We've certainly had our fair share of JP merchandise liscense updates over the last year or so, almost all confusing to say the least. Well forum member 'crex' (who also happens to be Chris - see 10/2 story below) recently had one of his staffers inquire directly to the Star Wars team at Hasbro to get some sort of definitive answer on just what is really going on. Here's what he had to say:

"Since the summer the Star Wars team @ Hasbro has been allowing the SW Collecting sites to submit 3 questions each week. So after a few weeks of doing this, I decided to see if they would bite on a JP question. Turns out they still have the license and do plan on future releases BUT they are repaint exclusives to KB. Now obviously, the findings at KB months ago support that.

If the license ran out, someone would pick it up and announce it. And the exclusive thing has been following Hasbros MO lately with the repaints. There has been plenty of repaints with Star Wars and thats a license thats a year removed from a movie year, 6 months before the 30th anniversary build up and the upcoming TV shows. A license like JP wouldnt make fiscal sense to invest money for new product when no significant news is out there in terms of movie announcements and they can still get some return from JP with small scale repaints."

A big thanks to Chris again for that update. So in short, we can expect more repaints down the road until JP4 rolls around. I'm sure that's what most expected anyway but hopefully this report can serve to clear matters up just a bit. Also worth noting today is a set of JP3 prototypes that recently surfaced on ebay and were purchased by forum moderator Raptoralpha. He was kind enough to take several new pics along with descriptions which can all be found in this thread on our forum.