Radar Laser Cannon (Tri-Logo)

As I've mentioned before on this blog, a big part of retaining one's sanity (and financial solvency) as a vintage collector is establishing what you will NOT collect. For me, my collecting dead zone has always included the toyetic representations of vehicles that were never shown on-screen in the original trilogy (I'm looking at you, Mini-Rigs).

However, fortunately for me, Kenner released some really cool toys during the Empire and Jedi periods that hit the Mini-Rig price point, but represented some essential items that actually DID appear on-screen. I'm going to cover these in the next few blog posts, and the first one up for discussion is the Radar Laser Cannon.

Of course, this is the crew-served weapon used by the Rebels on Hoth to defend Echo Base from the Imperial attack at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. Note that this is not to be confused with the "other" radar laser cannon that was packed into the Hoth Ice Planet Adventure Playset! This one is much more detailed and has a cool "blow apart" play feature. The one that came with the HIPAP is a one-piece toy, is smaller in size, and is not designed to come apart in any way (except permanently if, for example, your little sister smashed it to pieces).

The "Action Figure Accessories" range is shown on the box side. All from the Empire film, strangely enough.

You can make it "esplode"!

The two box sides shown above illustrate the unusual features of this packaging - it's tri-logo! In the  picture above we see the English logo, with French and Spanish shown in the picture below.

But wait, there's more! Italian, German, and Dutch text are also included under the logos. It's like a mini-European Union on there, pre-Brexit of course :-(

On to my favorite bit - the replication of the box art. Pretty straightforward this time, with only two Rebel Soldiers crewing the Radar Laser Cannon.

My example of the toy came with instructions - notably, in English only...

Copyright information is on the bottom of the toy - notable in that copyright date is 1982, a rather late release for ESB toys. However, in addition to being released in an ESB box, the toy was issued in 1983 in RotJ livery branding, and presumably the Tri-Logo packaging shown came out with the rest of the Tri-Logo stuff in 1984.

trilogo.info hosts a ton of information about Tri-Logo packaging on carded figures, playsets and vehicles, but unfortunately doesn't have any info on these "accessories". I've emailed Joe, the creator and administrator of the site, to see why this might be, and I'll update this blog with anything relevant I find out.

Stay tuned to the blog for more Accessories!