Star Wars R5-D4 (Red Bar) AFA 70 Loose (Kenner, 1978)....

Description

Star Wars R5-D4 (Red Bar) AFA 70 Loose (Kenner, 1978). R5-D4's screen time in Star Wars: A New Hope may have been brief, but his toy story has become one of the most celebrated in the vintage line. Among the droid's many sticker layouts, the so-called "Red Bar" error is the best known - a factory printing mistake that originated from Kenner's Hong Kong partner Kader. The filled-in red bar on the front decal was the result of a leftover element from the R2-D2 print separation not being properly removed, causing a handful of sheets to be produced with the erroneous red marking. As has been documented, Red Bar examples are tied only to Kader sticker sheets and do not appear on Unitoy product. They are markedly scarcer than standard segmented-bar R5-D4s. Importantly, they were not limited to a single release window - Red Bar figures have surfaced on nine different cardbacks, including a rare Canadian 20-back, further underscoring how sporadically these error stickers entered distribution. For collectors of early Kenner oddities, this Red Bar example, graded AFA 70 EX+, is a true piece of sticker lore - a production slip that has become a cornerstone variation in its own right. It represents the intersection of global factory practices, printing quirks, and the obsessive eye of the Star Wars community that uncovered and preserved its history. Adding this astromech to your lineup means owning not just another droid, but one of the line's most enduring error legends, a figure whose mistake turned into mythology.

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