Star Wars LEGO Review | 7879 Hoth Echo Base

The original Star Wars trilogy’s central chapter is often said to be the finest film in the saga to date, and until the cartoon tragedy of Revenge of the Sith gave me pause, I was one of the ones doing the saying. Yet until recently, my LEGO Star Wars Empire had a great big hole where The Empire Strikes Back should have been. Yes, I had the mandatory AT-AT and even the gargantuan Executor, but the sheer size of the latter only served to highlight the dearth of Alliance opposition, and without scrambling rebels to stomp on, an Imperial Walker’s not that much fun either. However, for my birthday I received a gift to remedy that: the latest LEGO rendition of the Rebel Alliance’s Echo Base on the icy planet of Hoth; a purportedly limited edition from 2011 that, unaccountably, still takes up a lot of shelf space in UK toy shops some three years later.

One reason for set’s continued presence may be its price tag. There’s no shying away from the fact that at or around £91.99, this 773-piece set is overpriced; a fact subsequently brought into sharp focus when Jabba’s lavish palace was subsequently released in the same price bracket. Unlike the Hutt’s ill-gotten gaffe, which offers a good likeness of the iconic building and great sturdiness to boot, this supposed ‘base’ is brittle and insubstantial, not to mention an unusually poor outward approximation of the tough-to-penetrate bunker that Irvine Kershner built half an hour’s stunning set piece around. 

Of course, this much was evident from the packaging and promotional material, yet I wanted one anyway - much for the same reasons that I did the Battle of Endor set a birthday or two before. Whilst its model might not be up to much in most respects, it has certain aspects that I find irresistible: those iconic doors leading to a frozen wilderness beyond; a tauntaun; even a medical bay with a bacta tank complete with its very own ‘Underpants and Snorkel’ Luke. That last feature makes the set indispensable in of itself.

And Captain Underpants isn’t alone. Beyond the tauntaun megafigure, LEGO also throw in five highly detailed, head-spinning buddies for him to play with - new and exclusive iterations of Han and Leia in their wintry gear, medical droid 2-1B, protocol droid R-3PO, and another eBay-bound, standard-issue Chewie - as well as two snowtroopers to fight. An eight-year-old me would have doubtless balked at the prospect such a collection of peripheral and/or scene-specific minifigures, but the nearly-quadruple-that-age me certainly appreciates both their aesthetic and commercial worth. Indeed, “collector’s edition” would have been a far more appropriate billing for this set than “limited edition”.

And so when LEGO come to revisit the swamps of Degobah or the sprawling lattices of Cloud City, as from studying their pattern of releases I firmly expect them to before their next licence renewal, I hope that they give us something more solid and substantial than they have with this 2011 Echo Base - provided, of course, that the wizened Yodas, treacherous Landos and implacable Lobots that inhabit them still measure up to the superlative standards set by this set’s compliment of minifigures.
 

The Star Wars LEGO Hoth Echo Base is still available from Toys Я Us for £99.99 with free delivery.