A GUIDE TO VINTAGE STAR WARS FIGURES & ACCESSORIES

Emperor’s Royal Guard

DON’T RELY ON JUST THE COO TO IDENTIFY A FIGURE. Mould, paint colour, plastic colour and figure assembly traits are also needed to confirm your figure’s origins.

Family I:

Kader/ Lili Ledy

Left leg: “MADE IN HONG KONG”
  • Kader features a darker helmet and fluffy bright red cloak
  • Shorter, and with a sharper frontal ridge to the helmet sculpt
  • LL features a bright red helmet and a bright or darker ribbed cloak
Picture of Wolff

Wolff

The ERG came with different slit cloaks it seemed, but after examining more closely ROG found out that the cloaks on the LL ERGs are not glued and can be rotated easily. So it can not be proven how these left the factory until a carded one turns up with the slit the other way around. But even then you can “configure” every ERG like you want it. So this needed an entry, but cannot be called variant anymore.

Also difficult is the staff on that one. There is dark grey ones and light grey ones. The mold is present as Kenner produced staff also. The dark grey ones are easy to spot, but the lighter ones can be always Kenner ones too. Most carded examples that survived show the lighter staffs.

Family II:

UNITOY

Left leg: “HONG KONG” and smoothed coo
  • UT features a violet-red helmet and fluffy red cloak
  • HK coo had a shorter run as the steel tooling was altered to remove the coo for the European market
  • Two Unitoy figure sculpt variations

Family III:

TAIWAN (UNIVERSAL MANUFACTURERS)

Left leg: “MADE IN TAIWAN”
  • Taiwan helmet colours are generally an orange-red or mid-red colour, and can occasionally be found in much darker shades
  • This variant can be identified by it’s strongly ribbed cloak

MOULDING COMPARISONS

Beyond the colour of the helmet, there’s not much to differentiate the figures, although the Kader MIHK figure can feature a more menacing concave shaped visor.

The belt/torso section in particular deserves attention as mentioned previously. The rope belt is a completely different sculpt for each factory.

Unitoy ERG has some sculpting variations noted in the graphic below. There’s been two minor cavity variations noted in the arms, legs and and torso. These parts are mixed across the ERGs produced at this factory from HK through to the NCOO figure.