Did we every heard who the pilot is, or is it another Jedi Bob situation?

So as a kid, I had no idea what this ship was, but I got it anyway, and then I realized it was the thing Luke played with when talking to C-3PO. Part of why I never recognized it is because I watched the 1990 VHS tapes of the Original Trilogy up until the 2004 DVD release, which has a prominent shot of the T-16 in the montage at the end of Return of the Jedi carried over from the 1997 Special Edition. In a way, this is kind of the first thing LEGO did ever really delving into the expanded universe of Star Wars and they wouldn't make something explicitly from outside the movies until the TIE Crawler (7664) in 2007.

Early, I am!
I prefer the 2015 version of this craft, even the Microfighter looks better

I can't believe how Huwbot has been so good lately at bringing up sets which are related to things in the Lego news. It was cool to see Kenobi gift one of these cool, rare toys to little Luke.

@MCLegoboy said:
" TIE Crawler (7664)"

What is this? How did I miss this?

@MCLegoboy said:
"So as a kid, I had no idea what this ship was, but I got it anyway, and then I realized it was the thing Luke played with when talking to C-3PO. Part of why I never recognized it is because I watched the 1990 VHS tapes of the Original Trilogy up until the 2004 DVD release, which has a prominent shot of the T-16 in the montage at the end of Return of the Jedi carried over from the 1997 Special Edition. In a way, this is kind of the first thing LEGO did ever really delving into the expanded universe of Star Wars and they wouldn't make something explicitly from outside the movies until the TIE Crawler ( 7664 ) in 2007."

Well, they made 10131: TIE Fighter Collection in 2004 with the Droid Tie.

Without actually spoiling anything, for those that know what I'm talking about, that scene from the first episode of Kenobi made me say "Awwwww" out loud. Adorable.

Really.

This is just an Imperial Shuttle after the Jawas are done.

@MCLegoboy:
You can actually see the cockpit of Luke’s real T-16 (the one he says he used to “bulls-eye womp rats” with during the Yavin briefing). It’s in the background when he’s giving C-3PO an oil bath, off in another section of the garage. Now, if you were watching 1990 VHS editions, it’s possible it got cropped out. At 2.39:1, you lose almost half the image when you cut it down to 1.33:1, as I believe was done with all VHS copies prior to the silver THX box set in the mid-90’s.

@Shadowcloner said:
"Did we every heard who the pilot is, or is it another Jedi Bob situation? "

Just going by the face. I always thought it was supposed to be Luke.

This is a good example of how much better new sets are. Yes this thing was cheap, but it's extremely basic and would take no time to build.

@StyleCounselor said:
"Well, they made 10131 : TIE Fighter Collection in 2004 with the Droid Tie."
Got me there. Totally forgot about that one. Another dent in my nerd cred. XD

@StyleCounselor and @GSR_MataNui
Definitely my favorite moment of that episode, but Luke still didn't get to keep it. Maybe that will be the capper to the series, seeing Luke get to it first and Ben just mindtricking Owen into allowing him to keep it.

@R1_Drift said:
" @MCLegoboy said:
" TIE Crawler ( 7664 )"

What is this? How did I miss this?
"

I honestly don't know how you missed it... tanks are awfully loud when they roll by. :-P

In all honesty, it's not too great a set from what I recall. Annoying tank tread mechanism doesn't work too great, and the fact there are 164 of them to add together is a pain. Plus, I believe this was the blue color's second-to-last outing for the Empire. The 2010 lineup 8087 Tie Defender was the first of the grayscale, while 75185 was the last blue Imperial starship. (but it was never canon anyway, so it doesn't count!)

I actually have this set! I found it at an antique toy shop. I’m still missing a couple of pieces, but it’s mostly together. Really solid representation of the source material.

@R1_Drift said:
" @MCLegoboy said:
" TIE Crawler ( 7664 )"

What is this? How did I miss this?
"

It's a cool set based on books, I believe. It is a bit unsteady (as the old sets tend to be), but fun. It included two of the awesome Shadow Troopers.

@PurpleDave said:
" @MCLegoboy:
You can actually see the cockpit of Luke’s real T-16 (the one he says he used to “bulls-eye womp rats” with during the Yavin briefing). It’s in the background when he’s giving C-3PO an oil bath, off in another section of the garage. Now, if you were watching 1990 VHS editions, it’s possible it got cropped out. At 2.39:1, you lose almost half the image when you cut it down to 1.33:1, as I believe was done with all VHS copies prior to the silver THX box set in the mid-90’s."
That's one of those "Technically it's there" type scenerios, I mean, you laid it out pretty well, but also, there's no way anyone's going to know what that is unless you were to dive into expanded media. Your best look of it in the movie is the actual concept model they gave to Mark to play with in the scene.

@MCLegoboy said:
" @StyleCounselor said:
"Well, they made 10131 : TIE Fighter Collection in 2004 with the Droid Tie."
Got me there. Totally forgot about that one. Another dent in my nerd cred. XD

@StyleCounselor and @GSR_MataNui
Definitely my favorite moment of that episode, but Luke still didn't get to keep it. Maybe that will be the capper to the series, seeing Luke get to it first and Ben just mindtricking Owen into allowing him to keep it.
"

The nerd cred is strong with this one. Your comment was great. Heartily agree with it all.

@Murdoch17

8087 is one the best all-time sets!

I loved the way the reused the Scout Trooper's face print in this one.

@Murdoch17 said:
" @R1_Drift said:
" @MCLegoboy said:
" TIE Crawler ( 7664 )"

What is this? How did I miss this?
"

I honestly don't know how you missed it... tanks are awfully loud when they roll by. :-P

In all honesty, it's not too great a set from what I recall. Annoying tank tread mechanism doesn't work too great, and the fact there are 164 of them to add together is a pain. Plus, I believe this was the blue color's second-to-last outing for the Empire. The 2010 lineup 8087 Tie Defender was the first of the grayscale, while 75185 was the last blue Imperial starship. (but it was never canon anyway, so it doesn't count!)"

Actually, the first greyscale TIE was the 2009 8017 Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. Which was fitting to shift to a slightly more accurate color scheme, given it was one of the 10th anniversary sets.

@R1_Drift:
Dunno. It’s one of the few LEGO sets that can be displayed vertically to save space. It was also 2008, and the internet was a different place. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what information you had access to 14 years ago.

@Murdoch17:
You’re right about the tank treads. Yes, it’s one of the most tedious bits of construction I’ve ever done, and yes they don’t roll well enough to justify the labor. The treadplates rotate freely on the cockpit, and independently of each other. If you press down on the cockpit, it causes the long end of the tread to tilt up. If you push it towards the short end, the design is such that the treadplates could roll forward 180° instead of the actual treads rotating.

@StyleCounselor:
First appearance was the original Dark Empire miniseries, so comic books.

@MCLegoboy:
So, I don’t actually own a pan-&-scan copy, and haven’t watched it in 1.33:1 since they released the THX VHS box sets. I can’t remember if it was even visible outside of theaters prior to the first widescreen home video release, but I was just pointing out that it _was_ in the original Star Wars: Just Star Wars cut 45 years ago. As I said, you lose almost half of the image (44.4%) going to so-called “full screen” cuts, because of how wide the image was on those films. I know at least one element that got cut was the Tusken that Luke spots, because he walked into frame on the far right of the screen, and the shot was cropped for the one who jumps out and attacks him from slightly left of center.

When my group of friends had a viewing party after I bought the widescreen THX set, we were noticing a _lot_ of stuff we had missed before because probably none of us had seen the films on the big screen since their original releases. For Ep4, that could have been 18 years. I don’t remember if any of the others even had home video releases of any sort. Most of us probably just caught it on broadcast TV (for a while, it was basically an annual thing), and a few may have recorded their own copy when VCRs came out. It was probably also the biggest group of people any of us had watched them with since their original theatrical runs. Anyways, the only reason I even realized that was Luke’s T-16 is because it matched the cockpit of the model he was swooshing around. That was probably around the same time I realized the Lars family had a black version of the white enclosed Landspeeder with three top-mounted thrusters that’s seen in Mos Eisley.

This looks like a stack of bricks rather than a spaceship. It doesn't look any better since it has been released, no nostalgia here.

I find it odd that we got this before a minifig scale Star Destroyer, TIE Interceptor, Sandcrawler, Death Star or Khetanna. It even predated the first AT-AT by six months.

And we now have two of them (plus a microfighter). Where's our second TIE Bomber, Zam Wesell Airspeeder or Imperial TIE Interceptor?

What about our first Ebon Hawk? Stinger Mantis?

In these days where Star Wars sets need to come with small brigades of minifigs for the collector crowd it’s honestly quite quaint seeing this one guy all by himself

I own the 2015 version 75081. I always found it funny that they included a rat because “hey, womp rats”. Even though Luke’s description of them indicates they are huge (over two meters long).

Fun fact: This is only 15 parts more than the Microfighter version.

@Murdoch17
@PurpleDave

I'm gonna have to disagree about the TIE Crawler tracks. In and of themselves they roll very well in my experience, with little tendency to throw a track or jam. Better than the Separatist tank droids tend to do, certainly. The track units also FEEL flimsy, but are surprisingly fairly sturdy.
The rotating attachment with a single axle each is the big problem. Not only do the track units flop around –it's impossible to pick the set up one-handed without them dropping down – they also flex. For one thing there's some sag – I suspected thats why they added the third gun with a boat stud on the bottom, to support the cockpit. But worse, the track units will flex forwards and back, which brings them out of parallel. It's somewhat noticeable when pushing the set along and probably contributes to it not rolling quite as well as it should, but especially when trying to turn on the spot, which is harder than it should be with this ratio of track length and distance between tracks.

I suspect the reason Lego desingers did this is (somewhat ironically) for structural integrity. If the model was all rigid, it would need a pretty beefy frame. They already built the track units pretty lightweight; the rotation saves them from having to support a big twisting load on the struts from the tracks being cantilevered out back.

I love this set. I love that they did a T-16 so early in the theme. I was in love with this craft already, because it was tied up with a lot of stuff pertaining to the Tatooine scenes in the original movie that, as I grew up and gleaned all sorts of info about this universe from the movie itself and from ancillary things like trading cards and storybooks, really helped this universe feel “real”. The facts the exteriors for the Lars homestead (and other Tatooine locations) were shot at real earthly places in Tunisia that looked pretty much as seen in the movie, that there were all these deleted scenes (hardly a new occurrence with movies, but the first time I really became aware of them myself) involving Luke and his friends that survived into pretty much all the versions of the story adapted from the movie (novel, comic, storybook, radio drama, etc.) but not the movie itself (making it feel like they were all just different telling as of some real set of historical events that just to focus on slightly different aspects), and so on, helped weave this incredible feeling of reality that helped this fantastic world maintain the grip it’s had on me for over four decades.

The T-16 was a huge part of that, though it took me a while to fully put it all together. There was the model Luke was toying with in the garage, there was that big triangular structure with what looked like a circular engine thruster visible in the background next to the gangplank leading into the garage, and Luke’s mention much later in the movie of bullseyeing womp rats in his T-16, and the novelization’s mention of Luke having been grounded for busting a fin on the skyhopper racing through Beggar’s Canyon. I’d started putting some of this together, but I think it was when I finally acquired a copy of The Star Wars Blueprints (a published set of a handful of sets blueprints, enclosed in a vinyl pouch) that I realized the big triangular thing in the background of the garage was a portion of a full-sized version of the same thing Luke was playing with a miniature of in the foreground of the same scene and all that - that Luke had a model of the same craft he had for real, the same way a 19- or 20-year-old in our universe might have a Revell model of the same ‘69 Mustang or whatever that they’re tinkering with for real in their garage. It did so much to help sell and reinforce the idea that this whole universe existed, that there was stuff just at the periphery of the story or entirely offscreen that we don’t see because it’s not part of the main narrative but that exists because that world is as full of things as our own.

When LEGO released this set - quite early in the theme’s run, remember, when the whole line was just four years old - I had just started coming out of my dark ages, enticed by other Star Wars sets and by my own memories of my childhood LEGO from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and this set was an early indicator of just how all-in they would go on this theme and what I would be getting myself into over the next couple decades. It was one thing to make sets of obvious major things everyone knows, like X-Wings and TIEs, Luke’s landspeeder, the Millennium Falcon, the Slave I, and the new vessels from the then-new prequels, but if they were going to make a T-16 Skyhopper, something so enmeshed in the lore of this universe as I’ve described above and yet obscure enough that it had been totally ignored by Kenner with their original action figure / vehicle / playset line back in the ‘70s and ‘80s that had made such a colossal splash in the toy world, even while inventing new stuff out of whole cloth like their mini-rigs, then it must mean *nothing* was entirely off the table now, and the world of LEGO Star Wars was going to get bigger and crazier than anyone knew.

Edit: continued in next post; I hadn’t realized there was a maximum post length…

I actually have a few of these, including one still sealed in the box as part of my backlog / stockpile of unbuilt sets from the last two decades or so. One day in the hopefully not-too-distant future I’m going to finally open and build all my sealed Tatooine-themed sets from across the years together in one big massive Tatooine build-a-thon, with things like the new Lars Family Homestead Kitchen I just got last month right alongside this comparatively ancient set from nearly two decades earlier, and various landspeeders, cantinas, etc. from over the years. I’m so looking forward to it.

In addition to the copies I’ve bought of the full set, I have several spares of some of the printed elements, thanks to 4679-2, a bulk assortment sold at TRU in the mid-2000s that TLG seems to have used as a way of getting rid of excess parts inventory. It was one of their typical bulk tubs containing an assortment of extremely common basic bricks, but strapped to the top was a box containing a random assortment of recent parts no longer in use - printed elements from recent sets, discontinued elements or common parts in uncommon or discontinued colors, etc. Each copy of the set had the same common parts in the tub, but a different, apparently unique mix of weird stuff in the box on top - a treasure trove of mystery and surprise, and to top it off the $19.99 list price of this 1513-piece assortment worked out to a rock-bottom bargain-basement steal of a deal of less than a cent and a half per piece. I bought four copies of this thing (and wish I’d gotten more), and one of them had several of the various printed slopes from the T-16 Skyhopper (including multiples of the printed giant 1x6x5 slope used for the top of the fin).

About this set itself, I’d like to note a couple things I haven’t seen others note yet. One is that the visor-printed head (complete with printed “reflection”) of the pilot minifigure is the same one used for the original Imperial Biker Scouts. I always thought this a nice repurposing of the part, and thought the figure could work well to help fill out a Mos Eisley Cantina build, and extras of the helmet (as one would have with multiples of the set, as I did/do) could help add variety to one’s Rebel pilots.

Finally, there’s a notable omission / error in the set build in the official photo here that adorns the box. The big dorsal fin should actually be one plate taller; in the set, there’s a white 1x8 plate that runs along the bottom of it, helping hold all those bricks along the bottom of the fin together when the fin is swung open. I don’t remember whether it’s present in any of the other photos on the box (as noted, I do still have one sealed copy, but it’s stored away somewhere), but it’s kind of bizarre that the main official product image on the very front of the box would just omit such a piece from the build like that. Could it have been a last-minute addition to the set design, added to the instructions and inventory after the box art was created, or what? It seems like a strange piece to leave out of the build…

@PurpleDave said:
" @CapnRex101:
While I don’t remember seeing them do much of anything, I remember seeing at least one Flash Speeder in a clearing."

The Flash Speeder gets to fire a few shots right near the beginning of the battle of Naboo, as part of the diversion Captain Panaka organises to give cover for Padme and her group entering the hangar; it's seen briefly circling and firing, in the shot almost immediately preceding Nute's "I thought the battle was going to take place far from here" line: https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/199/4k-swphantom/full/4k-swphantom-starwarsscreencaps.com-18997.jpg