LEGO Star Wars Magazine Issue 124: The X-Wing Pilot Luke and the Second Gift You Couldn't Predict

Start with the figure, because that's what this issue is remembered for. The guaranteed covermount gift attached to the front of this one is Luke Skywalker in his orange Rebel Alliance flight suit — the X-Wing pilot look from the Battle of Yavin, complete with a lightsaber in the bag. Not a droid, not a background trooper, not another variant helmet. A headline character, on his own, in a sealed bag.

That alone puts LEGO Star Wars magazine issue 124 in a different bracket from most of the run around it. But it isn't the only reason people still ask about this one, and the second reason is stranger.

Quick Facts on This Issue

• Issue: 124, published by Immediate Media for the UK newsstand
• On shelves: mid-2025 — long since replaced in the shelf slot
• Guaranteed gift: Luke Skywalker in Rebel pilot flight suit, with lightsaber
• Bonus gift: a second, previously released LEGO item — and it wasn't the same one in every copy
• Comic focus: an Obi-Wan Kenobi story, with the Jedi Master up against an unexpected opponent

The Second Gift Was a Lottery

Issue 124 ran as a double-gift issue: the Luke bag on the front, and a second bagged LEGO item taped alongside it. The catch is that the second item wasn't fixed. Reported variants included a 44-piece Republic Fighter Tank micro-build and a Chewbacca minifigure — both previously released items being cleared through the newsstand rather than anything made for the magazine.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Immediate Media has repeated this pattern since, most visibly on issue 140, where UK buyers reported different bonus minifigures depending on which supermarket they walked into. Issue 124 is one of the earlier clear examples of it, which makes it a useful reference point for anyone trying to understand why two sealed copies of the same magazine can hold different contents.

The practical consequence matters more than the trivia. When the bonus gift varies, the phrase "sealed copy of issue 124" stops describing a single product. Two listings can contain genuinely different things, and neither seller is doing anything wrong.

Under the Cover: Obi-Wan Takes the Lead

The book itself follows the format this line has run for years. The main comic strip is an Obi-Wan Kenobi adventure, built around the Jedi Master trying to escape an enemy the story keeps back as a surprise — a sensible structural choice for a strip aimed at roughly the 6–11 bracket, where the reveal is the payoff.

Around it sit the usual fixtures: pull-out posters, puzzle and activity pages, short character features, and competition pages offering LEGO sets as prizes. If you're buying for a child, that content is the actual product and the bag on the front is the hook. If you're buying for a shelf, it's the other way round, and there's no point pretending otherwise.

How Hard Is It to Find Now?

The scarcity story for these magazines is geographic rather than numeric. They're UK newsstand titles from Immediate Media, printed in large quantities, so nothing here was rare on release day. What makes them hard to get is distribution: they never appear on LEGO.com, they aren't stocked at retail in the US, Canada or most of Europe, and once the next issue takes the shelf slot the only supply left is whatever individual buyers set aside.

Issue 124 has now had over a year of that attrition. It still turns up at UK magazine specialists and on the secondary market, which puts it in the comfortable middle band — not a chase piece, but not something you can pick up at a newsagent either. Sealed copies thin out faster than the magazines themselves, because in most households the bag gets opened the same day it comes home.

Three Things to Check Before You Buy One

First, ask which bonus gift the copy actually has. Given the variation, a stock cover photograph tells you nothing about the second bag. Ask for a picture of the specific copy, showing both gifts attached.

Second, confirm sealed means sealed. These bags can be opened and pressed flat again more convincingly than you'd expect, and a short accessory — a lightsaber blade, in this case — doesn't show up in a listing photo.

Third, decide what you're really buying. A loose pilot Luke minifigure and an intact copy of LEGO Star Wars magazine issue 124 are two different products sitting side by side. If you want the figure for a display, loose is fine and the printing is identical. If you're building a complete magazine run, only the whole issue counts.

Weighed up honestly, this is one of the more sensible gaps to fill in a run. The guaranteed gift is a recognisable hero rather than another variant trooper, it reads clearly on a shelf next to an X-Wing, and the double-gift quirk gives it a story most issues in this line simply don't have.

Browse our LEGO magazine range to see which issues we currently have in hand, dig through the wider LEGO Star Wars collection if you're building out an Original Trilogy display, or read our background guide to the LEGO Star Wars Magazine for how the UK release schedule and covermount gifts actually work.