Tracked down what these bootleg Episode I figures are, and the names are ridiculous
I came across a local listing for these and the seller had no clue what they were. They copy the Hasbro Star Wars Episode I sculpts but everything about them is a little off. The cards are blank plastic blisters with no printed cardback, every figure comes with the same generic yellow or red stick instead of a real saber, and the sculpts are rougher than the originals.
I went down a whole rabbit hole trying to ID these. Reverse image search just kept matching them to the real Hasbro figures because the sculpts are copied. Asked a couple of AI tools and they confidently told me they were the genuine 1998 Hasbro releases, which they clearly are not. Nobody could tell me what they actually were until I stumbled onto an old CNN piece about them.
Turns out they are from a well known bootleg line, and the names on the cards are the best part. Valorum became Glorious Star Lord, Qui-Gon is Fly-Gone-Gin, Obi-Wan is Toby-One, and young Anakin just got labeled Little Girl. Apparently a UK clearance company bought a pile of them at a liquidation auction back in 2014.
Kind of wild how these crude knockoffs became their own little collecting sub-genre. Anyone here actually collect the bootlegs? Would love to see the weirder ones you have come across.