In a new blog piece, Hasbro Pulse answers a question that has been bugging fans of Star Wars Rebels and The Black Series 6 inch action-figure line for years…. Where’s Zeb?
The wait for Zeb in TBS 6″ line ends later this fall.
In 2017, everyone at San Diego Comic Con– including Zeb voice actor Steven Blum–was asking “Where’s Zeb?” At HasCon that same year, then Star Wars Design Director Steve Evans vowed to complete the crew of the Ghost eventually, but characters in the show kept evolving—getting older, new armor, accessories—making it difficult to settle on which version we should develop. Zeb was finally planned for Fall, 2019. This was going to be his year! Then, like a Star Destroyer coming out of hyperspace, the Mandalorian television show blasted in hot and heavy, and Zeb got bumped for the deluxe Paz Vizla figure. (That figure was super cool, though.) So, 2019 ended up being the year we brought Ezra and Chopper to the line. With Ezra, we ran into that problem of which version of the character to bring to The Black Series. It had been three years since he got his new look in the show, but ultimately, we decided to go with the season 1 version since that was the version we chose for the other characters and we wanted to maintain a cohesive crew. Chopper was smaller than the rest of the figures, so we wanted to make sure we packed as much value as possible into the box. This came in the form of a lot of accessories he uses in the show, and a cool display stand for the droid.
Which brings us to 2020. The year of Zeb! He’s one of the most complicated Black Series figures we’ve ever developed. Not only due to his size, but because of the unique articulation the figure requires and the challenges those new joints presented during painting when airbrush fades were applied. Not to mention his weapon converts into four different modes, making it an engineering puzzle that required a very clever solution.
Read the blog in full here.
