As we look to expand content here at StarWars-fans.com, I will continue to follow my passion as I have done in the past and write about those things that interest me. While Star Wars news is interesting, I am not one to get a big scoop anytime soon, but I also know where I stand in the Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes community. One lesser-known fact is my involvement in selling Legos on eBay. One the past 7-8 year my family has regularly acquired collections, kept what we wanted and sold off the rest. Through this I have built a lot of Lego sets, most notably Star Wars Lego sets, and today I begin the new LEGO Star Wars Review series.
Lego 75306 Review
Lego 75306 is the Imperial Probe Droid, a 683 piece set released in 2021 and retired in November 2022. My initial thought was that this set, priced at $60-80 USD, was over-priced and not worth the money. However, after acquiring the set after buying an entire Lego collection that featured a ton of Lego Star Wars and Marvel sets, I quickly changed my tune. Note that the Imperial Probe Droid as we have always known it from Leia’s identification of it in The Empire Strikes Back back in 1980, is more correctly called a Viper Probe Droid because of changes made by the Galactic Empire to make it a more military-equipped device.
Lego 75306 is one of those sets that features a LOT of smaller pieces and unique/hard-to-find pieces. You can tell that Lego has moved toward more small pieces and brand new pieces to throw collectors who like to rebuild sets off. That having been said, they clearly did not just do this for the sake of new and hard-to-find pieces, but the use of the new pieces was very, very well done.
If you look back at the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where the Imperial Probe Droid is most known for, it has been sent to search and hunt for signs of the Rebels, in one famous scene on Hoth. As Chewie draws the IPD’s attention, Han shoots it setting off the self-destruct and it is destroyed. But before the scene unfolds, we see the Imperial Probe Droid has dangling arms below its body, arms that we have since 1980 learned have specific functions and operations. According to IGN, “this lightly-armored probe is equipped with six manipulator arms extending from a central pod and several retractable sensor arms for gathering samples.”
What I like about the Lego build, in addition to creating the snowy base and ability to have it rise up from the ground securely, is the amount of detail in each of the arms and throughout the build. The main, round, body section is actually two large parts made up of crazy details even on the underside of the body. The top, head-like section has all of the sensors and eye-like round pieces that most of us would not have really ever paid attention to in the movies, but that detail has been added to over the years since the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Overall, I really, really enjoyed this build. My expectations were not high for this set and right now it is not an in-demand set on eBay. But there was a certain nostalgia to building it and I almost enjoyed the challenge of making all of the small, sometimes unique pieces work to form Lego 75306, the Imperial Probe Droid.