[Morgan]

Here's a Chekov figure signed by Walter Koenig. Back in the day the original cast was really hard to find in stores -- I didn't see a single Kirk, Scotty, or Chekov in supermarkets -- only later and only in 1996 in comic book stores. That's how bad the scalping situation was in those days: the original cast just did not sit on shelves at all, despite the reduced articulation of the figures. And in hindsight it really spoke to how much more collectors valued the original cast, given the fact that Playmates was making the figures of the cast in these uniforms for the first time really.

Walter Koenig is a friend of a friend, and still lives in LA. Few fans remember this now, but the inclusion of parts of the original cast in "Generations" was kind of a controversial thing internally: Leonard Nimoy didn't want to do the movie because he said he just had one or two lines and the were incidental. George Takei and Nichelle Nichols passed for similar reasons. Then there was the whole Kirk skydiving scene, which gave us a figure that didn't make it into the final cut, but that, in hindsight, echoed the feelings of the original crew about not wanting to attend the launch of the Enterprise-B. Viewing that scene now, it feels like Shatner is talking about not wanting to be in the film itself.

As it turned out, "Generations" gave Koenig one last moment to shine after pretty two-dimensional turns in "The Final Frontier" and "The Undiscovered Country," where his lines felt sort of interchangeable, and in some cases they actually were. In "Generations" Chekov was given the task of meeting Guinan, and finally visibly taking charge of something by forming a team of medics from scratch. Unlike with McCoy, Scotty and Kirk, we don't really know what happened to the character later in the canon trek universe -- we saw McCoy and Scotty and Spock in TNG and that's pretty much it. But, it's not a bad thing that they left the original cast alone after that.

On this figure the Chekov head sculpt came out really well, and they also gave him a unique body not shared with any of the other movies-uniform figures. In fact, there were only four unique body sculpts produced in these uniforms, including Saavik, and this remains the single biggest missed opportunity of the entire Playmates license: very few movies figures in movies uniforms. The company wasted the resources that it had on "The Motion Picture" pajama uniforms, and when it came time to rectify this it was too late. So nobody ever got such a basic crowdpleaser as Spock in movies uniform, but thankfully this is something one can now piece together via a Kirk "Generations" head-swap. But this sort of decisionmaking seems like a major, major blunder 25 years later, given the popularity of the Trek figure line. A whole lineup of the original cast in movies uniforms was the greatest fish-in-a-barrel financial bet for Playmates, but the company busied itself with unpopular items like the TMP pajamas.