LEGO Star Wars 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship stays true to its mysterious on-screen roots

Dig into the details of a relatively obscure Clone Wars-era gunship – and how well the vehicle translates into an upcoming LEGO Star Wars set.

The LEGO Group has selected a surprisingly tough-to-find ship as inspiration for LEGO Star Wars 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship. Harking from the animated series, The Clone Wars, this specific colour and style of gunship is used to transport the Coruscant Guards on their business (as you might guess from the name). However, the vast majority of the time that we see the Coruscant Guards in the show, they are already in place and on guard, rarely travelling in their own specific vehicles.

Instead, we see them on board private ships of senators or Jedis, or inside or at the entrances of buildings on Coruscant. One of the few exceptions to this, however, is season six, episode seven, ‘Crisis at the Heart’, where Rush Clovis and Padmé Amidala arrive on Scipio on a Republic frigate, escorted by several Coruscant Guard Gunships. Although they remain in the background and we don’t get to see them clearly up close, this is one of the best sightings of this particular style of gunship and there’s enough detail to be able to draw some parallels between the on-screen ships and the newly-revealed brick-built one.

The colour and shape is pretty spot on, with the proportions of the wings to the body staying true to the on-screen version. What’s more, the red colour that makes it stand apart from a standard Republic Gunship holds true, with the white logo of the Coruscant Guard emblazoned on the nose of the ship. The red and white missile launchers on the top are fully loaded in the show, as they are in the build, coupled with wing-mounted laser turrets on the wings.

There’s also room for two drivers in both versions of the ship, visible through the bubble cockpits on the front of the ship. That means you could have two of either the guards themselves as pilots, or combine one of them with Commander Fox – unless you want the impressively detailed Clone Wars-era Padmé or Palpatine to have a go behind the controls.

One key difference between the show gunship and the LEGO replica is that the brick-built vehicle has just one door that slides to the side, as opposed to the animated one that appears to have two doors that swing to the side and up to allow troopers and guards to embark and disembark. Nonetheless, this is a relatively small change, presumably due to the side of the ship.

Moving onto the size, while some detail is lost due to the smaller size of 75354 Coruscant Guard Ship (compared to UCS models, for example), it does mean that the ship is more to scale with minifigures. In The Clone Wars, the heads of the guards skimmed just below the door frame when jumping in and out of the gunship, much the same as the minifigures appear to do in the product images of 75354. When you compare this to ships like 75309 Republic Gunship, where the doorframe is two or perhaps even three times the height of a minifigure, the scale is more true-to-life than previous iterations of similar vehicles.

LEGO Star Wars 75354 Coruscant Guard Ship will retail for £129.99 / $139.99 / €149.99 from September 1.

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