The vintage Y-Wing Fighter has some tremendous upsides. First, the battery-operated rooftop cannon is unmatched for taking out the enemy. Sweeping left to right at manic speed, it just can’t miss. And just in case you’ve sprayed a few too many turbo lasers, the chin cannons are there for backup! You could literally jab your target into submission with those two badboys. Also the vintage Y-Wing actually allowed you to insert your own droid as opposed to the X-Wing Fighter that used an artificial R2 substitute.

Downsides? A few. The rear engine extensions broke about as easily as eggshells. Also, while brilliantly conceived, the landing gear mechanism suffered from poor construction. Kenner tended to use plastic throughout their vehicles, even where a little metal would’ve really hit the spot. So even back in the day the wings of the Emperor’s Shuttle, the wings of the X-Wings, and the landing gear on this lovely Y-Wing all tended to stop doing what they were supposed to do once that plastic gave out.

The Y-Wing has one other peculiar design flaw. You see, the vehicle’s hull is put together kind of like a sandwich. There’s a top half and a lower half and when screwed together they keep in all the good stuff that controls the landing gear and electronics. What’s troublesome is that some of the decals need to go over the seam between the top and bottom halves, so that if you ever needed to open that sucker up you’d actually have to tear or otherwise remove the decals. As far as I know it’s the only vintage Kenner vehicle that can boast this.