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Major Panno

May 9, 2010 | By Errex More

Hasbro released Major Panno in 2009 as part of the fourth wave of red-carded Legacy Collection figures, a wave inspired in the characters from the Episode VI: Return of the Jedi movie.

Major Panno is a Dressellian, a member of the same alien species as the vintage Prune Face figure (a.k.a. Orrimarko in the PotF2 line). The easy way to tell them apart is that Orrimarko wears an eye-patch, but other than that they might as well be wearing the exact same uniform, which in terms of toy-making means the rest of this figure’s body could be reused for a variety of other characters.

Major Panno wears pretty standard Rebel Alliance Spec Ops clothing: olive green cargo pants, a light gray long sleeve shirt and a short , white vest. Over it all, Major Panno wears a mid-gray fabric hooded cloak with a couple of pockets sawn on the chest.

For the most part the sculpted clothes are very good, as the folds and wrinkles on them do look natural, but sadly most of the figure ends up hidden underneath the fabric cloak.

The cloak is well stitched and even the hood drapes correctly, which is always a difficult effect at this scale, but right out of the package the cloak doesn’t look as good as it could, due to the way the fabric is secured inside the plastic tray.

For a while now, figures with ample soft-goods items on them are packaged with the edges of the fabric inserted into cuts done to the clear plastic bed, and this always causes characteristic round marks on the textiles.

On either very dark or very light fabrics the effect is not as distracting, but on medium-bright fabrics like this, the semi-circular marks do look quite ugly. Fortunately this can be corrected by soaking the fabric in water a leaving it to dry under a heavy book for a few minutes, but it is certainly an annoyance to do.

On the other hand, the head sculpt is simply stellar. The Dressellians have a very distinct look, with deep creases and wrinkles on their heads, all of which are well reproduced on Major Panno’s noggin. The hands are also very detailed, but other than the earthy orange color, they don’t look particularly alien to me.

Major Panno is articulated like this:

Ball jointed neck

• Peg & hinge shoulders

• Peg & hinge elbows

• Swivel wrists

• Swivel waist

•Swivel hips

•Peg & hinge knees

• Peg & hinge ankles

Since most of the pieces conforming Major Panno are molded in the correct plastic color, the paint operations on him are fairly simple, consisting mostly in block colors and a light olive drybrushing on the pants. Out of the small accents and details that round off the deco, the most notorious are the gold-painted eyeballs.

This is a somewhat tricky design choice for figures with rather bulging eyes, as the reflective nature of golden paint tends to make the pupils appear to be to be off-center depending on how the light hits the face, when in reality the black pupils are perfectly centered.

Major Panno comes equipped with an interesting array of accessories. First up, is the gray fabric cloak I mentioned at the beginning, which has a couple of simulated pockets stitched at breast height and can be used to hold another accessory, a small white /silver cylinder which resembles somewhat the sonic screwdriver used by Dr. Who.

There is also a set of goggles that can’t really fit onto Major Panno’s head and a double-barreled blaster carbine made from metallic gray plastic. Like any other of the figures released within the Legacy Collection, Major Panno ships with a Build-A-Droid Piece, this time the dome and center foot for the R5-C7 astromech.

Major Panno is not what I’d call an exciting character, according to his portrayal in the movie, but the figure is actually very good, both as a collectible and a plaything, thanks to the solid construction and the nice accessories.