a blog post from our friend, Jeremy Conrad — speaking of the let down our fellow Star Wars fans were having over Hasbro’s ‘Black’ X-Wing.  So I clicked on the link and to my horror, I saw some bad images of this X-Wing that I just bought, some 6 or 8 hours ago.  I sent a tweet saying I should bring mine back and his response was:

Curiosity got the better of me and I ended up opening it, earlier this morning. And sadly, I was one of the unlucky ones that had an X-Wing with bent laser canons. However, that wasn’t the only issue — take a look at the photos I took of this ‘Black’ X-wing:

Finally, I recall this being called a Black X-wing and Poe Dameron was Black leader of Black Squadron. This X-Wing should be called the charcoal gray X-Wing. The color is way off to me. I could look past the color, but not the bent laser canons and Poe, not fitting properly into the cockpit. I had originally planned on doing a video review of this, but it was so bad, I didn’t want to bother.  The biggest disappointment for me, was Hasbro.  A company that has its HQ in my home state of Rhode Island; so I take personal when Hasbro screws up. We take a lot of pride in our home-grown businesses doing well and seeing Hasbro screw this up, on the world stage, makes me feel awful. We all know Hasbro is better than this, hopefully going forward, they well correct this and stop cutting corners in production.  Force Friday wasn’t all doom and gloom for me. The Hasbro First Order TIE fighter I picked up that night, is pretty good, although, I’ve heard reports of bent sail panels with the TIE’s.  I guess I was one of the lucky ones.  In the coming weeks I will be starting a video series reviewing Star Wars toys.  I know there are a lot of Star Wars toy reviews out there, but I think I’ll offer something different.  I hope this review stops you from giving up your hard-earned money on this plastic garbage.  I know I’m returning mine tomorrow.