A long time ago in an exceedingly cute galaxy....

The Star Wars Galactic Heroes toyline makes action figures and a few vehicles for the preschool set. I own a bunch of these and my daughter and I play with them pretty regularly. The usual scenario involves Darth Maul throwing a pizza party and inviting everyone. But sometimes Darth Vader is a school teacher and everyone else is a student. So far I have managed to resist the urge to buy the new Marvel Super Hero Squad line, where the apply a similar design ethic to a bunch of Marvel characters. But honestly it's only a matter of time. Those things are adorable. How can you not like tiny kawaii Punisher? If they made a Ben Grimm I'd probably already own the whole line.

Anyway, here are two of the more unusual Galactic Heroes figures that we've got at home.

The armored mummy you might recognize as Dengar, one of the bounty hunters that Vader hired in Empire for the purposes of rounding up the good guys. According to StarWars.com he went on to have some expanded universe adventures of his own, like pretty much every other named character in the original trilogy. What makes this figure so special to me is the fact that it looks like he's wearing the best shoes in the galaxy. Nearly everyone in Star Wars wears boots. Some aliens such as Chewbacca or Bossk go shoeless. But this little Dengar looks like he's wearing some comfy moccasins. I love that!

The little black robot is R2-Q5. I didn't even know this character existed until my wife got me the Death Star themed Galactic Heroes tenpack for Christmas. Back in the day I loved R series astromech droids. R5-D4 was one of my favorite robotic action figures. That was the red R2 unit with the bad motivator that futzed out right after Uncle Ben bought him. Turns out R2-Q5 is an R2 unit working for the bad guys. Given the recent revelation that R2-D2 was one of the Alliance's top agents, I can't help but wonder what roll this droid really played in the Empire.

By the way, while I was poking around Hasbro's Star Wars hub I found that they had a slick custom Heromachine just like the GI Joe version I found a while back. Dig it: