Boss Fight Studio Dead-Eye Duck and Holiday Bucky

Wave 2 of Boss Fight Studio’s Bucky O’Hare line is now shipping to consumers and comic shops across the US. Wave 1 was extremely well received nabbing a few Toy of the Year awards and earning the approval of yours truly right here at The Nostalgia Spot. Wave 1 was pretty hotly anticipated among Bucky O’Hare fans since it was the inaugural wave in a  new line of action figures and because it contained the long-awaited First Mate Jenny action figure – a character we were denied back in the Hasbro days. Wave 2, which consists of Stealth Bucky, Astral Projection Jenny, and Dead-Eye Duck is perhaps just as much anticipated because Dead-Eye has long been a fan-favorite. The four-armed former pirate and current gunner on the Righteous Indignation, was brought to life by Scott McNeil for the cartoon with a ton of moxie and a bad ass attitude – traits always endearing to young boys. Also shipping is the special Holiday Bucky, an Easter variant of the Wave 1 figure presented as a chocolate bunny, though not as literal chocolate.

Wave 2 still runs approximately $35 per figure, a steep price for a single 4″ figure, and thus why this review is only for Dead-Eye and the holiday variant. I’m not a professional reviewer and my blog is hardly large enough to attract enough attention to the point where I can receive review copies of toys, so I had to take a pass on the Wave 1 variants and just stick to Dead-Eye. When it came to the Holiday Bucky, I was just too charmed by the packaging and concept to resist. For the time being, I’ve opted to keep Easter Bucky in his packaging, even though it’s fairly easy to remove the figures and reassemble the packaging thanks to an ingenious design that just clips the blister to the card stock. As a result, I’m not going to go into much detail for him. He’s the same figure as before, just with a different paint application. I consider the Easter themed packaging to be part of the appeal and I just think he displays better in box.

Too sweet.

Without a beak he kind of looks like Marvin The Martian.

With Dead-Eye though, I am taking no such precautions. Dead-Eye is a wonderfully fun design and he demands to be opened and played with. His colors are toon and comic accurate being a pale orange with red straps. The straps are a separate piece of plastic and are glued in place giving him some nice definition. He comes with four guns, though typically he would only wield two at a time in the comic/show, but four arms practically demands four guns, plus the old Hasbro toy came with four as well (sadly, my old Dead-Eye has been lost to time so no comparisons). He has a pair of additional beak attachments to change up his face, and four additional hands including one with a piece of chalk for tallying his kills from the seat of his canon. He has the same articulation as Bucky, with the joints able to pop off and on making the chances of breaking him quite limited. Of course, the additional arms technically means he has more articulation and each shoulder is connected by a ball and socket joint. His range of motion with all four arms is excellent, and his over-sized webbed feat make posing him a breeze.

Basically my only complaint with Wave 1 was how hard it was to swap Bucky’s parts, though I had no such difficulty with Jenny. Dead-Eye shares some of those traits with Bucky, and in some areas he’s better. Dead-Eye arrived with some pretty stiff joints all around. His shoulders moved fine in the socket, but the hinge piece in there and as well as in the elbow were pretty stubborn. Working him gently alleviated some of this, but I’ll probably need to hit him with a hair dryer if I really want to loosen things ups. His hands are also pretty stubborn and do not like popping out. They’re small pieces and getting a grip on them can ware out your thumbs pretty fast. Getting them in is harder than getting them out, and to get them flush you’ll probably need hot water or the aforementioned blow dryer. Thankfully, his beak attachments are a breeze, popping off and on with minimal effort, but not so minimal that you need to fear them falling off. His default expression has gritted teeth on either side and he comes with a second bill that has a wider grin on the right side and a third bill that’s completely closed. Since his whole face doesn’t come off his eye will always be in kind of a frown, but I’ve honestly never seen Dead-Eye with any other expression.

Size-wise, Dead-Eye is pretty much the same height as Bucky which is accurate to both forms of media. This means he’s a little shorter than Jenny and the trio look great posed with each other. It’s hard not to look at them and imagine what future versions of Blinky, Willy, Bruiser and so on will look like beside them. Like the other two, his packaging also is an homage to the Hasbro toy with the same artwork on the front just changed slightly. A character bio from creator Larry Hama appears on the back as well as a silhouette of the Toad Storm Trooper to follow in Wave 3, which is supposed to arrive before the end of the year. In addition to the Trooper, a stealth variant of Dead-Eye is expected as well. There’s also to be a special Corsair Canard version of Dead-Eye, which was the group of pirates he belonged to before the events of the comic/show, that is being packaged with a tin lunchbox. There also is a toon variant of Bucky, which appears to be the same as Wave 1 Bucky but with maybe a brighter red plastic, that I believe is also part of Wave 3. Boss Fight Studio is a small company, and Bucky O’Hare a niche product so forgive me if I’ve said this before, but variants are needed and will probably continue in order to make the line profitable and hopefully able to continue. Boss Fight has yet to show anything for a potential Wave 4, so your guess is as good as mine on what will be included, but hopefully it happens.

Dead-Eye Duck is a welcomed addition to the Bucky O’Hare line and the most appropriate choice for a third figure due to his fun design and popularity with the fanbase. He’s just as good, if not better, than the figures that preceded him. His anatomy makes his facial expressions less imaginative, but he makes up for it with easy to swap face pieces without the troubling stubbornness exhibited by the Wave 1 Bucky. And Holiday Bucky is a silly and fun variant for the line. Really, a chocolate Easter Bucky design? I would have never thought of it. Both Dead-Eye and Holiday Bucky, who is limited to 400 pieces, are available at http://www.bossfightshop.com along with the other figures from Wave 2 and the Wave 1 figures. Being a small shop, don’t expect Boss Fight to dispatch your order right away should you choose to make a purchase since they’re probably consumed with fulfilling the pre-orders right now, but they’ll come. I can’t say enough good things about this line of action figures, or about how happy it makes me to see Bucky and the gang relevant again, so if yo’ve been sitting on the sidelines maybe now is a good time to jump in!