My Star Wars teddy bears

I now have a complete set of adorable Bearbrick Star Wars characters, thanks to my adorable friend Akimi!

Like all Bearbricks, these are plastic action figures of a teddy bear, identical sculpts that differ only in their paint schemes. These 16 have been painted to represent various iconic Star Wars characters, both from the original trilogy and the new films, and some of them are quite inventive in how they reproduce established creatures and robots. I particularly like the upset expression on Chewbacca’s face (front row center), the shiny vacuum-metallized paint job on the C-3PO bear (back row center), and the creative license taken with the R2-D2 paint scheme — not an easy design to apply to a teddy bear! As these are only sold with 500ml bottles of Pepsi NEX, they’re only available in Japanese convenience stores and supermarkets; completing a full set required a lot of running around town (not to mention the cooperation of my friends Kevin, Jason and Akimi). I could’ve simply bought a full set from the secondary collector’s market — an online auction site, for instance — but where’s the fun in that?