Doppelgangers: Colin Mochrie

Action figures of topless fat guys usually don’t fly off the shelves (barring, of course, if they ever made a fat, topless Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson action figure), so its only natural that most people probably have no idea who this action figure is of.  It doesn’t reallly matter… because he looks like Colin Mochrie’s (from TV’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?”) bizarre, Rancor-keeping doppelganger!

In the Star Wars universe, our fellow here is known as Malakili, Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor keeper in Return of the Jedi.  Remember that guy that cries when Luke kills the epic Rancor beast in Jabba’s palace?  This is that guy.  Kids love that guy.  You know, all your friends were playing with the Cobra Commander and Megatron and you had this guy.  You poor bastard.

This figure has had three different versions over the years: an original from the 80s, this figure here from the late 90s, and a new version from 2009 (sometime I’ll update this article with pictures of that version).  This is the late 90s version.

It really doesn’t matter who this character is: the bottom line is that this kind of figure doesn’t have a whole lot of child appeal, so these kinds of characters are thrown into collectible figure lines as collector fan service and often wind up as “peg warmers,” which I discussed at length in my Indiana Jones figure retrospective, because collectors don’t need to buy multiples of them and kids tend to avoid them.