Call this one an old personal gripe, but why-oh-why did it take US model kit manufacturers 20 years to release the traditional flat-wing panel TIE fighter? Sure, we got Darth Vader's bent-wing prototype from model manufacturer MPC, but Japan's Takara company released the standard, classic, regular old TIE Fighter all the way back in 1978.
So what if it was molded in gold plastic, had a transparent blue canopy, and looked kind of weird. It was still the first of its kind, and remained so until a full-fledged, movie-accurate TIE Fighter was released in 1993 -- also in Japan.
