With all six of the Star Wars movies finally in and out of the theaters (and finally on DVD to boot), I'm sure that Lucas' people were having to sit around and think of ways to expand their collectible oriented universe. Without a film to generate hundreds of collectible figures, I'm sure they had to look into alternative reason for their fans to drop down good money. So, what was their newest idea? "Let's merge our intellectual property with that of another sci-fi series with a huge fanbase. But, which would would work the best?"

With that said, Star Wars and Transformers have collided. Slated for a January 2006 release, Hasbro has developed a set of four vehicles that transform into major characters from the movies. Included in the initial line up are Darth Vader (TIE Advanced), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Jedi Starfighter), General Grievous (the wheel bike from Episode 3) and Luke Skywalker (X-Wing Fighter). Each of the collectibles comes with weapons, a miniature pilot and firing missiles.

The actual vehicles are excellent representations from the movies and show off a great level of detail. You could easily leave one of these out in their vehicle form and no one would be the wiser. The only issue I could notice with the vehicles is that the X-Wing seems a bit stubby in length, but I'm sure this was a design decision to make the figure work out. I'm not sure how complex the transformations are, but each of these turn into robotic representations of their pilots. With Vader and Grievous, the robots aren't much of a stretch, but the Luke and Obi-Wan take a little imagination.

Of the set, I would say that the Grievous figure is the most true-to-film, and even then, there are additional vehicle elements that bulk the figure up. The Darth Vader doesn't look too bad, even if the head does look like it was pulled off a Pez and glued on for good measure. When it comes to Luke and Obi-Wan, one must just take these less as representations of the human characters and more as "What ifs?" What if Luke and Kenobi were Transformer robots? Would this be what they look like? Sure. I'll bite.

The actual robots carry over the same level of detail from the vehicles and look pretty good, even on their own. The paint jobs tend to look really nice and while I wish there some more small, shiny details, the series as a whole looks pretty good. The figures show some decent poseability and I can't really comment on how sturdy or well they can stand on their own. The Luke figure looks like it would be top heavy.

I'm not exactly sure if this is the greatest idea ever or just a "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" monstrosity. For fans of Star Wars and Transformers, I'm sure this is something you're going to want to check out. If this series does well, I'll like to see them try to pull off Boba Fett's Slave 1 or the Millennium Falcon. If not, I'm sure that this series will prove as one of the more interesting ideas that didn't get anywhere.

- - Vane