Author Archives: Joe

April 25, 2023

NECA Cartoon TMNT Dirk Savage and Mona Lisa

By Joe
These two are on an odd pair, but not a bad one.

Today’s look at yet another Haulathon release from NECA Toys features two one-off characters from the cartoon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Dirk Savage and Mona Lisa. For Savage, this is his action figure debut as he wasn’t featured in the vintage Playmates line. For Mona Lisa, she was only featured in one episode of the show, but did benefit from an action figure and that’s honestly how I remember her. I did see her episode as a kid, but the memories are rather fuzzy. She has also shown up on other iterations of TMNT and is often paired with Raph as a romantic interest because turtles and newts so often mate in the real world. For casual fans of the property, this is definitely a set that will lead to some head-scratching, but if you’re all-in on this line then you probably expected these two to show up eventually, though maybe not together since they weren’t featured in the same episode. And in keeping with this line, they’re pretty good so you might want to check them out even if you can’t remember them.

That is some chin.

We’ll start with Dirk first, the mutant hunter who looks a bit like a cross between Flash Gordon and Judge Dredd with a little Jay Leno in the face. He stands at around 6.75″ to the top of his head and touches 7″ if you factor in the hair. Dirk is a great example of how this line has a little pop to it. We get a real bright red for this shirt to pair with a deep purple for the pants. There’s browns and grays all over the place for the various straps and cuffs he’s sporting and there’s an abundance of little painted details all over the place. I love the toony quality his face possesses and the five o’clock shadow he has. The human characters have a tendency to feel drab in a line that stars a bunch of mutants, but Dirk is a fun design and a great piece for the shelf. The paint is very clean and I think everything here is unique to Dirk. If there’s reuse going on I can’t tell. He also brings back the shading which has been a bit hit and miss with this recent batch. Some figures have had it in abundance, and some have not. With Dirk, we get it on the shirt, pants, and boots, but NECA declined to include it on the belt, shoulder pads, or head. I’m not sure what the reasoning for this is, I think it would have looked nice on the hair and shoulder pads, but I’m guessing most won’t care.

For those who like weapon storage, this one’s for you.

For accessories, Dirk comes with a pretty substantial spread. We don’t get any additional portraits, but given how perfect his cocky expression is, I don’t think we need another. He comes with three sets of hands: fists, gripping, and trigger hands with all of the hands featuring the horizontal hinge instead of the vertical one. Dirk also has a pair of guns. One looks like a sci-fi version of a sawed-off shotgun and Dirk has a removable holster for the rear of the figure it can be slotted into. I had to look up promotional images of the figure to know how it’s supposed to go in as it’s a tight fit, but it can be done. The weapon itself looks fine, but the barrels end with a flat piece rather than look like a cylindrical barrel which is an odd look. I didn’t check to see if it was the same way in the show, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is as I can see some censors not liking that it looks like a shotgun and mandating some changes. He also has a much smaller sidearm that I think shot out a cable in the show. It looks nice, though the red tip makes it look like a laser pistol or something. I do wish we got an effect part for the cable to pair with it though. Dirk also has a baton weapon that resembles a cattle prod. He can hold it or it has a slot on the holster for it making it relatively easy for Dirk to carry all of his weapons. Well, except for the giant laser trap he comes in. We saw the net portion with Genghis Frog and it’s a repeat accessory here, only it also comes with its base which it just slots into. It’s a plastic box, but it’s well-painted and well-sculpted. Dirk also has his wire cuffs which should be able to fit around the wrists of most of the figures in this line. It’s joined by a soft plastic cable of sorts, though it doesn’t appear to have a bendy wire inside it. I wish he had a slot on his belt to store it, but it can be wrapped around the holster or an arm with relative ease if that’s your thing. All of the accessories look pretty great though and there’s plenty of paint to go around. The only downside is Dirk’s hands are all really stiff so getting him to hold his guns and baton is a challenge. You’re best off to just use some hot water to soften the hands first or else risk scraping the paint. Mondo Gecko also came with his control cuff so if you have that figure it’s like having yet another accessory for Dirk.

“Come quietly or be taken, mutant!” “No, my buddy! Release my buddy!”
Tokka and Rahzar can’t fit in the foot trap so Mona is going to have to help us out.

For articulation, Dirk is done surprisingly well. He has some issues with his design that are going to interfere, but overall I think he’s going to be thought of as one of the better figures in the line. His head is on a double ball peg with a ball joint at the base of the neck as well so he gets tons of range. He can look up, down, rotate, and can hit some nice nuance poses as well. The shoulders are the usual ball-hinges and he can lift his arms out to the side, but rotation is going to be hindered by the oversized shoulder pads. There’s a biceps swivel past that which works as expected and then the usual double-jointed elbows which will get past 90 degrees. My right, lower, hinge on the elbow is pretty stuck, but I also haven’t given it my all to get it loose and it’s the only stuck joint on my figure. The wrists swivel and have the less desirable horizontal hinge, as mentioned before. The diaphragm joint is likely a ball peg of some sort as Dirk can tilt back and forward a small amount as well as to the side and rotate. The waist twists and the ball-jointed hips will allow Dirk to hit some killer splits. He can rotate at the same joint and he kicks forward pretty far and kicks back a small amount. The knees are double-jointed and bend past 90 degrees and below that we get a boot cut which is hidden by the cuff of the boot. The ankles bend forward and back and also feature a rocker. About the only real limitation with this guys is that he doesn’t have a great ab crunch, but that’s typical of NECA, and then there’s the shoulder pads which get in the way. Even so, I think he has plenty of range for what he is and it’s a nice surprise.

Dirk is quietly one of the tallest figures in the line.
She’s something of a scientist.

Dirk’s box-mate is the lovely Mona Lisa, who was a chemistry student tragically mutated into a newt or something. She fights for the environment and it’s sort of interesting that she’s a bit of a brain, but she’s paired with Raph and not Donatello. Compared with Dirk, her design is far more simple. She’s essentially a nude, anthropomorphic, newt lady with a ton of brown hair on top of her head. The only clothing she wears is her pink scarf and a belt that seems to only exist to make her look less nude since it serves no function. She’s basically all green plastic, but in true NECA fashion, every inch of her is painted. She stands at a petite 5.25″ and the hair will take her close to 6″ if you want to go there. Her body features the toon shading, but her head and scarf do not. The only embellishment on her person is the stripe of light green on her torso and another stripe of dark green on her rear which runs down and over her tail. In the show, this light green on her torso was more yellow so it’s interesting that NECA went with green instead. The paint is pretty clean, especially the linework. The only blemish on my figure is a chip on the back of her ponytail, but otherwise she looks fine.

Mona’s accessories are a bit more academic than usual.

Mona Lisa, not being a ninja or a mutant hunter, comes with more benign accessories, but she still comes with a lot. We get four sets of hands with her: fists, open, gripping, and a set of open hands without webbing. I’m not sure why there’s a set of open hands without webbing, but maybe there’s one, off, scene in the episode where they forget to draw them in. She also has a set of books, a red one and a blue one, and one is labeled Chemistry and the other Physics because she’s something of a scientist. They don’t open or anything, but they look fine. She also has some chemistry accessories. There’s a trio of test tubes done with translucent plastic, but painted to make them resemble having a liquid inside. One is blue, one is green, and one is pink. They have a stand they slot into which actually works well. There’s also a flask and a stand for that. The flask is also done with translucent plastic and painted to make it look like it has a green liquid in it. Take note, Hasbro, this is how you properly do such an accessory as the ones that came with Beast look bad. This one also has a cork stopper on the top that’s actually removable – pretty neat! We also get yet another flask, this one with a pink liquid, and it has a straw or something coming out of it. Lastly, we get a second head and this one is angry. I will say, swapping heads is a little tough. It takes some good old-fashioned elbow grease to pull the default one off and the second one doesn’t want to go on easily. Some heat will help there. The hands are also surprisingly tough to swap as well. They’re on tiny pegs that are pretty long and barbed and I don’t think we needed the barb at the end. Her forearms are so thin that they probably would have stayed in fine without them. You may want to apply heat to the forearms as a result, but careful when doing so because if you heat the peg that could actually make things worse.

They look cute together.

Articulation for Mona is a bit in-line with what we expect out of this series from NECA. Her head is on a double-ball peg, but the lower ball is so far in her neck that she really can’t do much save for rotate and tilt forward a little. The shoulders are standard ball hinges that go all the way out to the side and rotate all around. Despite her slight frame, Mona Lisa gets a biceps swivel and double-jointed elbows and it all works just fine. There’s more of a delicate feel to them, but the elbows aren’t gummy which would have been a killer on this figure since the piece is so small. The hands swivel and hinge and the hinges are all horizontal. There is a waist twist behind the belt, so that belt at least does something here. It’s a ball joint so she can arch back a bit, but she doesn’t crunch forward really at all. There’s also not much tilt and the figure really fights the waist twist. It could just be that the belt is really tight or maybe it’s not spinning on the ball joint freely. The legs are of the ball and socket variety and she can kick forward all the way and kicks back a bit. She can do full splits and there’s some rotation at the thigh too. The knees are double-jointed and bend past 90 degrees while her ankles are hinged and bend forward and back plenty. I’m pretty sure she has ankle rockers as well, but mine are pretty stubborn and it feels like the peg is bending when I try to engage them. Her tail is also articulated and it’s on a ball-hinge joint. It rotates and has some in and out movement as well which makes it useful as a third leg if you feel it’s warranted. She articulates well enough, especially if the ankle rockers are unique to my figure and not a widespread thing. The only real limitation that shouldn’t exist is with the head, but maybe because her head is so heavy due to her hair that NECA prioritized stability over range of motion. The “diaper” piece at the hips is one of the least inhibitive I’ve seen in this line so she has great range of motion below the waist which is helpful when finding poses.

“Don’t worry, Raph, this will be good for you.”
“Mona! What did you do to me?!”

Dirk Savage and Mona Lisa may be an odd pair for a two-pack, but they’re two characters done pretty well. Mona Lisa is a more simple, and thus less flashy, design, but her engineering and accessories are pretty fun and for fans of the character I think they’ll be quite pleased. Dirk Savage does pack that extra “bang” by virtue of his design and accessories. He poses very well for this line and his accessories give him a lot of variety when hunting for that perfect, shelf, pose. Considering we already had one of his accessories via the frogs and Tokka and Rahzar were targets of his, adding him to the collection feels like it makes that small segment of the property complete.

Share a pizza with someone you love.

This two-pack is exclusive to Target stores and will set you back $60 like the other two-packs released during this Haulathon event. Given the accessory loadout and the fact that both figures feature all new tooling this one feels like it earns that price tag better than some of the others. The online drop for this set has come and gone, but more seem to be shipping out so keep an eye on your local stores if you’re in need. Last fall’s sets, which featured similarly obscure characters, are still being found in the wild so there’s reason for optimism if you missed the initial release that these will be easy to come by as well once the initial rush dies down. Like the other two-packs we’ve seen recently, this one might not be for the casuals, but if you like good toys or remember either character there’s probably enough here to entice you. And I think those who do take the plunge will come away feeling pretty good about their decision.

More from the world of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987):

NECA Cartoon TMNT Tokka and Rahzar

There is certainly a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles product flying around these days, but I would guess collectors and fans of the property are paying the most attention to two toy makers in particular: NECA and Super7. One search for “NECA” on this blog will reveal that the company has produced a ton…

by Joe

NECA TMNT Cartoon Rasputin and Genghis

During Season Two of the classic cartoon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the world was introduced to the Punk Frogs. Despite their name, there was nothing particularly punk about these mutated amphibians as they all dressed like they were going to a Jimmy Buffett concert. They make a few return appearances in the show, and given…

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NECA TMNT “Shred, Mondo, Shred!” Deluxe Mondo Gecko

When we took a look at NECA’s Muckman from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon line of action figures, I mentioned how Muckman was supposed to be released in a two-pack with Mondo Gecko. That obviously didn’t happen and it’s because the figures just got too expensive for the two-pack format. Rather than release a…

by Joe

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April 20, 2023

Super7 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Ultimate Goldar

By Joe
He’s coming for your Power Rangers!

Last week, when we took a look at the first Power Ranger in Super7’s line of Ultimates! action figures based on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers I expressed some surprise that Hasbro would license out this brand since it competes with their own Lighting Collection. I do feel like the actual Rangers are pretty safe. People who are into MMPR will buy a set of Rangers from both companies and be happy. When it comes to the monsters though then I think Hasbro could have an issue. In truth, the monsters have been a relatively small part of the Lightning Collection. The few that have been released have been of the deluxe variety with an increased cost relative to the Rangers. They’ve also been kind of terrible from what I’ve seen. A few look like they’re sculpted well enough, but Hasbro really cheaped out on the paint apps for most of them and they just look awful as a result. It’s surprising because MMPR is an in-house brand for Hasbro now. I may not like it, but I understand when a Marvel Legends figure or a Star Wars release has less money put into it because those have the additional burden of a licensing fee, but that’s not the cast with Power Rangers.

Goldar has some size on Tommy, and I’m happy to see he doesn’t completely dwarf a Lightning Collection release.

Since Hasbro has declined to make any monsters worth my money, I naturally saw Super7’s line as a potential replacement. I like having villains, especially monster types, that are bigger than the heroes so the larger scale of Super7’s figures didn’t seem like an obstacle to me, but really a potential benefit. Though so far I’ve only committed to buying one such figure, but if it’s any good I may change my mind. And that figure is Goldar. I don’t need or want a big MMPR collection, but Goldar always felt like a character worth having. He’s Rita Repulsa’s general and basically her right hand man…monster. Despite his inability to actually defeat the Power Rangers, he was kept in that position when Lord Zedd usurped Rita’s throne and attempted to take matters into his own hands. As an enemy, I think Goldar was the first monster the Rangers battled in their Megazord, though I also haven’t gone back to watch the show in years so I could be misremembering. I always liked him as a design. He’s some sort of armored wolf, and as the name implies, he seems to like gold. He looks scary, and even though he wasn’t exactly batting a thousand, I always felt like he was a threat to the Power Rangers and not the show’s version of a Bebop or Rocksteady.

It’s probably not screen accurate, but this works for me.

Super7 apparently felt like Goldar was rather important and he was chosen to be the main villain in the first wave of Ultimates! Like Tommy, he comes in the same Ultimates! styled box with a green slipcover over a window box inside. He does get his own “power coin” logo on the slipcover and there’s a bio and still from the show on the back of the inner box. Once removed, Goldar stands a mighty 8″ or so to the top of his head, a touch taller if you count the horns of his helm. He looks rather resplendent in his golden armor which appears to be fully painted. Like the Green Ranger, it looks like Super7 committed to giving us a nice finish by casting the figure in the appropriate color, but then painting over it with the same. It gives the figure a much more “premium” appearance which is a good thing considering he’s priced at $55. The inner parts of his suit are painted red in accordance with the character design and there are a few gems or something painted as well. The face looks really nice as it’s blue with shading around the eyes. The teeth are cleanly painted and the furry…things…that drape over his shoulders look fine too. The crown of his helm is done in a translucent, yellow, plastic that almost looks like stained glass. It’s an unexpected, but welcomed, embellishment. If I am to nitpick the paint I’d first go to the black strap on the calf area which do nothing to convey the illusion of an actual strap. They’re flatly painted and unconvincing. Some of the red could have also been applied cleaner. It’s pretty hazy around the kneepads and some of the hands are a bit messy. In Super7’s defense, the hands are hard to paint as there are gold plates over the digits with red underneath. Hasbro declined to attempt such a thing and I’ll say for the most part they look good enough. I also feel like the feet could have used some shading as they’re the only part that looks “plasticy” to me.

Goldar is also sized well to compete with zords. I’m curious how he’ll stack up against the upcoming Megazord.
I figured we should sneak in a comparison to another Super7 figure featuring some gold accents that a lot of people seemed to have issues with. And we might as well put him up against another big boy in Apocalypse.

As for the sculpt, well there’s really little to complain about. Super7 absolutely nailed the portrait with Goldar which is something I wasn’t sold on with the Lightning Collection release. This looks like the character to me and I feel like if he started talking on my shelf I wouldn’t even be surprised. Most of the body has a nice texture to it as the gold is dented like a golf ball in several parts. I am not an expert on the show, but it looks accurate enough to me. All of the details I associate with the character are present like the giant codpiece and the bundled up tail on his rear. Super7 has received numerous criticisms from me over the years, but rarely is sculpting an issue and this guy is no different. He might really be one of their best which is not faint praise.

This ornately designed chest looks pretty damn nice.
These things are less interesting, but you get five of them!

Goldar has a rather expensive look to him so I was expecting Super7 to skimp on the accessories, but he’s actually pretty robust. For heads, we have two options which are essentially mouth closed and mouth open. Both look great, though I think I like the open one just a little bit more. For hands, we get a whole bunch: fists, gripping with horizontal hinges, gripping with vertical hinges, and open hands. For those gripping hands he has his rather large sword which is painted very nicely with hits of silver and gold and the red gem in the center. He also has his little wing nubbins on the back which can be removed and replaced with open, black, wings that also look quite nice. They’re entirely sculpted in plastic and the feathers are nicely textured and the paint is clean. In addition to all of that, we get some episode specific stuff. There’s an elaborate chest that contains the power coins after they stole them or something. The chest has a hinged lid so it can open and close and the paint job is pretty damn spectacular. Goldar also has the five Badges of Darkness which I think he gave out to the Putties to create evil, clone, Power Rangers. They’re identical and they just resemble grey stones with a light blue gem in the center of a star carving. Nothing special, but those more interested in episode-specific trinkets will get more mileage out of them than I. His extra stuff at least feels more purposeful than most of the stuff the Green Ranger came with.

The alternate head is definitely a keeper.
“I will destroy those teenagers with attitude!”

Goldar is not a character that looks like he’ll move very well, but again, Super7 kind of surprised me here. For starters, his head is on a hinged-ball peg. I do not like that, but at least he looks up and down okay and can turn his head. He just doesn’t really get much in the way of more nuanced poses. His head sits high on the ball, so he gets more than the Green Ranger, but Super7, please just go back to using double ball pegs. The shoulders are the hinged ball joints that peg into the arm and he can lift his arms out to the side past horizontal. This really surprised me as he’s got some rather large shoulder pads, but they do a solid job of getting out of the way. Rotating the arms all around isn’t going to happen, but you get enough. He has a biceps swivel and a single-hinged elbow that can’t quite hit 90. You also get a rotation point at the elbow as well. The wrists rotate and he has the proper hinge for the gripping hands, so that’s a plus. They are a tad loose though and his heavy sword can be a touch finicky to pose, but it seems to hold in position well enough. In the diaphragm, we get what’s probably a ball joint of some kind that lets the figure rotate, but also tilt to the sides. He arches back a little, and crunches forward a little as well. In both cases, it’s more range than I expected. He does have a waist twist below that and some hinged ball joints at the hips. Goldar can just about hit a split before the armor at his hips gets in the way and he can kick forward to almost horizontal, though he can’t really kick back at all. You get some rotation at the thigh and the single-hinged knee can go about 90 degrees. It also rotates a little at the joint. The ankles feature the usual hinge and rocker, though the shape of the plating of the armor does restrict things a bit. The hinge goes back well enough, but you don’t get much forward. The rocker is also limited, but I think you’re going to get enough out of it to keep his feet flat even in some rather wide stances.

He’s not some super-articulated ninja figure, but he can look tough and swing a sword so that works for me.

I would say Goldar articulates pretty well for such a design. I admit, some of that opinion is colored by my low expectations going in which were influenced by both the look of the figure and my own experience with Super7. I think they did a good job though and I don’t really feel like other companies would do much better. Yeah, you could slip in some double joints at the elbows and knees and maybe get a little better than 90, but is that really going to up one’s enjoyment of the figure? I think the easiest point for criticism is the head as Super7 should ditch the hinged ball peg. I suppose a hinged joint in the diaphragm could get more ab crunch? That’s probably a little more expensive to implement though and presents gapping issues usually. He basically reminds me of a NECA figure and his range is pretty comparable to Warduke. And since he has a less restricting his torso, he probably moves better than that figure. That figure is probably a little visually more impressive, but it’s definitely more subjective than usual. At least Super7 is comparing well to something that’s much cheaper since usually they present worse and cost more, a true double whammy.

A lot of people have had a lot of issues with these parts so do be careful.
I think the wings are worth the hassle as they do look rather nice once applied.

One thing I do need to talk about though is the quality control issues people have been having with this figure in particular. I have seen and heard from lots of folks who had issues with the head and wings. I didn’t actually mention the wings in the articulation portion, but they do connect via a ball and socket joint on the figure’s back and they have a hinge as well. The left wing seems fine, but the right is a bit iffy. The socket feels like it’s off just a tiny amount, probably not enough to notice with the naked eye, but it’s noticeably tight. People have been snapping the peg when trying to rotate or use the hinge. I noticed before even inserting that wing that the hinge also stressed the plastic when pushed all the way. I guess naturally that means don’t push it all the way, but it still should not be. With the head, I’ve seen folks have a hard time getting the alternate head on and snapping the post as a result. One person I talked to snapped it just rotating the head after getting it on. I mentioned in the review that the heads seem to sit high on the ball and I think that’s by design to help clear the stuff around his neck. If so, it’s a bad design because every toy collector is going to think they need to seat that head all the way down and if that’s breaking things then Super7 deserves to have to eat some costs replacing them. Just elongate the post, or find another solution, this one feels half-assed. Out of an abundance of caution, I heated the little wing nubs on my figure before removing them and also heated the wings before inserting them. Once in, I’m just leaving them alone as I posed them via the hinge before inserting them. For the head, the default one came off without any issues and I heated the open mouth one before putting it on. It seems fine, but it doesn’t really want to rotate so I won’t force it. I prefer the look of the open wings with the open mouth so I would have been bummed if they had broke in some way. I technically didn’t have any issues with my figure, but I feel like a lot of others had to suffer broken Goldars in order for me to have such an experience. I guess tread lightly and make sure you purchase from a place with a good return policy if it comes to that.

“Buy my toy!”

Quality concerns aside, I think this is one of the best Super7 figures I own. It’s rare that they hit in all three phases for me: sculpt, paint, articulation. Usually they try to close the gap by tossing a bunch of junk into the box with their figures, but with Goldar that’s not needed. And better yet, most of his “junk” actually feels purposeful. While I liked the Green Ranger as a figure, I couldn’t help but feel like it was overpriced. With Goldar, I don’t really get that feeling. I think he’s actually pretty damn good and for $55 he’s the rare Super7 figure I can say is worth it. I have a lot of Super7 figures that I’m happy with, but objectively feel are overpriced. Goldar gets to be both objectively and subjectively a good figure. If you’re one of the folks who had a different experience with the head or wings then you might feel differently, but I’m reviewing both the figure and my experience with the figure and for me this is exactly what I wanted out of this character. He looks good with the other releases in the line, and extra menacing with the Lightning Collection Rangers. He can face off with Super7’s Green Ranger, and look good battling the T-Rex zord and he’s probably the star of this inaugural wave. If King Sphinx or Lord Zedd turns out this good then I may need to add some more bad guys to my collection in the future.

Interested in more Power Rangers action figures review? Gives these a shot:

Super7 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Ultimate Green Ranger

We continue to finally offload some long standing preorders this year and up next is Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Super7. It was June 2021 when these figures were announced to the surprise of many. Why? Because Power Rangers are now owned by Hasbro, probably the biggest toy producer in the world who has its…

Keep reading
by Joe

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April 18, 2023

NECA TMNT Adventures Jagwar

By Joe
Let’s rock!

The next figure in NECA’s line based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic series is a much anticipated one for fans of those books and its spin-off The Mighty Mutanimals. And that’s because this character is making his debut in plastic. Previously, we looked at Slash who has been pretty well-represented in some form or another in most versions of the franchise. Last week was Man Ray’s turn, and while technically a new debut, he’s basically Ray Fillet from the old toy line so the anticipation level wasn’t quite the same. For Jagwar, we’re talking something completely new to the world of TMNT action figures. Like a lot of characters that make up the expanded universe of TMNT, Jagwar began life as an action figure concept for Playmates since Mirage Studios and its artists basically were churning those out in the 80s. He was rejected, for one reason or another, but he got a second chance at life with the comic series. In that, he was actually not a mutant jaguar, but the result of some lady getting it on with a Jaguar god. I guess that makes him a demigod or something? I don’t make the rules, so call him what you will. He’s a crusader for the Brazilian rainforest and his exploits have a real world connection in that they were influenced by activist Chico Mendes, who was unfortunately assassinated for his work in saving the rainforests of Brazil. He was even made an ally of Jagwar’s in the comics and he’s basically carrying on his legacy which is pretty cool.

Who doesn’t want to be friends with a jaguar demigod?

Jagwar would befriend the turtles and then go on to become a founding member of The Mighty Mutanimals, and it’s from those books that this action figure from NECA appears to take most of its inspiration. During Jagwar’s earlier depictions, he was drawn with solid spots on his body and I think he even had a skull pattern on his forehead, but later the the spots turned to ring shapes which this figure utilizes and the skull was dropped. Jagwar, like the other figures in this line, is also based on the art of Ken Mitchroney so he’s somewhat stylized to resemble how he would draw the character. He also did the box art and the shape of the box is more in-line with what we saw with Slash as Man Ray had to go with an oversized one to accommodate his added bulk. Jagwar was first released as part of the Haulathon event with Target which is over at this point, but he may still be getting shipped out to Target stores. He is expected to eventually show up elsewhere including other big box retailers as well as specialty retail so if you missed out on this guy just keep your eyes open at other venues as he’s not likely to be too hard to come by.

I like that both he and Man Ray come with “sexy” faces.

Out of the box, Jagwar stands approximately 6.25″. He’s a mostly naked jaguar guy who just wears a necklace of leaves to go along with the same at the wrists and waist. The necklace is a separate piece that pegs into the back and chest so it doesn’t move all over the place. I assume it’s reinforced with glue, but I could be wrong. It definitely doesn’t appear to want to come out. The leaves at the wrist are more of the floating variety and could be slid off if desired while the leaves at the waist are done in a similar fashion to the necklace so they’re pretty locked in. The body is done in orange and painted over as well, which NECA often does. The only other paint needed are for the spots and some black linework here and there. The spots are done in brown, which seems consistent with the books, and my only critique here is that the opacity seems to vary between the limbs and torso giving some rings a darker look than others. There’s also no paint on the hands aside from the orange which makes them look a bit plain. I would have at least liked some linework around the claws and I’m going to assume having the claws match his fur is consistent with the source material. The head, which features a comical expression, has some nice linework and the eyes are rather cleanly applied so that is all in order. I think the expression some may take issue with as it is a bit odd, but we do have another head to talk about when we get to accessories so I think it’s fine. It has that toon vibe I associate with the Archie series so I don’t mind it.

“Am I supposed to eat this?”

And for those accessories, we have some interesting stuff and some pretty typical items. For hands, Jagwar has a set of fists, gripping hands, and open, style posed, hands. The gripping hands have a standard horizontal hinge and feature a pretty wide grip and they’re not really suited for much of what he comes with. And as for things he can hold, we get a little Malignoid slug, baby, worm, thing. It’s painted in blue and has a rather wicked head on the end of it. Mine is defective in that it’s missing its lower jaw, though it’s not something I even knew about until I saw another one. It’s pretty fat though so it doesn’t fit into his gripping hands effortlessly and you’ll probably end up leaving some orange paint behind on it when pulling it out. His other item for gripping is a stick going through a purple fish. It looks fine, but it’s almost too thin for the gripping hands. At the fattest portion, the figure still can’t really get a good grip on it, but you can position it to stay in his hand. The paint is really nice on the fish though I’m a little surprised he doesn’t have “X” eyes. Jagwar also comes with a little campfire to cook his fish over. It looks fine and the fire itself is done entirely with paint as opposed to translucent plastic. There’s also a bowl of fruit for when he’s not in the mood for fish and it looks fine too, but in the end, is just a bowl of fruit. There’s also a baby Jagwar so he can hold a baby version of himself and create a wicked time paradox. Lastly, we have a second head and in keeping with Man Ray there’s a cockyness to this expression. His eyes are narrow and I can’t decide if he’s ready to throw down or looking to attract a mate. It’s fun though and I have a feeling a lot of people will use this head in place of the more cartoonish one.

“Now that’s more like it!”

The accessories for Jagwar aren’t terrible, but do feel a bit lackluster. He did sometimes use a blow gun so I’m surprised to see that omitted, but regardless, he can make up for that with the articulation. Jagwar is pretty much all new tooling, and if anything is repeated it’s not obvious to me. As such, it will be interesting to see how he moves. The head is on a double-ball peg and it has terrific range. He can rotate, tilt, look up, look down, the whole nine yards. There’s no joint at the base of the neck, but he doesn’t seem to need it. The jaw on both heads is articulated, but it doesn’t open as far as I’d like on either. It doesn’t get ugly though, so that’s a plus. The shoulders are the customary ball hinge joints and Jagwar can raise his arms out to the side to about horizontal and rotate freely. We have a biceps swivel and single-hinged elbows. I’m a little surprised at the lack of double elbows here, but he can at least achieve a 90 degree bend. There’s a slight swivel at the joint too, but it doesn’t have much range and I don’t think the goal was to get much there either. The wrists swivel and hinge and all of the hinges are horizontal. They were also the only joints I’d consider stuck, but I was able to get them moving without having to resort to heating them. In the torso, we get a diaphragm joint that mostly allows for rotation. You get a little bend back, no crunch forward, and some tilt. The waist also has a waist twist. At the hips, we get the ball and socket joints that allow for the figure to almost hit a full split, but the leaves at the waist prevent the legs from going out to the side as far as they could. There is a little thigh twist there and the legs kick forward to almost horizontal (again, the leaves get in the way) and kick back a little. The knees are double-jointed and work fine while the ankles have the customary hinge and rocker combination which also works fine. Lastly, we have a wired tail on a little ball hinge that rotates and can be positioned pretty well. The wire is also strong enough that you could use the tail to help stabilize the figure if you so wanted to.

“I am freaking out here!”
And this isn’t even the “camping” variant of Jagwar!

Jagwar moves pretty well for this line. I’m a little disappointed that NECA didn’t separate some of the leaves at the waist to provide some pathways for the legs as I’m sure they could bend further without the obstruction. We saw a similar situation with the Chakahachi figure from the toon line where the sculpt has room to be modified with the goal to achieve better range at the hips, but NECA opted not to do so. I’m guessing they were worried about the durability of the soft plastic if they had cut into it, but I think they could have found a way. The diaphragm joint also could be better as I’m surprised it gets virtually no range bending forward. This is a character who should have a lot of articulation so while I normally go soft on the criticisms when it comes to that area, I think this is one of the few characters that should have a bit more. Even with those shortcomings, he still poses pretty well which is a good thing because his accessories don’t offer a whole lot there. You can have him holding a bowl of fruit or roasting a fish over a fire, but that’s not likely to be how most assemble the Mutanimals on their shelf.

The Mutanimals are starting to come together…

Was the wait worth it? Considering fans of Jagwar have been waiting for over 30 years for this I would have to guess that the answer is “No,” because how could it have been worth it? So many versions of TMNT have come and gone since without a Jagwar and that’s pretty surprising. If we’re just going back to when NECA got the license then I think the answer is “Yes.” Jagwar looks pretty cool and he’ll look good with his buddies, the ones already out and the ones likely to come. There’s certainly some room for improvement, but at the more normal price of $35 I think I can safely recommend Jagwar to fans of the Archie universe of characters and to those collectors that just want to mix him into their toon display. Archie fans, at long last your wait is over.

NECA TMNT Adventures Series Slash

As NECA continues to find success with its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lines of action figures, the company has sought to branch out beyond the usual source material in an effort to give collectors more of what they want and also likely to just keep the hype train rolling. NECA started first with doing figures…

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by Joe

TMNT Loot Crate Series 2 Vol. 2 – Pixelated Shark Boy

2022 is nearly in the books. As we countdown the final hours and minutes until 2023, it feels good to say that the new year will begin with no further Loot Crate obligations. That’s because after a delay of more than a year, the second crate in Loot Crate’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series of…

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by Joe

NECA TMNT Adventures Man Ray

Back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ruled the world, there was a lot of brand synergy between all of the various media being generated by this one mega popular piece of intellectual property. The comics came first followed by a toyline which necessitated the creation of an animated mini series to basically serve as a…

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by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Comics, toys

April 13, 2023

Super7 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Ultimate Green Ranger

By Joe
There’s a new Green Ranger in town.

We continue to finally offload some long standing preorders this year and up next is Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Super7. It was June 2021 when these figures were announced to the surprise of many. Why? Because Power Rangers are now owned by Hasbro, probably the biggest toy producer in the world who has its own line of action figures to sell. This has become somewhat the norm though as Hasbro has licensed out both Transformers and G.I. Joe for action figure lines, both to Super7. Is Super7 just paying a tidy sum that Hasbro is happy to take? Or is it that Hasbro just doesn’t view anything that Super7 could produce as actual competition to what they’re doing? That’s probably likely as Super7 deals in a different MSRP from what Hasbro does and is going for a different aesthetic. Well, sort of. With Transformers, Super7 is doing figures based on the cartoon that don’t transform. Hasbro probably knows that Transformers fans aren’t going to stop buying Transformers that actually transform, so have at it, Super7! With G.I. Joe, Hasbro has the Classified line which is somewhat of a reimaging for the franchise. It’s also in the 20-25 dollar range and sold everywhere. Super7’s G.I. Joe figures are based on the cartoon, in a different scale, and cost roughly twice what Hasbro is putting out so it seems easy to see where the confidence is coming from. With Power Rangers though, that’s a bit more confusing. Super7 is, so far, just doing the Mighty Morphin era of the show, by far the most popular. The figures are 7″ scale and, like the comparison with G.I. Joe, basically double the price of Hasbro’s figures. Conceptually though, they’re not much different since both companies want to mimic the show. The larger scale, more paint, and more accessories also have a chance to make Super7’s offering look a lot better than what Hasbro is doing. About the only restriction it would seem placed on the Super7 version is there’s no combing zords. Or Super7 doesn’t have interest in doing those. Either way, out of all of the Hasbro properties Super7 has started making action figures for, this is the one that seems most likely to negatively impact Hasbro’s sales of its own line. As long as it’s good.

The Super7 packaging we all know…and love?

It took awhile, but Super7’s first wave of MMPR figures is here. When the line was first unveiled, I wasn’t sure where my money would go. During the great lockdown that was 2020, I started buying a lot more action figures. One line I dabbled in was the Lightning Collection. At first, I just wanted the Green Ranger as that was the character I liked the most. Toys for MMPR were insanely hard to track down in 93-94 and that toyline from Bandai is one of the black holes of my youth. Also not helping matters was the odd space the show occupied. As a 4th grader when it premiered, I wasn’t sure if I was too old for it. It debuted at the tail end of summer vacation where I lived, so kids like me got to decide if we liked it largely free of peer pressure before school started back up. At that point, it became clear the consensus was that MMPR was a baby show, you would be ridiculed for admitting you liked it, even though it was the highest rated children’s show on Fox so likely everyone was watching it and just lying about it. At any rate, the only figure I would ever own of a Power Ranger as a kid was the auto-morphing Green Ranger and I only got it because we happened upon a fresh case at the store. I was with my grandmother, who was usually good for a toy or something on an outing, but even she was excited by this as she had tried in vain to score Power Ranger toys for my sister and I with little success so she eagerly shoveled out the cash for a pair of figures for the two of us. Had one of my friends been there though when that happened, I may have had to pass out of peer pressure. It was such a conundrum and I hated the pressure to outgrow toys.

It is time for morphing.

I’m only sharing those details to enforce that I have a special attraction to the Green Ranger as a toy because of the scarcity and pressure to not even like the show as a kid. During 2020, I also finally acquired a vintage Bandai Green Ranger and Dragonzord and that was the gateway to get into Lightning Collection. I eventually added the entire MMPR team, but since then, I’ve been able to avoid adding more (not counting the TMNT crossover figures). The first wave from Super7 would contain the Green Ranger, Yellow Ranger, Goldar, Putty, and Tyranosaurus Zord. Goldar had some appeal as I didn’t care for the Hasbro offering, and the T-Rex looked cool, but did I need another set of Rangers? No, but I obviously gave in for my boy Tommy. There was some temptation to just wait it out as Super7 figures have mostly hit clearance at some point, but my will wasn’t strong enough to wait.

Nice knife.

The Green Ranger comes in the standard Ultimates! packaging. There’s a green slipcover, which is consistent across the line and not a Green Ranger thing, and once removed you get a nice window box and a bio on the back. The Green Ranger stands at 6.5″ and it’s likely all of the male Rangers to follow will be featured on this same mold. The body is of a lean man which is consistent with the in-suit performer of the show. The shade of green in use for the costume is a more olive green than the brighter color Hasbro used for its figure. There’s really no sculpted folds in the green and the presentation comes across as very clean, and maybe a touch minimalist. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I suppose Super7 could have attempted to add that sheen the spandex suits seemed to possess, or even dirty up the boots and gloves, but simple was apparently the approach. The dragon shield is the Japanese version that the character was most often shown in as opposed to the frumpy, shiny, one used for the scenes shot in the US. The gold is a somewhat matte, yet metallic, finish and it’s a good approximation for how it looked on TV. There’s some black paint around the diamond and it’s cleanly applied. The helmet has a glossy appearance which also matches up with the show. The paint of the red diamond in the center and the teeth around the visor looks good.

Cool sword, but what is with that massive handle?

Other areas where the paint looks nice is the black trim of the belt and the morpher in the center. The words “Power Rangers” are even legible on the morpher which is impressive. Areas where the paint isn’t so great is the gold trim on the gloves and some of the green triangles on the gloves and boots as well. The right forearm on mine has one triangle that stopped short so there’s a gap of white between it and the gold band. On the left forearm, some of them just weren’t applied with enough opacity, or a residue of some kind got onto it after the fact. I left it in place for the images here, but after completing them I actually swapped the forearm on my left arm with the alternate left arm that comes in the box (we’ll get to that in the accessories). I’m tempted to do the same for the right arm, but my alternate right forearm doesn’t have great paint either. Aside from those issues, I do think he looks rather sharp. This shade of green just does something for me and it was the main driver of why I decided to get this figure. He does have his show accurate, black, holster for the Dragon Dagger on his left hip and all of the details of the gloves and boots are in place. There is one line missing from the helmet that should come out from the diamond and I’m torn on if I wish there was some black linework added there. Would it be too much, or would it add more pop to the presentation? It also looks like the red diamond should be outlined in gold and not the silver Super7 went with. One thing this figure does have over the Hasbro one though is that the white diamonds on the costume are painted on as opposed to ignored. Overall, I think I like the presentation of this figure vs the Lightning Collection offering, but concede it may fall short for those who want a more “stepped out of the TV” version of the character.

This sword is less impressive.

Because this is a Super7 Ultmates! release, we get a whole bunch of accessories. Tommy has a set of fist hands, gripping hands with a vertical hinge, gripping hands with a horizontal hinge, open/clenchy hands, a flute playing right hand, and a two-finger gesture left hand that I think is also intended for the flute. The Green Ranger’s signature weapon is his Dragon Dagger and Super7 included a damn fine representation of that weapon. The sculpt looks great and the paint is super impressive. I like that the center button on the handle is depressed so it slots into his special right hand very well. You could also have him wield it with his standard gripping hands too, but that’s not as fun. If you think the Green Ranger needs something more impressive to wield, he does come with the Sword of Darkness. It’s well-sculpted though the paint isn’t as crisp as it is on the dagger. I don’t like the very chunky handle which I’m assuming is show accurate, but maybe a little creative license could have helped here. It does have a real tassel tied to the end which is a nice touch and at least it isn’t warped and bent like the Hasbro version. If you don’t like it though, there’s also the Sword of Power. I don’t remember this thing, but it’s a big, black and gold sword that honestly I think looks stupid, but maybe I’m in the minority. He also has a gun which the internet tells me is the Mega Heater. I don’t remember it at all. It looks rather goofy, a very DIY type of thing made-up for the show, but if you like it you have it.

The figure comes with 3 different heads, but when two of them are this bad do they even count?

If you prefer your Rangers un-morphed and therefore unmighty, there’s a pair of unmasked heads. These are supposed to resemble the late Jason David Frank, but the likeness is terrible. Not helping things is that the paint is also poor. It’s not that it’s sloppy, it’s just unimaginative. The face is a solid color with no shading and the sculpt is too soft to create natural shading so it looks like a blob of nothing. One head features Tommy with a ponytail and the other he has the headband and a more tortured expression as it’s supposed to be Tommy from when he was under the control of Rite Repulsa. If you do happen to like these heads though, swapping them is pretty painless. You also get an activated morpher he can hold which is just as well-painted as the one on the belt. Sure, it makes no sense for him to be already in costume while in the process of morphing, but Super7 apparently felt like it had to include a morpher with each figure. The handle on it can slot onto either the gripping hands or even the clenching hands. It is pretty tiny though, so good luck in not losing it.

Shiny shields and one-color accessories, if that’s how you want to roll.

Lastly, we get some vintage toy inspired accessories. The Green Ranger comes with a shiny, vac-metal, dragon shield that can replace the show-accurate one he comes wearing. This shinier shield is a callback to the 8″ Bandai figure as well as the auto-morphing one and it snaps together in pretty much the same manner. To complete the look we also get a set of spare arms that lack the gold bands around the bicep. The old toys didn’t bother with that detail. They also didn’t have the gold trim on the boots and gloves or the green triangles instead of diamonds, but Super7 can only give you so much. Plus, the extra arms allow you to display your Green Ranger “naked” without the shield as he did pass it off to the Red Ranger on at least one occasion in the show (though I think the gold bands stayed on his arms when he did, but I could be wrong). I doubt many will want to display their figure in that way, but at least Super7 gives you the option. More likely is that some fans will want to buy doubles of the Red and Black Rangers to display with and without the shield. If Super7 had wanted to juice sales of this guy, they would have made the shield specific to him, but it looks like that’s not the case. Lastly, this figure also comes with two vintage style weapons in the form of a gray dragon dagger and a white blade blaster in gun mode. The dragon dagger is a replica of the one that came with the auto-morphing figure while the blade blaster came with the larger scale figure. It’s possible it came with the auto-morphing one too and I’m forgetting it. I don’t have that figure anymore though so I can’t comment on how well they nailed that weapon’s likeness, but the blade blaster is pretty spot-on to the one I have. I don’t know why anyone would ever use it, but it’s here.

I guess the gun is okay, but do we really need it?

The last thing we need to talk about with this figure is articulation. Being that this is a character from a martial arts-based show, he needs to move pretty well. Unfortunately, that has never been Super7’s strong suit. They openly dislike things like double-joints and seem loathe to break-up their sculpts in other ways. They did try something new with this figure, but in general, articulation is the one area where Hasbro’s Lightning Collection is always going to win out. One joint that it does have in common with that line though is the ball-hinged neck. I don’t know why Super7 went in this direction and away from double-ball pegs, but it is what it is. This figure looks up and down pretty well and you get full rotation, but there’s no nuance posing afforded by this design. The helmeted head doesn’t want to slide around on that ball at all. The shoulders are the usual ball-hinge design and they get full rotation while also being able to raise out to the side. The hinge feels tight, maybe due to how the arms had to be designed to be removable easily, while the rotation is pretty loose, but not so loose that he can’t hold a pose. Both style of arms feature a biceps swivel which looks better on the arms without the gold bands, but there’s not much Super7 could do there. The elbows are single-hinged and they do rotate at the joint as well while the wrists swivel and hinge and get plenty of range.

Maybe Super7 includes stuff like this to remind us of how far things have come?

In the torso, we get a joint I absolutely hate. Super7 felt the need to add an ab crunch to these figures and I think that’s fine. With the women Rangers, it’s a diaphragm joint that’s on a ball or double ball peg, but the males get this hinged ab crunch that looks awful. It’s basically an inverted design compared to what most companies will do where the hinge in the middle of the abdomen is the thin portion. Most companies will thicken that part to make it less noticeable and they also often have some chiseled abs to work around that this design wasn’t going to benefit from. Still, what Hasbro did looks much nicer while this looks awful. I continue to be shocked that a company that thinks a double-jointed elbow is too ugly to feature on one of their toys would okay this thing. Just do ball-pegs like the women! To add insult to injury, the joint doesn’t even work that well. The figure bends back a decent amount, but going forward is just so-so. Plus, this figure has the shield to contend with most of the time (though that also helps to hide the joint too) so the joint is largely just an eyesore and they would have been better off skipping it entirely. Below that is a waist twist, which is just a basic waist twist, so it’s fine.

“Oh man, I feel so naked!”

For the hips, Super7 is using a hinged-ball peg that goes into the crotch. Going out to the side, the figure can basically hit a split, or at least it would if the scabbard wasn’t in the way of the left leg. There is a thigh twist there, but it doesn’t have much range and might only get you about 45 degrees rotation going out away from the center of the figure. Kicking forward, the figure can basically do 90 degrees and it can kick back maybe half that, more if you want to really flex the diaper piece that is over the crotch. The knees are single-hinged and can bend back about 90 degrees. There’s a little shimmy to them, but I don’t think it’s truly intentional as the knees are cut in such a way as to prevent rotation. It’s not needed anyway as there’s a boot cut below that and the ankles are the traditional hinged and ankle rocker setup. They work fine as they go back pretty far and the rocker has generous range to help keep the figure’s feet flat on whatever surface you place it on.

You can sort of fake a playing pose with the dagger, but it’s a lie and you’ll always know it’s a lie.

In terms of posing, the figure is okay. He’s best suited to stand in a ready position with a weapon in-hand. He’s not going to be very good at kicking poses or sword-swinging ones either. The lack of butterfly joints also means he can’t do a proper morphing pose with the Power Morpher, but considering he’s not un-costumed I don’t think that’s a terrible loss. What is borderline unforgivable is that this guy can’t play the Dragon Dagger. With some forced perspective type shots, you could fake it for a photo, but that won’t do you much good for the shelf. Id you don’t need him actually squeezing the buttons then you can get the mouthpiece to the mask, but in order to do so I had to make the figure grip the very end of the dagger and it looks pretty silly. Limitations aside, the joints at least feel solid. The only loose ones are the shoulders, but they’re not giving me problems. The hinge in the head is also very loose, but again, it’s keeping the head where I want it so it’s not an issue at the moment. The figure does possess somewhat of a cheap feel to it, though it’s not awful. It’s mostly with the arms which again I think is a symptom of the removable design. The floppy hinge joint in the neck looks awful, but that’s only apparent when the figure has no head.

“Ha ha! Foolish Ranger! I am so much more ‘premium’ than you!”

The big question with this release, and it’s often the case with Super7, is the figure worth the $55 asking price? It’s a bit of a hard sell at that price and some of the other figures in the line aren’t really helping the cause. It’s a 6.5″ figure with okay paint for the most part, a decent sculpt, mediocre articulation, and a bunch of accessories. This is one of those Super7 figures that feels like it started with a price of $55 and then someone had to get the final product up from a much smaller cost to justify the price. And that’s apparent in the abundance of accessories that no one is really asking for. The vintage inspired stuff is cute, but how many people are actually going to use that stuff? The heat gun, the Sword of Power – these are all things I can do without and would actually prefer to not have around if it meant the price could come down. Super7 seems to have this thing where every figure in the line has to be $55, but other figures can certainly top that, but that $55 is a hard floor and in some cases it does the product no favors. More people would buy this if it were $40 and it wouldn’t look silly beside the likes of Goldar and the T-Rex zord. From Super7’s perspective, it makes people who buy the more impressive looking items feel better about that price, but I don’t know if it works that way. And it could be, and quite likely is, that Super7 would argue those other figures should be priced higher than what they are and maybe that’s true. All I know is, I’d like this figure a lot more at a cheaper price. I still willingly paid $55 for it and I don’t hate myself for it, but the pragmatist in me would advise others to wait for a sale. It’s the Green Ranger, he’s popular and not going out of stock anytime soon so there’s no harm in waiting. Where the price really hurts is that I’m only willing to get my favorite Power Ranger at $55 and he’s likely to be lonely on my shelf as a result. He’s just going to have to make due with being placed beside his Bandai and Hasbro counterparts.

Is Tommy Oliver your favorite Power Ranger too? Maybe you would like to check these out too:

Hasbro Lightning Collection Mighty Morphin Green Ranger

In the early days of the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic I found myself filling the social hole in my heart with toys. That has continued, but in the earliest days I went backwards. I grabbed some toys that I had wanted as a kid, but never got, and I talked about them here. One such toy…

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Bandai Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Dragonzord

So a week ago I did a post that I titled The Toys that Got Away. It was about toys that I had pined for as a child, but for one reason or another, was unable to ever acquire. It wasn’t intended to be a sympathy piece or anything, because I had an awesome childhood…

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Hasbro Power Rangers x TMNT – Tommy and Raphael

When Mighty Morphin Power Rangers arrived on Fox Kids in 1993 it quickly became a ratings juggernaut. It was the hottest property around aimed at kids and seemingly everything got knocked down a peg as a result. By contrast, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was embarking on its downturn. The third film wasn’t nearly as successful…

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April 11, 2023

NECA TMNT Adventures Man Ray

By Joe
Sexy fish man is here to dispense some justice!

Back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ruled the world, there was a lot of brand synergy between all of the various media being generated by this one mega popular piece of intellectual property. The comics came first followed by a toyline which necessitated the creation of an animated mini series to basically serve as a commercial. When the toys and cartoon took off, more episodes were ordered and certainly more toys were created, but the comics remained as they were. Which is to say they were pretty much intended for an entirely different audience. Enter Adventures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, whatever you want to call it. It was a comic that started off as an adaptation of the animated series, but pretty quickly became its own thing. Published by Archie Comics, it was the kiddie comic though it would actually get far more mature than the cartoon series ever did. Characters created for the toy line would show up in the cartoon and sometimes in the Archie books as well. When that happened there tended to be differences and we saw that with the first figure in this subline from NECA: Slash. Now we have another one in Man Ray, who non-readers likely know as Ray Fillet. The character is credited to Stephen Murphy and Ryan Brown, and it’s my understanding that the concept of Ray Fillet came first for the toyline, but was imported into the comic as Man Ray. The two look very similar, but there are some differences. As for the cartoon version, he was named Ray and really couldn’t be much more different. If we ever get a Ray toy we’ll get into that there, for now, let’s talk about Man Ray.

Do you prefer your Man Ray angry or sultry?

Man Ray debuted in issue number 5 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures and he had a fairly standard origin for this kind of property. Marine biologist Jack Finney touches a manta ray, comes in contact with the mutagen, and is turned into a mutant superhero. He looks like a humanoid manta ray and he can command sea creatures like a more famous hero from the pages of Detective Comics. He fights for all of the usual stuff, but also has an ecological bent which I can appreciate. Of course, we’ll ignore the fact that we’re talking about a mass-produced lump of plastic in the character’s image which is doing who knows how much harm to our present environment. Man Ray would also go on to join The Mighty Mutanimals, the offshoot series for TMNT, where he’d work alongside the likes of Slash, Leatherhead, and more. As the second release in the Adventures line, Man Ray is a logical choice. He seems to have a pretty strong following in the fanbase as a lot of people my age really liked that Ray Fillet figure, myself included. I also had his origin story, though I don’t think it was the comic, but rather an adaption as a children’s book that I have long since lost track of. And since he didn’t really appear in the cartoon series it also makes sense to get to him early as collectors will want the character as either the Archie Comics character or just as a stand-in for Ray Fillet in their toon display.

Man Ray comes in a slightly oversized box relative to Slash which once again features original artwork from artist Ken Mitchroney. I personally love Ken’s art and I think it has the right aesthetic to really separate it from both the work of Mirage Studios and the cartoon. The figure itself is also based on Ken’s style and this one is presently showing up as part of NECA and Target’s Haulathon. Unfortunately, by the time you read this the online drop will have past and possibly even restocks at the store as Man Ray was part of the initial wave of product. If he’s anything like Slash then he may hang around so it shouldn’t be too hard to get your mitts on this figure. And if you miss him entirely he should eventually show up at other retail outlets. He’s just debuting at Target, he’s not exclusive.

Flight stands are going to be tricky with this guy.

Once out of the packaging, Man Ray stands at approximately 6.5″ to the top of his head and closer to 7″ if you factor in the…horns? I don’t know much about manta ray anatomy. He’s clad in his green and yellow suit which I suppose is the character’s default look. He had several looks in the comics so bigger fans would have to tell me if this is the most appropriate. His skin is a very rich shade of blue and it’s what really stands out the most. I love it, but I also love the color blue, and all over his body are little areas of sculpted-in scales. The scales ate outlined in black, as are his muscles, and he has a very superhero look to him. The paint is super clean given the abundance of it and I’m really impressed with the piping on the costume and how well NECA handled the white stripes. He has those big fins on his back which are permanently affixed and there’s a tail that has to be inserted by the user. The tail and fins are done in a light shade of blue which contrasts nicely with the main body. The sculpt for the head looks terrific as he’s pretty angry looking and ready to throw down. The only blemish with the presentation I notice is with the boots and specifically the hinge there. He has a white stripe right down the center of the boot so NECA cast the hinge in white plastic. When the hinge is visible from the front, it’s a bit of an eyesore, but going with white is better than having a yellow gap. On the rear though you get a white block of color amongst all yellow because the stripe is only on the front. There’s not really much NECA could do about that without changing up how they articulate ankles. The April figure had a similar issue, but at least it’s a blemish largely confined to the rear of the figure and it makes sense to do it this way given that.

Man Ray comes with not just one little buddy…

Man Ray comes with a bunch of stuff in his rather large box and the first thing we tend to talk about are the hands. In the box you have fisted hands, wide gripping hands, a right trigger finger hand, a left relaxed hand, and a left splayed hand. The very wide gripping hands are so he can carry his harpoon gun in a more casual manner as seen on the cover of his debut appearance. The trigger finger hand is to hold said harpoon gun in a more conventional manner, though the trigger finger just barely can touch the actual trigger. The gun looks fine though as it’s brown and gray and features a lot of line work on it. Man Ray also has a second portrait which is this cocky, almost flirty, sort of grin. This is the type of fish Troy McClure would love to have an encounter with. Man Ray also comes with a little sea turtle who I guess is a stand-in for his summoning powers. He’s cute and really well painted, but is otherwise a slug figure. He also has a little buddy, Bubbla, who looks like a lobster or crayfish type of creature and was apparently based on the little buddy figure the toy came with, Fishsticks, though they look nothing alike. Bubbla looks a bit irritated, but he’s well painted and stands nicely on a shelf and is a fun inclusion.

…but two little buddies when you count this turtle here!

Where these NECA reviews have been going off the rails a bit lately is with articulation, and perhaps to no one’s surprise, Man Ray isn’t going to impress here. For one, we’re dealing with a character that has no neck and giant fins on his back. Despite the no neck, the head is on a double ball peg which is mostly good for rotation. He can tilt forward and back a bit, but really moving the head at all breaks up the sculpt and he looks pretty silly as a result. It can kind of shimmy side-to-side which works better than rotating it, but it is what it is. The shoulders are the usual ball-hinged joint that just pegs in. The arms will go as far as they can until they strike the fins and raising them out to the side won’t quite get to horizontal. There is a biceps swivel and below that a single-hinged elbow. There’s a generous cut-out in the forearm for the hinge so it will bend a tick past 90 degrees. The wrists rotate and hinge and all of the hinges are a horizontal hinge including the trigger hand. The hinges are also cut a bit off-center which I assume is intentional. They’re all also super tight and most won’t work for me. Swapping hands is at least easy, though swapping heads required heat.

“How dare you pollute my ocean, Shredder!”

In the torso, we get a diaphragm joint that feels like a double ball peg system. Man Ray doesn’t bend back very far, nor does he crunch forward much, but you do get a generous amount of tilt on the joint plus rotation. You probably want to be gentle though so as not to scuff the abdomen. There’s no waist joint and the hips are the standard ball joints. Man Ray can basically do splits as the diaper overlay is cut way back which I like a lot. The thigh will swivel a bit on the joint and below that we have double-jointed knees. They’re very tight and manipulating them past 90 degrees is a challenge because they strike the fins. Kicking backwards also doesn’t work very well for the same reason, but he can kick forward a decent amount though his legs want to go off towards the side when doing so. There is no boot cut and the ankles have the previously mentioned hinge joint and rocker, both function well. Lastly, we have the tail which is a ball-hinged joint that gets decent range. The tail itself also has a bendy wire running through it for a little extra something. Man Ray stands pretty well, but the tail can also add stability if you feel it’s warranted or if you have him in a more unnatural pose. There is a lot of weight to this figure, but it feels like it’s pretty well-distributed and the big feet and tight joints will help to keep him upright.

We’re slowly putting together the Mutanimals!

Man Ray is a pretty typical release for NECA and it’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles offerings. The sculpt and paint are all terrific while the articulation is just so-so. Man Ray does have some hurdles to deal with unique to his design, so I can forgive NECA for that. I think he’s going to move well enough and it’s hard for me to quibble too much with the articulation setup given how nice the sculpt turned out. And when it comes to the look of this guy I’m pretty much in love. I love the colors, I love the expressiveness of the face sculpts, and the detail work is fantastic. The accessories are solid and I might just display him in a superhero pose without the gun because I don’t think he needs it. The only other thing left to discuss is the price tag which comes in at $40 making Man Ray not as cheap as Slash and some other recent releases, but less than Zog. I guess he’s a little more involved than some other figures, but it’s hard not to get the feeling that NECA started at $40 and then added on stuff to get to that price like the turtle and Bubbla. Slash was somewhat bare bones, but also using an older mold. Jagwar, another character we will be looking at in due time, is $35 with all new tooling, lots of accessories, and plenty of paint. Maybe NECA figures to reuse some parts from that one later on? I’m not sure and I don’t know the economics of the situation I just know what’s on my shelf and what it cost me. At $40, Man Ray isn’t the value some other figures are. I do think he looks great though so I’m not exactly saying he isn’t worth it, but I do wish he could have been cheaper. And for fans of the Mighty Mutanimals, I suspect he’ll be worth it to them too as NECA is building up that team and it certainly seems like a priority for the company so I suspect we’ll be talking about them for awhile to come.

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NECA and Target’s Haulathon event which has seen a vast assortment of product dumped onto shelves recently was not content to limit the products to just the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Far from it, as an assortment of comic book based characters were also released and today we’re going to look at the first…

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April 6, 2023

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

By Joe

I need a break from action figure reviews so why not turn to the world of video games? I don’t get to play many these days, but I did splurge on a PlayStation 5 not that long ago and was looking for something to play. And ideally, that something would be budget friendly. The good thing about not playing a lot of games is that I never got around to playing a lot of the latest and greatest for the PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Switch, and since it’s cheap to port and upscale an older game, there’s a ton of that sort of thing available on PS5 which lead me to Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot.

The first time I ever watched a fight unfold on Dragon Ball Z I knew I wanted to experience that in video game form. It’s fast, frenetic, and spectacular. Street Fighter 2 has fireballs and “ki” type attacks, but they weren’t anything like they were in DBZ. Unfortunately, 99% of the DBZ games at the time were region-locked to Japan and if you went through the trouble of either importing them or downloading them you got to find out that they were also terrible. The best games were mediocre, at best, and none of them were truly worth the price. And trust me on that because I did import some and they sucked. The only games released outside of Japan were Dragon Power for the NES, a sidescroller that was altered to the point of being unrecognizable as a Dragon Ball game, and Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, a truly godawful 3D fighter based on the mediocre sequel anime series to DBZ.

In Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot you will play as Goku, as well as other characters, and basically relive the entirety of Dragon Ball Z and then some via an open world environment and lots, and lots, of battles.

Once Dragon Ball Z picked up in popularity in the west the better games started to follow. I was a day one buyer of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai when it was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. It was not a great game, but compared to the crap that came before it it felt like a masterpiece. The good thing was that the games only seemed to get better from there. The only problem for me is I found myself getting tired of the fighting genre. I played so many fighting games in the 90s that come the 2000’s I had mostly moved on. Wrestling games and DBZ were really the only fighters I was still dabbling in and they had their own flavor, for sure, but eventually I got burnt out. I was, and still am, mostly into role-playing games so naturally I wanted to see DBZ expand to that genre. And it had in the past in the form of a few card battlers for the Famicom. I even played a ROM hack of the first one and managed to complete it and found it to be a satisfactory experience. There was a similar title released for the Game Boy Color that flew under the radar a bit and that was due to Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku sucking up all of the attention on the Game Boy Advance. That game wasn’t a true RPG and more like a Zelda clone, but it was different so it had that going for it. It also wasn’t very good. The sequel was much better received, but I never played it. Years later I would order a cart on eBay, but it was misdelivered to the wrong address so I never got it and I was out a meager sum of money (this was before the collector market explosion in prices) and I never tried to get another copy.

Other RPG or RPG-style games have followed for Dragon Ball, but I never gave any a shot. I never heard great things about any of them, not that I heard truly negative things either, so I never sought it out. When I heard about Kakarot it did get my attention. It is basically a hybrid fighter/RPG that takes the player through the entire DBZ story, something that has been retold countless times in video game form, but it definitely looks to have a great deal more polish than past games. Some of the fighting games have basically granted you control of the hero characters and dropped you in a sandbox to seek out the bad guys to advance the story so Kakarot isn’t completely unfamiliar. With this game though it seems there’s more emphasis on the progression and freedom to do as you please without making it into a true open-world game on par with The Witcher III or Red Dead Redemption. When the game first dropped in 2020 it received generally positive reviews, though they weren’t over-the-top with praise. It was a game of diminishing returns from what I gathered so I didn’t feel particularly drawn to it. I figured I would get around to it, but I did lose it in the shuffle a bit, but after getting the PS5 I suddenly had reason to give it a shot.

Much of the story is presented with flashy cinematics, some of which are shot-for-shot recreations of the anime.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is like a cross between The Legacy of Goku and the Budokai Tenkaichi series. You start off as Goku and you’re free to fly around the area containing Goku’s house. It’s a fairly large area connected to other regions of Earth via an old school world map feature. As you progress through the game, more areas open up and even off-world areas. While exploring, you will encounter random bad guys that can be either dealt with or ignored to some degree. You will also run into NPCs that range from random earthlings to notable characters. Your next story destination is always marked with a red indicator while side missions are designated blue when available. Side missions range from battles to fetch quests, for the most part, and some will involve characters from the show and others won’t. It’s pretty straight-forward and progressing through the game will unlock the ability to play as additional heroes from the show. Even though the game is called Kakarot, Goku’s Saiyan name at birth, you don’t exclusively play as Goku. If you’re familiar with DBZ’s story, then you know that Goku will be dead for portions of it and in the game he won’t even be available to you during those times. The game just sticks with the canon story, which is basically all of the stuff from the manga so no Garlic Jr, no Other World tournaments, and definitely no villains from the movies. Not everything you do and see is strictly canon though as there are ways to bring back villains to battle again and there’s a game-only bonus boss fight as well, but for the most part, the game just gives you the main story.

The actual fights are similar to an arena fighter with the camera behind the player. You lock onto enemies that way your character is essentially always facing their direction, but you’re able to move about in a free manner.

Battle is obviously an important component to this game and it plays out like an arena fighter, but simplified. The camera is positioned behind the player character and you will be tasked with dispatching one or more other fighters. I think the max amount of enemies on-screen at any one time is six, but I could be wrong and it may be more. The face buttons on the controller map to the following commands: melee attack, ki attack, dash, charge ki. The dash is more like a movement button that also allows you to perform vanish attacks when blocking. Blocking is mapped to a shoulder button along with the special attack commands. Pressing L1 on the PS5 controller in tandem with a face button unleashes a special move. This can be a melee attack or one of the signature ki attacks from the series like the Kamehameha or Special Beam Cannon. R1 does the same, but for your allies. In most fights, you can have up to two supporting fighters and they will have two special moves each mapped to a face button. You have to manage your health, ki, and the support move meter of your allies throughout. Ki will go down as you fire off special moves or use the vanish command and can be replenished with the charge button. The support character meter will regenerate over time. There’s also a third meter called the surge gauge which fills up as you dish out punishment. Once that fills up you can enter a super-charged surge mode which strengthens attacks and makes your character move faster. It’s not of much use early in the game, but later on it adds the ability to restore health while it’s active which is invaluable in the hardest boss fights. There’s another meter, the Z combo meter, that is basically unseen, but fills as you call upon your allies for support attacks. Once it’s full, you’ll be able to unleash a Z combo which is basically a cinematic, team, attack initiated by pressing two shoulder buttons. It’s neat and can really pull you out of a jam as it’s unblockable and basically cancels whatever your opponent was doing in the moment. Lastly, there’s also an items menus accessible via the D-pad which contains a list of a equipped items that mostly just restore health.

Sometimes you’re able to bring along some friends, though never more than two.

Tackling opponents in DBZ: Kakarot is pretty straight-forward once you get the hang of it. Most of the fodder enemies aren’t very hard and can be overwhelmed pretty easily with melee attacks. The more powerful enemies are much better at blocking and many will enter into states where they can’t be staggered via attacking. All of them can also enter into this flaming, red, state which indicates they’re charging up an attack. If that attack lands it will leave your character stunned and open for a free hit. It’s a bit odd because the game doesn’t tell you about that ability and you may be wondering how you perform the same, but you simply can’t. It’s a special move that only the CPU can make use of. As your characters get stronger, the enemies on the world map will become even easier. If you’re dashing around the map and happen to contact them you may even get an automatic win without even having to enter into the battle mode. Harder enemies will exhibit more of a pattern as well where they’ll go into various different, scripted, attacks you will have to either avoid or figure out the proper way to counter. They also get to benefit from generous amounts of health relative to what the player has and the hardest encounters won’t allow you to use items. This is when the ability to heal via the surge mode really comes into play.

Z Combos are unblockable, cinematic, team-up, attacks that can certainly help swing the tide of battle.

Character progression in the game is very much like any other RPG. Participating in battles and completing quests will award the player with experience which will in turn allow the player to level-up. The initial level cap is 100, but you can blow past that in the post game content. Each character has access to a character progression grid where they learn moves and abilities. Each character can equip four attack moves at a time and they also have access to passive buffs and abilities and the amount of those abilities that can be equipped increases with every ten levels. Characters learn these new moves and abilities by spending Z orbs, which are all over the place when buzzing around the world. The most plentiful way to acquire them though is via battling and completing quests. In the main game, I almost never had to go farming for orbs, but in the post game I did often. Some moves are also learned by training and early on a ton of moves and abilities will be locked. They become unlocked as you progress further into the story so no learning how to go Super Saiyan with Goku before you even fight Raditz. Speaking of which, transformations are in the game and they’re separately equipped. Almost all of them are added via the story mode. For Goku, he can also just go to any transformation he has available so you don’t have to power-up to Super Saiyan, then go Super Saiyan 2, before you can go Super Saiyan 3 in a fight. If you have access to the Super Saiyan 3 transformation then you can just go straight to that. Late in the game, you can also learn auto-transformations which will start you off in battle in that form. More importantly, it removes the ki-drain penalty the forms possess which is pretty huge as exhausting your ki in battle will revert the character to their base form. With Auto Super Saiyan 3 equipped, that basically makes Super Saiyan 3 Goku’s base form. Fusion is also available for the characters it applies to, but both characters need to be in the battle party and it’s triggered like any other transformation. Even though Fusion has a time limit in the show, for the game it just lasts for the duration of the fight.

When you’re done with the main story, more adventure awaits via paid DLC. This will give you access to Goku and Vegeta’s other transformations like Super Saiyan God.

The character roster for the game is pretty large, but deceptively so. Basically, everyone you would expect to be in the game is, and most of them are voiced by the actors from the anime as well. There are a few who are different, but it’s not terribly distracting (except for adult Mai who has a voice befitting her child form from Dragon Ball Super). For player characters, you’re actually pretty limited. They are: Goku, Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta, and Future Trunks. You can also fight as Gotenks and Vegito via the Fusion technique. Characters like Krillin, Yamcha, Tien, Goten, 18, and so on are support fighters only. They can level-up, learn moves, and join you in battle, but you can’t directly control them. Who you can utilize is dictated by where you are in the main story, but generally speaking, you’re free to swap characters in and out as you please. You can’t change who you’re controlling during battle though, only when outside of it. To further boost your abilities there’s what’s called the Community Board. These are a bunch of grids where character coins can be placed. Each character is assigned a rating in various subcategories which can be improved upon by giving them gifts, which are just items found all throughout the game. It’s a bit messy and convoluted, but as you acquire the character tokens and get a feel for it the feature starts to make more sense. Take the Z Fighter board as an example. Leveling it up basically improves battle performance by adding permanent buffs like melee damage bonuses and ki attack increases and so on. Goku is the centerpiece of that board. He naturally will work better with certain allies and placing Gohan, for example, next to Goku will add 2 points to the Z Fighter score plus whatever Gohan’s Z Fighter value is. A character can get to a maximum of 30 in any one category, though they’re natural max could be miniscule. You can permanently boost it with special items, but generally speaking, you want to place tokens according to their strength. Gohan is a great fighter, but a terrible cook, so you probably won’t want to put him on the cooking board. It sounds confusing in writing, but it’s not so bad in practice and it even becomes fun trying to best place characters so that you can max out as many boards as possible and as early as possible.

And let’s not forget Super Saiyan Blue.

And speaking of cooking, that is yet another way you can boost your power in the game. Throughout the world there is various flora and fauna to collect. There’s even a fishing mini game which the game will introduce you to almost right off the bat. Campfires dot the landscape of every area and the player can fry up a fish or a deer to get a quick boost, but the best bonus items come via meals. You can have cooks, or even Chi Chi, prepare gigantic feasts if you have the proper ingredients and hunt down the recipe. These meals will often add significant attribute boosts which last for a limited time and can make taking down certain enemies a lot more manageable. I found that cooking wasn’t something I had to rely on, but it helped the few times I was underleveled when faced with a task. Usually, said task was an optional one or a training exercise as getting through the game was pretty painless, but it was nice to have that trump card in my back pocket. There’s also a side activity that lets you build cars or bipedal walker-type devices which honestly can be ignored. The cars can be used for races to get money, which you basically will never need, and the walkers can help hunt minerals which is another thing you will rarely have to hunt hard for.

The Trunks DLC has been my favorite of the four as it allows you to experience the events of Trunks’ future before he travels back in time as well as after he returns from the past.

In terms of extra stuff there’s a whole bunch that Kakarot has to offer. Most of the training available is stuff you will want to do, but there’s also bonus training available later in the game located at Capsule Corp. This training is a bit harder, but is also how you learn the very useful auto-transform abilities. There’s also the Dragon Balls which can be hunted down to make a wish. You will have some generic wishes like a wish for money or Z orbs, but the best ones allow you to resurrect defeated villains. They’ll come back stronger than before and are great for earning extra experience. This is also the only way to get their character token. Throughout the game there will also be “Villainous” enemies which are like super-powered clones of more famous enemies. As you take them out, they’ll be replaced with harder versions until you eventually defeat them all and unlock the game’s optional boss. Again, defeating these are mostly just a way to earn extra experience or Z orbs, you’ll likely need to be at max level to beat the final one anyway, but the challenge makes it fun. You’ll gain access to the time machine so you can go back and complete any side missions you may have missed or just to take on a past enemy once again. And then there’s the downloadable content. As of right now, four scenarios are available and they are: Beerus, Golden Frieza, Future Trunks and Bardock. The first two basically just let you play through the events of the final two Dragon Ball Z movies: Battle of Gods and Resurrection F. Those also happen to be the first two arcs of Dragon Ball Super. They give Goku and Vegeta access to more transformations while increasing the level cap to 300. Content wise, they’re a bit light as you basically just battle Beerus in the first one before gaining access to training with Whis on the home planet of Beerus. The Frieza arc grants you access to a new region on Earth and also unlocks horde battles which just pits the player against scores of enemies. They’re honestly a bit dull, but Frieza presents a solid challenge as does Beerus. The Trunks story is basically The History of Trunks and it’s almost like a whole new game as it takes place entirely in the alternate timeline where Goku and the others were murdered by the androids (or, in Goku’s case, a virus) and only Trunks and Gohan survived. It’s actually pretty cool because it continues past the defeat of Cell and lets you play as Trunks as he tries to prevent the awakening of Majin Buu in his timeline. And as you probably could guess, the Bardock one is an adaptation of the other DBZ OVA: Bardok – The Father of Goku. You get to play as the doomed Saiyan as he tries to prevent the annihilation of his race at the hands of Frieza. Upon finishing it, you will also gain access to a Prince Vegeta sidestory which is pretty cool.

The latest DLC puts the player in control of Bardok, and for a little while a young Prince Vegeta, but more is on the way. Unfortunately for Bardok, there’s no changing the past in this game.

Of the new stuff, the Trunks add-on was my favorite. Part of the charm this game possesses for a longtime fan is you do get to see more than what the anime shows. I suppose none of it is canon, but there’s a moment where Trunks relays a story to his mother about what it was like to spend a year with Vegeta in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber so you get little character moments the show didn’t have time for. We get to see a bit more of Vegeta taking Goku’s death pretty hard following the battle with Cell and there’s some other stuff sprinkled in there that I quite enjoyed. All of the technical bits of the game are also top-notch: good music, good voice acting, terrific visuals. It’s a fan’s sort of game and I hope they keep it going with more downloadable content. I’d love to get the Goku Black Saga and the Tournament of Power or either Dragon Ball Super movie would be welcomed as well. The next one slated for release presently doesn’t have a release date, but it’s supposed to detail Goku’s battle with Piccolo Jr. at the end of Dragon Ball. I’m curious to see how the game is able to pad that one out so it feels as substantial as the other add-ons, but it’s cool to get more from the original Dragon Ball series.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is not a game for the ages, but if you’re into Dragon Ball, this is about as good as it gets. I only wish it started earlier with the original Dragon Ball and let us get to Dragon Ball Z followed by Dragon Ball Super. It might have made for a fun juxtaposition going from the more grounded early days of the franchise to the frenetic days of DBZ. Even without that, there’s still a ton of content here and the fact that I’m over 90 hours into it and still willing to play more is testament to that. The gameplay is simple, but rewarding, and while it can get monotonous when you’re hunting items down and getting attacked relentlessly by weaker enemies, I never found myself truly bored or frustrated. I’ve played through and watched this story so many times at this point, but Kakarot helps make it entertaining once again by really delivering on the story beats that matter. It’s like getting a cliff notes version of the show and honestly very little gets left out. The only fight not in the game I was expecting to participate in was Future Trunks vs Perfect Cell, but I guess they didn’t want to create a character model for the bulked up version of Trunks and that’s fine. If you love Dragon Ball Z and are sick of traditional fighting games, then I definitely think Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is worth taking for a spin. The base game is probably enough for most people to get their fill and it’s not very expensive relative to a new game these days. And if you’re like me, when you finish it you’ll likely want more and you have four scenarios just waiting for you if so. That’s about the only criticism I can levy is that if you don’t care about experiencing Goku’s Super Saiyan God transformations then you could probably skip two of the downloadable scenarios (they’re also not free), but the Future Trunks one is definitely worth investing money and time in and I also enjoyed Bardok’s story. This game is simply a good time and you’re likely to walk away from it feeling like you too can unleash a mighty Kamehameha on command.

Some more video games and movies from the Dragon Ball franchise awaits:

Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure

In the West, it took awhile for Dragon Ball to make an imprint with US audiences. It was localized and brought over in the mid-90s in the hopes of making money in syndicated markets. There were over 200 episodes, so the reasoning was sound, but it just didn’t take off. It wasn’t until the property…

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Dragon Ball Z – Budokai HD Collection

Oh, you thought we were done with DBZ?! Oh no, I have some more Dragon Ball related material to share with you and even though we’re done with the movies, I thought now was as good a time as any to talk about some video games. If you’re a usual reader, you may recall I…

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Dragon Ball Z – Resurrection ‘F’

Dragon Ball Super still feels very much like a new series to me, which is kind of funny since it just concluded with episode #131. Although it may have just ended (and production company Toei Animation has suggested it’s likely to continue), I’m currently about 80 episodes behind since I’ve been watching it on Cartoon…

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Leave a comment | posted in Video Games

April 3, 2023

Mondo X-Men TAS 1/6 Scale Magneto

By Joe
Behold! The Master of Magnetism!

If you showed a random individual this blog and asked them what my favorite cartoon was as a kid I’m guessing they would go with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And they wouldn’t be wrong as that was my favorite for a time, but come 1992 I was starting to drift away from that show. Batman: The Animated Series hit the airwaves and with it came a renewed interest in the caped crusader which really was coasting off of the recent success of Batman Returns. I don’t think I would have ever named that show my favorite though, but in looking back on it I can say it probably was the best cartoon series of the 90s. My favorite would soon follow in the form of X-Men, the unlikely hit for the Fox Kids Network that debuted on television sets on Halloween 1992. Because the show ran into some production snags, the show wouldn’t really get off and running until 1993, but before 1992 was over we would be introduced to the signature villain of the series: Magneto.

Magneto debuted on November 27th in the appropriately titled episode “Enter Magneto.” In it, we would be introduced to one of the most nuanced villains in superhero comics. Magneto, a victim of humanity’s most extreme form of cruelty as a Holocaust survivor, wants to exert dominance over all of humanity in the name of mutant supremacy. As his rival, Charles Xavier, described it, Magneto feels a war is brewing between humans and mutants and he intends to be ready. Xavier, for his part, believes there is a path to peace that doesn’t involve violence, but that’s partly because he didn’t have his sense of optimism crushed by the Nazis. When presented in that lens, Magneto may not seem right, but he’s definitely understandable and if he wasn’t opposite our beloved heroes then maybe we could even see ourselves rooting for him. The show was almost too good at making Magneto likable as he really wasn’t much of a villain following the next episode, “Deadly Reunions.” He wouldn’t show up again until the Season One finale where he teamed-up with the X-Men to take down the Sentinels. Season Two would see he and Xavier stranded in the Savage Land for the entirety of the season’s run essentially extending the team-up for another 13 episodes. Following that, he would mostly serve as an unlikely ally of sorts. The two-parter “Sanctuary” saw him try to separate himself and his followers from humanity, only to be undermined by one of his followers. He joined the ranks of the villains for the intended big finale “Beyond Good and Evil” which felt a bit forced. He’d also come back around to the side of the X-Men before the story’s conclusion and it looks like he’s going to be a member of the team when the show returns this fall in the form of X-Men ’97.

Artwork by Dan Veesenmeyer.

Maybe Magneto didn’t turn out to be the biggest villain of the show, but he was still quite memorable and damn likeable. It’s for that reason that I am left to assume that Magneto was given the honor of being the second release in Mondo’s line of X-Men action figures. It was in 2021 that Mondo revealed it had acquired the license for X-Men and did so by showing off Wolverine in its line of sixth scale action figures. I got my mitts on that figure in early 2022 and it was one of my favorite releases of the year. Mondo solicited Magneto in the fall and he has finally arrived. As the second figure in the line, Magneto does feel like a bold choice. Gambit, Cyclops, and other members of the team might have been safer, but this is a line that’s not after massive sales or casual fans. It’s a scale not a lot of folks collect and at a price point that’s certainly prohibitive (around $220). Still, if you want a representation of a character from the show then it’s hard to do better than Mondo. The only comparable is the mini busts released by Diamond which certainly look terrific, but aren’t action figures. Hasbro did its own line of figures last year, but they’re not even comparable given the difference in price, scale, and overall quality and dedication to the source material. And while I am not a sixth scale collector by nature, what Mondo is doing with this property is basically exactly what I want to see from a company tackling X-Men so I had to grab the Master of Magnetism.

And get this, the flap on the window box is secured by…a magnet!

Magneto comes in an impressive box. Perhaps not as flashy as Wolverine’s comic con exclusive packaging, but it is comparable to the non-exclusive version of Wolverine that followed. It’s a mostly white box adorned with production artwork from the show. There’s also a new image of Magneto by storyboard artist Dan Veesenmeyer, the same artist who handled Hasbro’s VHS packaging which is a nice bit of both synergy and authenticity. The art is great, though I do feel inclined to point out that it depicts Magneto from later in the series so the costume doesn’t match the figure in the box. There’s a nice write-up on Magneto inside the flap by showrunner Eric Lewald and contributing writer Julia Lewald. It is a window box and when pulled away you get a nice look at the figure in the plastic tray inside. It’s flashy, but I’m an opener so I felt no guilt when I cut into this to pull Magneto out.

“Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!” Magneto got all of the best lines.

Once removed, Magneto stands at approximately 12″ making him scale to about six feet. This has been a source of criticism for the line in the early going as Wolverine was around 10.75″. In looking at the model sheets for the show, Magneto was intended to be 6.5′ tall so the figure is a little small. Wolverine was a mere 5.3′ so his figure is too tall if we’re talking true sixth scale, but only by a quarter of an inch. Like a lot of action figure lines, my assumption is the scale isn’t true to life and Mondo is trying to bring the short characters up a little while bringing the tall ones down a little in the interest of keeping costs down. True sixth scale would have put Magneto at 13″ while Wolverine would be 10.5″. Does that matter? It’s one of those things that’s going to vary from person to person. I think a little more separation would have been nice, but I don’t care that much and I wouldn’t be surprised if Magneto was drawn closer to 6′ anyway in the show as Cyclops is intended to be right around that mark, but I swear he and Magneto stood around eye-to-eye.

They’re probably not true sixth scale, but at least Magneto is noticeably taller than Wolverine.

Collectors can fuss over the scale all they want, but what I think few would debate is that this figure is gorgeous. Magneto looks like he’s been ripped right from the show. The shade of red for this costume is perfect, the colors used to apply the cel-shading look correct, and the paint job is immaculate. His default head is a stoic one and I love the black shading just above the eyebrows and in between the eyes and brow. The cape is all plastic which is the right move if you want the figure to look like the source material as a soft goods one just won’t match what was painted on the cel. The inside of the cape is a dark purple while the outside is the softer lavender we’re accustomed to seeing. It sits high on the figure, which is also screen accurate for those early appearances as Magneto was often floating rather than standing. Magneto has his red gloves, which was how he was depicted in his first appearance, and the collar area is also filled-in with lavender. His later appearances would have red and sometimes he had purple gloves. The proportioning looks really nice and I like the true-to-the-source-material musculature on his chest and abdomen. About the only thing I’d consider even close to an eyesore on the figure is Mondo’s double-jointed knees. There is a noticeable gap between the end of the thigh and the joining knee piece. It doesn’t bother me, as this is an action figure and action figures have joints, but I’ve seen some express displeasure in how that turned out. I’ll get into it more when we get to articulation.

Both can manage their signature pose from the show’s iconic opening.

Magneto looks tremendous out of the box, but Mondo also included a bunch of stuff to really add some excitement to your display. Magneto comes with fist hands in the box, but he also has a set of wide open hands and a set of slightly clenched hands. The clenched hands evoke images of X-Men #1 in my mind, the Jim Lee one, and the image of Magneto on the cover with his hand out in front of him. The splayed hands are more in-line with how he demonstrated his powers in the show, and to do that Mondo also included some effect parts. We get two, conical, translucent pieces with yellow rings painted on them. To best show them off, we get another set of splayed hands with magnets at the center. The effect parts attach to those magnets effortlessly and look fantastic. There’s also a second, right, fist with a magnet on the back of it which seems like a direct call-out to Magneto’s pose during the opening credits of the show when the camera zooms in on his face before the good guys and bad guys clash. It’s a terrific idea and given that Wolverine has his sparking effect from the opening credits I wonder if recreating such scenes will be a priority going forward for Mondo?

Don’t piss him off Wolverine.

Magneto has even more stuff to help show off. He also comes with a tangled mess of shrapnel that also features a magnet in it. It’s sculpted really well and painted even better and it also features a little shout-out to the show by containing Xavier’s watch. There’s also a long, bendable, metal pipe, or cable, that I assume is intended to wrap around a foe. The bendable component isn’t quite good enough to pull that off without some finagling. It looks nice though, but isn’t as functional as it could be. We also have a stand and it’s the same stand included with all Mondo figures. For Wolverine, it wasn’t necessary and with Magneto it’s basically useless as it doesn’t fit between his body and cape. You could probably make it fit, but that’s more likely to scratch the paint on the inside of the cape than it is to provide actual stability. It’s also all black and not the least bit flashy so it’s an easy accessory to leave in the box.

Magneto doesn’t just have powers and extra hands to add some shelf presence, but extra heads as well. The stoic head is the one that comes on the figure, but he also has an angry, teeth-gritting, expression that is just fantastic. I love this head as Mondo painted black all around his eyes which is how the character is often drawn. I don’t ever want to see a helmeted Magneto figure not feature some black shading around the eyes and this head is proof of how awesome that can look. If you prefer your Magneto sans helmet, he has an unmasked head as well. It features his long, flowing, locks and the look is much better than the unmasked Wolverine head that came with that figure. The only thing I’m not crazy about is that Mondo used a lot of blue when shading the hair and I think they overdid it. It also would have been nice to get an empty helmet for him to hold when sporting this look, but if you position one of the helmeted heads just right, you can fake it. This first edition of Magneto also comes with two bonus heads that won’t be on the standard retail version currently up for preorder. First up, we have Magneto as The Leader from the episode “One Man’s Worth.” It’s basically Magneto with a beard and even longer hair, though he also looks a bit worse for ware. It’s pretty cool, though The Leader had a different costume so the look isn’t that convincing. Magneto did have a beard at times in the show so I suppose it works just as well for that. Like the unmasked head, there’s a bit too much blue for my liking in the beard and hair, but otherwise it’s pretty cool. Magneto also comes with the Evil Morph head. Wolverine had good guy Morph, and Magneto gets the evil version. It makes some sense since it was Morph who tricked Xavier into going to the Savage Land by impersonating Magneto, though he morphed his entire body to resemble Magneto and at no point was he presented as Magneto, but with his own head. It’s more of a gag inclusion, I suppose. The likeness on the Morph head looks awesome though and I do hope we get a full figure some day. Perhaps it will come with a different, evil, expression so as not to make this accessory redundant. The heads are all easy to swap, but you do have to be careful with the un-helmeted head and The Leader due to its long hair. There’s a tendency to want to pull the head back, but that will cause the hair to scrape against the neck and it will lead to paint rub. It will likely be hidden when another head is put on, but it’s something to be mindful of.

“We have to go help the others take down the Sentinels. Hop in, we’ll take the Blackbird!” “Umm, Logan, that’s…”

The articulation for Wolverine was what I would term basic, and with Magneto it’s more of the same, but less functional. The head is on a double ball peg so you can rotate it and have Magneto look down and he can look up slightly. With the no-helmet look, his ability to look up is further restricted by his hair. The shoulders are just ball hinges and he can raise his arms out to the side and rotate as far as the cape will let him. There’s no biceps swivel as instead there’s a swivel at the elbow which works fine. The single hinge grants just shy of 90 degrees of bend while the wrists swivel and hinge. The hands sit pretty deep on the bracers of his forearms though which restrict the ability to swivel. You will want to pull them out slightly to create more range before working at it (more on that to come). None of the hands seem to want to swivel on the ball hinge in the hands like I think they’re supposed to which would allow you to line the hinge up in whatever direction you want. Maybe I’m wrong though. There’s a ball joint in the diaphragm, but the cape isn’t going to let it do much. It basically just tilts to the side and bobbles forward a bit. It honestly could have been omitted entirely. There’s a waist twist below that which works fine and the hips are on some big old ball pegs. The diaper piece will restrict some motion, but he can kick pretty far, especially if you let the legs go out to the side a bit as they’ll want to do. He can almost do a split and there’s some thigh swivel at that point too. The double-jointed knees will let Magneto bend past 90 degrees and there’s basically a boot swivel at the base of the joint. It’s a bit awkward looking, but functional. Since the cape makes the ability to bend past 90 moot one could argue that Mondo could have simplified the joint and come away with something that looked better. As I said before, I don’t hate the look of the joint, but there’s some merit to that argument. Lastly, we have ankle hinges and rockers which work well. All of the joints are pretty smooth except for the diaphragm which is a bit loose. He holds his pose, but it could be tighter. More importantly, the lower half is plenty tight which creates a strong base which is important for a figure as back-heavy as this one. I haven’t had any shelf dives yet, but I’m definitely placing him near or against the wall on my shelf for peace of mind.

“I said ‘hop in!'”

Now for the part of the review that’s not as rosy, but does have a happy ending. I ran into some QC issues with my Magneto. The first was that I was missing a hand. My figure came with duplicate, splayed, right, hands and I was missing the one with the magnet in it. That was a bummer since I’d have much preferred to be missing the non-magnet hand, but at least I had the right fist with the magnet still so my figure could utilize multiple effect parts. The other issue was with the left fist right out of the box. When I want to rotate it the fist just came right off shearing at the post. The ease with which it happened tells me it was likely damaged before it ever got to me as the posts on all of the hands are cast in a very stiff plastic. I was able to drill the post out of the figure so I could still make use of the other left hands in the box, but I no longer had a left fist. If we were talking about a 20 dollar figure here I might have just let it go, but since this guy is rather pricey I figured I should reach out to Mondo to see if they had any spare parts. If they had suggested an exchange I might have taken that too, though I was so happy with the paint job on my figure it would have been tough. Instead, Mondo just apologized and told me a brand, new, figure was being shipped to me. I didn’t even have to return the other one. While it sucks to run into problems with any item purchased, with customer service like that it’s really of no concern since that’s about as good as it gets when it comes to taking care of the customer. And now my best friend gets a free Magneto that’s just missing a left fist and right, magnet, hand. Or at least, he would, if not for my experiencing the same issues with the second figure. I was able to remove the left fist from it no problem, but the right sheared off at the peg once again and I had to go into that one with a drill. I think part of the issue is that the hands should rotate on the peg inserted into them on the ball joint, with the peg in the forearm just providing stability. I tried heating all of the spare hands and I got some to actually move on the ball joint pretty well, but one of the clenchy hands actually snapped off of the peg in the ball so there’s another hand down. Both pegs, the one in the hand and the one in the forearm, are hexagonal and not smooth and round so they’re just not great at spinning. I’m guess Mondo does it this way to prevent looseness, but the fail right in my experience is too high with this setup. Again, if you buy from Mondo getting a replacement should be no problem so I don’t think it’s enough to scare away potential buyers, but definitely go easy and treat the hands delicately. And maybe be wary about buying this figure from other locations, especially eBay or other reseller places.

Soon comes the hard part: making room for Jubilee!

Mondo’s second entry in this line is a pretty damn fine one. Magneto looks incredible, and while the articulation isn’t likely to impress many, the number of heads and effect parts included make finding a dynamic pose rather effortless. The only downside is he’s so big and heavy that finding a proper flight stand poses a significant challenge. I’d love to find a way to display him levitating, but the included stand is rather useless when it comes to that task and finding another has yet to yield results. The combination of the large figure and the rigid cape poses quite the challenge there. Thankfully, the figure looks so damn good that it doesn’t take much for it to impress. The sculpt and paint alone mean this guy can’t possibly look boring even when placed in the most vanilla of poses. I think I even prefer him to last year’s Wolverine, which was my personal figure of the year, because Mondo just absolutely nailed the look of Magneto from the show. A special shout out to sculptor Alex Brewer for that and Mark Bristow for the paint. They really did an unbelievable job and I can’t wait to see what’s next for this line.

More from the world of X-Men: The Animated Series:

Mondo X-Men TAS Wolverine 1/6 Scale SDCC Exclusive Action Figure

When San Diego Comic Con was cancelled for 2021, many of the entities that would have sold exclusive merchandise at the event pivoted to web sales. And since the 2020 iteration of the famed event was also canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many seemed to expect the same for 2021, or the massive delays…

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Previously on X-Men: The Making of an Animated Series

A lot of cartoons made an impact on me as a child. My first love was The Real Ghostbusters. Its goofy cast of characters and excitement were plenty of fun and there were interesting toys to supplement the series with, which was pretty much the goal of all cartoons in the 80s. The Teenage Mutant…

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X-Men: The Art and Making of the Animated Series

A few years ago, I talked about my love of X-Men, the animated series, via a book review of Previously…on X-Men by Eric Lewald. That book chronicled the development of the 92 animated series that helped propel the Fox Kids Network to the top of the Saturday morning leaderboards through notes from the author and…

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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

March 30, 2023

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Gamma 1 and Gamma 2

By Joe
Are you ready to experience the latest in android technology?

Last year saw the release of a brand new film in the Dragon Ball franchise: Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. The mouthful of a title was a bit of a throwback affair. It seemed that Toei and series creator Akira Toriyama wanted to use the film to return the spotlight to Gohan and Piccolo, two characters who had been sidelined in Dragon Ball Super in favor of the two Saiyan boys, Goku and Vegeta. The film also marked the return of longtime adversary the Red Ribbon Army and with it came two new androids for the good guys to pummel: Gamma 1 and Gamma 2. I’m not sure if there was an embargo on the new characters when it came to action figures or if Bandai just wanted to give fans a chance to see the characters in action first, but two new figures of the pair were introduced via the Premium Bandai route and recently started shipping. These are made-to-order figures sold exclusively by Bandai direct to consumer. Presumably, there’s a bit of a crowd-fund element at play, similar to what we see with Super7, whereby if not enough orders came in then the project would get scrapped, but evidently that didn’t happen. Perhaps Bandai also sees softer sales with either movie characters or new ones which is why this pair went the “premium” route. The inclusion of added parts for Gohan with each figure also adds to the feeling that maybe confidence in the pair wasn’t super high. The two were at least priced in a more reasonable window at $70 a piece. While this is a lot higher than the retail releases for the film of Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, and Piccolo, they also feels like bigger releases as they come with a lot more stuff and they’re not reused molds from past figures. They do basically share all of the same parts save for the heads which is why I’m going to review them together.

There is a bit of a dorky element at play with these two. Think Ginyu Force.

The Gamma boys come in the traditional window box packaging the S.H.Figuarts line is known for. There’s product shots, or renders, combined with a gold backdrop that seems to be part of the Super Hero theming. Out of their respective boxes, Gamma 1 and 2 stand at approximately 5.75″ to the top of their heads not including their stylish fins. And those fins are the main things that distinguish the pair as Gamma 1 has one, center, fin on his head while Gamma 2 has, appropriately enough, two fins set off to the side. The only other thing that separates them is their choice in color for the cape and the number on their chest. Sculpt-wise, the bodies are entirely the same save for the head. Both characters have a dark gray skin tone with a light gray face. They have a bit of a shark thing going on with their heads and the circular ears do give them a distinctive Toriyama feel to their design. Their bodies are clothed in a soft yellow military suit which is all unpainted plastic. The only paint on these guys is reserved for the buttons on the double-breasted jacket and the cuffs of the sleeves along with the painted numeral on the chest. And that paint is not that well done. The buttons look cheap and the edgework is not the sharpest. The actual yellow portions of the suit are okay. It’s mostly matte, but the softer plastic for the bottom of the coat does have a different look to it than the harder plastic bits. The knees and elbows are a touch darker than the rest, but it probably won’t be that noticeable on a shelf. I would also argue the shade is a touch off to the source material. These guys have more of a mustard to the yellow in comparison with the film. There is the customary Red Ribbon logo on the left shoulder and that looks clean, but overall, the paint is not a strong suit here.

Unlike most Dragon Ball villains, these two actually use a gun.

The rest of the aesthetics are generally good. The faces look appropriate and I like the height of the characters for the line. The boots have a very glossy appearance, but that seems intentional given their presentation in the film. The cape is hard plastic with a hinge which I think looks mostly fine. I wasn’t crazy about the segmented cape on the Proud Namekian Piccolo so I don’t mind the simpler approach here. The only thing I’m not crazy about are the shoulders as they do the Goku thing of having part of the material just pinned on. With Goku, I don’t like it, but I always understood it to a degree because he has short sleeves that extend onto his shoulder. Here, it’s a suit that just has shoulder pads and a V shape to it so I wish they just left it alone. I don’t think it would have reduced the articulation in a meaningful way and it would have looked better. I find myself fussing with these shoulder pieces more than I would like as I try to hide gaps and get them into a more natural pose.

I hate these ball-hinged heads because you can’t put the hinge where you want to. The heads are grooved to fit that tab visible on Gamma 2 so for him his hinge will always be on the side while Gamma 1’s is more centered. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to rotate just that barrel piece that slots into the head.

With that in mind, lets just jump to the articulation since both figures are the same and then we’ll talk about the accessories. Both figures use a ball-hinge for the head connected with a ball-peg system at the base of the neck. I don’t know why they did it this way, but it sure is annoying. You will have to manipulate the direction the hinge is face if you want more nuance posing, but they can look down and rotate and the lower neck joint helps to add more character. It can get a little gappy though if you tilt it back too far. Doing so with the hinge in the proper orientation and in conjunction with the hinged-ball peg system of the diaphragm can get both figures into a good flying pose. That diaphragm joint also provides rotation and tilt, though you do have to be mindful of the chest buttons when crunching forward. The shoulders are hinged ball pegs so they have some play at that peg while also being able to rotate all around and lift up past a horizontal position. The shoulder pad ruffle, or whatever you want to call it, pegs in and can be pushed aside. There is a butterfly joint here as well which can bring the arms pretty much clear across the chest. It does expose some gaps in the back as butterfly joints tend to do, but it’s not as hideous as some others and the colors are consistent at least. There is a biceps swivel and the double-jointed elbows will bend all the way forward as these guys have pretty thin arms. At the wrist, the usual hinged ball peg is present that allows for plenty of rotation.

These crossed arm pieces never work as seamlessly as they should.

At the waist, we get another hinged ball peg so these guys can rotate and tilt. The floating belt does get in the way so you don’t get maximum crunch, but working in tandem with the diaphragm joint should give you enough forward and back. The bottom of the jacket is done with multiple, soft, pieces of plastic so it doesn’t impede the legs from kicking forward way past horizontal or stop the figure from doing splits. They also lack a true posterior so they can kick all the way back. There is a thigh swivel which is conveniently hidden by the coat and the double-jointed knees bend well past 90 degrees. The ankles are on ball joints so you get plenty of range going back, some forward, and rocker, but it’s not the prettiest sight as it tends to make the figures look like their feet are separate from their shin. It’s probably not as noticeable on the shelf as it is in hand, but it is what it is. There’s also a toe hinge, if that’s something you like and it seems like it’s fairly tight so it actually has some worth. There’s also the hinge in the cape so you can raise it out behind the figure for a more windswept look. It does make them slightly harder to stand, but not impossible. It just pegs in so you do get a little side-to-side pivot as well, but not a whole lot. It’s mostly going to lay relatively flat or blow out behind the figure.

The guns are silly, but I do enjoy them.
As you can tell, I did not get the Super Hero edition of Piccolo.

All in all, I would say the Gamma brothers move quite well. There are some sacrifices taken with the aesthetic to achieve that, but I think most will be content with the tradeoff. The only thing I don’t love are the shoulders, the rest I’m fine with. And that articulation will come in handy as both figures come with a variety of hands and heads to add some life to a display. For Gamma 1, we get a neutral portrait, one with a crooked mouth indicating displeasure, one with his teeth showing in a bit of a grin, a yelling portrait, and a yelling portrait where one eye is larger than the other indicating some distress. They are all separate heads, so no faceplates with these guys. For hands, Gamma 1 has fist hands, open hands, chop hands, and a set of trigger finger hands. Those work with his little blaster sidearm of which he has two. One to wield, and one with a peg in the front so it can be holstered. The gun is painted reasonably well, but I wish it had a blast effect or at least a peg hole for one to be added. Gamma 1 also comes with a set of crossed arms which peg in at the biceps swivel. It’s a bit of a pain to get on and get both sides inserted. My pictures will illustrate how successful I was there. Gamma 2’s accessories are mostly similar, but also a little different. He gets one less head as he has a neutral head, yelling head, teeth-showing grin, and a side-eyed smirk. He has all of the same hands and the two blasters as Gamma 1, plus a set of “devil horn” hands. He does not have the crossed-arm piece.

Both figures also come with stuff for the Super Hero Gohan figure released earlier last year. With Gamma 1, we get a Super Saiyan head for Gohan. It has a very pale, yellow, color for the hair that has no shading or paint whatsoever. It’s a bit odd looking as a result. It looks like a nice base for Super Saiyan hair, but I definitely would prefer it to have some shading to bring it to life. There are three faceplates included for it: neutral, yelling, and a teeth-gritting expression. They look nice, though Gohan does have the issue of a lack of bangs with his Super Saiyan look so the sideburns had to be painted onto the faces. It doesn’t match the yellow plastic of the hair and there’s a bit of an ugly seem line unfortunately where the face meets the head that usually we can’t see. With Gamma 2, we get another Gohan head, but this one has his hair blowing all over the place like he’s powering up and he’s also wearing his glasses. They lack lenses, but otherwise look pretty nice. To complete the look and scene this was pulled from, he also has his cape and shoulder pads. They’re done differently than what we saw with Piccolo as the plastic is very soft for the shoulder pads and the cape is in one piece. There’s a hinge for the cape, but unfortunately it’s too weak to support the weight of the cape so there’s not much that can be done with it. It also doesn’t like to sit flush on Gohan’s shoulders which gets annoying. I should also add, the hair on both Gohan heads is very stiff and spiky which helps make it look as good as it can be, but it sure can hurt too to swap!

“No 2! Don’t do it!”

If you watched Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and came away from that experience wanting action figures of Gamma 1 and Gamma 2 then I think you’ll be happy with what Bandai released here. Once again, the whole “premium” concept when it comes to Premium Bandai isn’t really evident in the quality versus what we’re getting at regular retail, but rather reflects the more limited nature of the characters. With better paint, these two figures would be stellar, but as they are they’re still quite good and among the better Dragon Ball releases that I have. They move well, look nice enough, and come with a boatload of accessories. It seems like the whole tack on some extra stuff for other figures approach only began with these two as other figures from Premium Bandai are being sold with more parts for Gohan, in particular. It’s a fun approach for those who are all-in, but it sucks for someone who wants a Super Saiyan Gohan, but isn’t interested in getting Gamma 1. And those parts of the release are just okay. I think the Super Saiyan look is fine and with some shading would be potentially great. The glasses and cape look is more niche and less successful. It’s fun, but am I going to choose to display Gohan like this instead of the other looks? That’s a harder sell. I suppose he’ll pair nicely with Piccolo in the same sort of attire.

As mentioned previously, these guys retailed for $70 and were P-Bandai exclusives. Other retailers were free to order them just like anybody else, but that also means they were paying 70 bucks as well so they have to charge more than that in order to make any money on the sale. If you missed out on the original purchasing window then prepare to pay over $100 now for each figure. At $70 a piece, I think they’re worth it and I’m even tempted to get another Gohan (but I probably won’t) to make use of the extra parts. At over $100 each they’re a harder sell. If you only want the Gohan parts, maybe try eBay? It seems unlikely that someone interested in Gamma 1 or 2 would have no interest in Super Saiyan Gohan, but maybe there are some folks out there just looking to offset some of the cost of getting the new characters. More likely, you’ll be able to find people looking to offload Gamma 1 and 2 without the Gohan parts so maybe there will be some opportunities to score a set for closer to their original MSRP under certain conditions. I think they’re good enough on their own without the Gohan accessories, but those do help sweeten the pot. If you’re out on the hunt then I wish you good luck!

Need a primer on Gamma 1 and 2 or want to see more of those Gohan and Piccolo figures? Look no further:

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Super – Ultimate Gohan Super Hero

As part of the promotion for the film Dragon Ball Super – Super Hero, Bandai released a wave of action figures from its S.H. Figuarts brand of characters from the film. The neat thing was, these releases were actually really cheap relative to other SHF releases with a MSRP of just $35. Of the four,…

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by Joe

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that Dragon Ball Super has been the thing I’ve loved most that I never knew I wanted. I was done, or at least content, with Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball GT wasn’t good, but I didn’t need it so it wasn’t something that bothered me. Then…

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by Joe

S.H.Figuarts Piccolo: The Proud Namekian

When the S.H.Figuarts line was launched years ago and Dragon Ball Z was at the forefront, it wasn’t Goku who got to be the first figure out of the gate. Nope, it was Piccolo. That figure caught my attention when it was announced even though I had not purchased a Dragon Ball figure in quite…

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by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Film, toys

March 28, 2023

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III

By Joe
Original release date March 19, 1993

When I was a child, going to the movies was a pretty big deal. It didn’t happen often so when it did it felt like a special occasion. Most of the Disney films of the late 80s and 90s were seen by me at home. Batman, Ghostbusters, every Back to the Future movie- all films I saw on VHS instead of in a movie theater. Movie rentals were cheaper and more convenient so I totally see why a family of four would see few films in a theater, especially when one considers the varying tastes that exist between children and adults. One movie I most definitely did see in theaters was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990. That was an event for a child like me and my parents apparently recognized that fact and took my sister and I. They did not take us to the sequel and I had to hear about characters like Tokka, Rahzar, and Super Shredder from kids on the playground before finally seeing the film after Christmas 1992 when I received the VHS as a gift. 1992 was also the year my parents uprooted our family to move from New Hampshire to Virginia. It was a big move as we were leaving our friends and family and the only people we would know were the other families being uprooted for the same reason – work. My dad’s job relocated and that’s what you did. We gave it a shot, but by the late spring of 1993 we were already making our way back north because it just wasn’t working. Maybe because we had so little to do on weekends and because my parents constantly felt bad about moving us, we went to the movies the weekend of March 19th of 1993 and if you know your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or just looked at the subject line for this post) then you know why we were at the movie theater that weekend.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III is rather infamous for the franchise. It arrived when the initial wave of Turtle-Mania was really starting to subside. The first film was released in 1990, little more than 2 years after the cartoon debuted and roughly a year after the franchise really took off. The sequel was fast-tracked for a 1991 release, and while it was catered more towards a young audience, it failed to match the box office of the first one. It still made plenty of money though and everyone who had a stake in the franchise felt they could get at least another film out of it. Seemingly planning for a lower return, the budget was slashed and the film was allowed to be a soft reboot. There was no Shredder, no Foot Clan, and barely any New York! Would it work? Would kids continue to show up for their green-skinned heroes?

For me, personally, 1993 was the year I moved away from TMNT. Christmas of 1992 was the Christmas of Super Nintendo for me and I probably received more toys based on Batman Returns than TMNT. By the spring, I was fully onboard with X-Men and that was my preferred toyline with distractions also coming from the Batman: The Animated Series line and Transformers Generation 2. That summer, I would buy my last TMNT toys from Playmates until the 2003 line was launched. The honor fell to the Turtle Trolls which I just thought were neat for some reason. I also got the ninja-action Raphael who could perform a very poor backflip. I bought that figure because it had more of a Mirage style to the toy and I mistakenly thought the turtles were growing up with me, but that was not to be. As I sat in my chair at the theater in March of ’93, I can remember being excited. I had a big bag of popcorn on my lap, a giant soda in the cupholder beside me, and I was just waiting for the lights to go down and for the trailers to start. As I sat there, a boy came stumbling up the ramp towards my aisle seat with his hand over his mouth. Vomit soon starting squirting out from in between his fingers and the dam burst soon after. It fell to the floor maybe 10 feet away from me. The ushers and other staff of the theater did as good a job as they could cleaning that mess up, but there was no covering that vaguely sweet with a hint of tang odor which would permeate throughout the entire showing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

One of my last TMNT purchases as a kid were these silly trolls.

Sitting through a vomit-scented theater to watch this film probably feels oddly appropriate to many. Truly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III is not thought of well. It’s been so poorly received over time that it’s basically been retconned as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time to seemingly capitalize on the affection people have for the completely unrelated video game. As a kid, I liked it enough and I would even spend some of my birthday money that summer on a VHS copy of the movie. And I do recall watching it quite a bit, but at some point my appetite for the movie did wane. Now, just a little over 30 years removed from the original release, I feel like it’s time to go back with fresh eyes and give the movie its due. And personally, it seems like the appropriate way to celebrate my 1,000th entry on this blog. Yes, this is post number 1,000 and we’re dedicating it to the cinematic masterpiece Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III was written and directed by Stuart Gillard who had previously directed Paradise (1982) and The Return of the Shaggy Dog. Returning for their third tour of the franchise as the voices of Michelangelo and Leonardo respectively were Robbie Rist and Brian Tochi. After skipping out on the sequel, Corey Feldman was back as Donatello while Raphael got his third voice in as many films from Tim Kelleher. Paige Turco was back to reprise her role as April O’Neil and also returning was Elias Koteas as Casey Jones, a character written out of the sequel because he was deemed too violent. James Murray took over as the voice of Splinter, and we’ll get to the why very soon, while we have a bunch of new villains and supporting cast brought onboard as well.

The costumes for the turtles were a clear downgrade from the first two films.

By far, the biggest change from the first two films to the third is the choice to go with All Effects Company for the costumes and puppetry over The Jim Henson Company. Likely due to the film’s lower budget, All Effects had the unenviable task of taking over for the company best known for creature effects and the change was obvious. The turtles now have a mostly uniform look with their own personal features basically cast aside. They’re still mostly the same shade of green, have the same colors applied to the bandanas and various pads, and still retain the freckles. They just look all together more fake. The masks especially look more like helmets with mouths on them. The nuance in the mouth movement seems to be reduced in favor of just flapping beaks and the costumes themselves look more like rubber suits than before. There’s no warmth to the look of the characters and they more resemble the live shows than the first two films. Not helping matters is we’ve largely abandoned the sewers for this film in favor of bright, outside, shots that do no favors for the costumes. Splinter is also a new puppet and he looks decidedly worse and it’s likely the switch in companies that accounts for Kevin Clash being out as the voice of the character.

The other major change for the third film is with the antagonist. Shredder was seemingly killed off at the end of The Secret of the Ooze, and rather than bring in a new leader for The Foot Clan, the film just chose to ignore them all together. Instead, we get a time travel story where April, after buying a weird scepter at a flea market, gets sucked into feudal Japan and replaced by a man from that era by the name of Kenshin (Henry Hayashi). Unfortunately for April, Kenshin is caught in the middle of warring factions lead by his dictator of a father Lord Norinaga (Sab Shimono) and a collection of rebels lead by a woman named Mitsu (Vivian Wu). Mitsu is also Kenshin’s lover so he has a vested interest in ending the conflict with as little bloodshed as possible, but his father is uncooperative and pretty angry to see his son replaced by a strange woman. He’s also being influenced by a tradesman by the name of Walker (Stuart Wilson) who is essentially profiting off of the war and has a vested interest in keeping it up. April, upon being thrust into the past, is mistaken for a witch and imprisoned. The turtles need to go back and save her as Donatello, through some sort of plot magic, is able to infer that they only have 60 hours to do so. And to make things simple, time will move in sync between the two periods as the four brothers are replaced by four honor guards when they travel back leaving Casey and Splinter to keep them (and Kenshin) occupied.

The movie might suck, but Paige Turco is not to blame.

Much of the film takes place in 1603 Japan. There, the turtles have to tangle with the bad guys, join up with the good guys, and figure out a way home. We get scenes of the locals mistaking them for kappa, turtle demons from Japanese folklore, and the turtles have to win them over by saving their lives – routine stuff. The people of the era do speak Japanese, but also English so the kids don’t have to read subtitles. Like the first sequel, the action is fairly light and mostly comedic in nature. The turtles rarely use their weapons and would rather attack with witty remarks than fists. And how witty those remarks play up will vary by age. As a kid, Donatello dropping a random Addams Family reference was funny, but as an adult it feels so forced. It’s just completely random, have a turtle reference something else that’s popular in the moment, and play it off for laughs. The only clever jokes involve the ones where characters from the past interact with technology from the future. April’s Walkman freaks out the first guards she runs into while the soldiers sent to the present are completely baffled by television and even take a liking to hockey because of its violence.

Stuart Wilson also does an admirable job of turning chicken shit into chicken salad as the villainous Walker.

The sets for the film are adequate. We get the lair for the turtles which strongly resembles that of the one from the previous film and even looks like it’s been more lived-in since we last saw it. The stuff in Japan is largely relegated to open, outdoors, areas with some interior shots here and there. There’s a fair amount of grime added to some sequences and it’s not a terrible film to look at, excepting the less than stellar turtle costumes. The actors outside of those costumes also really give it their all. Turco is allowed to exhibit far more range than she did in the prior film where she felt almost out of place, like a character that didn’t belong. Koteas is terrific in his dual role of Casey and Whit, a character in the past. I don’t know why they cast Koteas twice, but maybe he was going to cost so much as Casey and they wanted to get their money’s worth. The film doesn’t try to hide that Casey and Whit resemble each other, it just doesn’t bother to explain why. Stuart is actually pretty terrific as the villainous Walker to the point where I feel almost bad for him since it’s wasted on this film. And for what it’s worth, the voice actors for the turtles do a fine enough job. Feldman is a bit overexposed as Donatello as I guess the film decided he was the biggest star, though he does have a solid deadpan which helps a few jokes land better than most. Michelangelo gets to do more than just be a goof off as he questions why he’d want to leave a time period where people accept him to return to a sewer in the present. The neutering of Raph is continued as he isn’t really allowed to get mad anymore and Leonardo is far more jokey than we’re used to because I guess someone decided he was too boring. All of the turtles feel like they’ve been brought closer together as far as their personalities go to the point where they’re almost a hive mind at this point. Basically, the only thing separating the four now is that Donatello is still written to be the smart one while also still being a quip machine.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III is not a good movie. This post is not in defense of it. I do have a perhaps “hot” take when it comes to this film though and it’s that I actually enjoy it more The Secret of the Ooze. That movie is just plain bad. The costumes are terrific, but pretty much everything else about it sucks. This movie, on the other hand, is a somewhat entertaining bad movie. The script is so terrible, mostly the stuff fed to the turtles, that it’s laughably bad. Donatello literally does the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” bit and we even get a Wayne’s World reaction to April’s bare leg out of the turtles. It’s stupid, lazy, and oh so dated so it has a certain charm for someone like me who lived through it. For today’s kid it won’t have the same appeal, but I bet they won’t like any of the TMNT movies much because they are just not movies written for today’s audience. We live in a world where there’s only one good, theatrically released, movie based on the franchise and it’s the original from 1990. None of the films that followed are really any good. The Secret of the Ooze is just a lazy sequel while the third film is the dying gasp of a fading franchise. The fourth film, which is technically a sequel to this, came out in 2007 and has no heart and looks cheap. It has one good scene and the rest is bad. The films that followed are just pure trash and now we pin our hopes on a team helmed by Seth Rogen to restore the turtles to their former glory. And I plan on seeing that film when it arrives later this year and I hope it joins the lonely ranks of “Good” TMNT movie. At the very lest, I hope it can usurp Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III for the title of second best because that is a distinction no franchise should be content with.

Check out some of these other posts on the TMNT film franchise:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Hollywood loves to go after us folks who are suckers for nostalgia.  We’re easy targets as it doesn’t take much to lure someone in with a touch of nostalgia.  Especially today.  We live in a world of 24 hour news networks and the internet puts information at our fingertips at all times.  The media’s tactics…

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by Joe

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

Cowabunga dudes, it’s the 30th anniversary of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie! On March 30, 1990, New Line Cinema together with Golden Harvest released a film to theaters that seemingly no one wanted to make. This isn’t that surprising considering when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first started soliciting offers for a toy-line…

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by Joe

Ranking the Many Versions of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

With Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hitting the airwaves, it felt like a good time to sit down and take a look at the various incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As you are likely aware, the TMNT got started back in 1984 when writer/artists Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman created their…

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by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Film

March 23, 2023

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Z Event Exclusive Super Saiyan 2 Son Goku

By Joe
He’s attained a level beyond that of a Super Saiyan!

I feel like I need a little break with all of the TMNT reviews I’ve been doing lately. I could use a break from action figure reviews all together, but I have quite the backlog and I buy tons of them so I only have myself to blame for that. Today, we’re looking at last year’s event exclusive Super Saiyan 2 Goku from Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts line. For the past couple of years, Bandai has been doing event exclusives like basically everyone because they sell well, but with Bandai they’re not exclusive to any one event. The same cast of characters tends to get sold at multiple conventions and when that’s all done they also put them up for order on their Premium Bandai website. The only downside to ordering online is the wait as it’s sort of a made-to-order situation. I wish they would just unload their stock first and then turn to that, but instead, other retailers seem to get the unsold merch which they sell on their storefronts at inflated prices. The waiting isn’t that big of an issue though, and most of these event exclusive figures have just been repaints of older figures which is great because it gets them back out there and often looking better than before. Last year’s round of exclusives included re-releases of Majin Buu, Android 16, and Shenron, but the only one I grabbed was Super Saiyan 2 Goku.

Scream for me, Goku!

The Super Saiyan 2 transformation is perhaps the most boring of Goku’s transformations. I think it’s due in part to the original planned ending for Dragon Ball being the battle between Gohan and Perfect Cell. Gohan would ascend to a level beyond Super Saiyan, and for him, the transformation looked pretty different from his Super Saiyan look. His hair stood all the way up, looked to be longer and fuller, and then you got the aura and lightning effects. Series creator Akira Toriyama was convinced to keep going though so we got another arc and in that one it was decided that Goku needed to be the main hero once again. This meant he needed to achieve the same level of power as his offspring and then go beyond that. Super Saiyan 2 was the big transformation for the Cell arc, but for the Buu one it was Super Saiyan 3 allowing the Super Saiyan 2 look to essentially be an afterthought as it concerned Goku. As a result, it doesn’t look much different from the standard Super Saiyan look. Goku basically just loses most of his bangs and his hair is a bit spikier plus he gets the same aura with blue lightning effects. Simple, but still kind of cool. As sort of the forgotten and less celebrated transformation, I have a bit of a soft spot for it. Mostly, it was Bandai’s approach to the aura that got me to pounce on this one.

Bandai has taken multiple approaches to Super Saiyan hair. The honey yellow with shading on Vegeta might still be my favorite, though the new Gohan hair looks like a solid base, but needs some shading of its own. I do like the approach with Goku here. The Dragon Stars Trunks is obviously the most basic approach, and probably the worst, but it was also a 20 dollar figure.

This Goku figure is more than familiar at this point. He is exactly the same as almost every Goku figure I’ve reviewed so I’m not going to go into too great of detail for this review. I mostly just want to talk about what’s new. For the sculpt, it’s very little. We get a brand new hair piece that has a nice shape to it and is evocative of the Super Saiyan 2 look. There’s a metallic gold paint in use, which is typical of these event exclusives, and it does give it a very nice shimmer. Considering this is a form that is known to basically always feature an aura, I think this paint job works better than usual. It helps distinguish it from a Super Saiyan look. Would I want all Super Saiyan hair pieces to feature this paint job? Ehh, probably not. I like the yellow in play on my Super Vegeta and the shading is done well on that figure. I’ll be talking about it eventually, but the recently released Super Saiyan Gohan head went in a different direction and I’m still sorting out my feelings on that one. I’d love to see Bandai try casting the hair in white and then hitting it with an airbrush of yellow. Absent that, this looks good. The only thing I don’t like are the pieces of hair off to the sides of Goku’s head. There is a sizable gap between his forehead and these pieces that just looks unnatural to me. It looks like they should either be right on his head, or further from it. They do at least hide the sideburns and the seem created by the hairpiece behind them. This Goku also has a halo since this is Goku from when he takes on Majin Vegeta, which also explains the more basic gi he’s wearing that lacks any markings on it. I’ve never really liked the halo effects when it comes to Dragon Ball toys because even if the post is transparent, you still see it. It just pegs into the hair, but it doesn’t seem to want to come out so it might be glued in. I’m tempted to just rip it out, but I’ll probably leave it.

These things are a pain to insert and quite brittle.

As for the body, the only other new part is the chest. Since this is Goku from his brief return to Earth, his shirt is ripped which was something that occured during his fight with Yakon. He would go Super Saiyan 2 to battle Vegeta shortly after. There’s a sculpted rip in the orange part of his top and it looks okay, but it really could use more paint. Most companies would paint the inside of the rip darker than the outside. Just like most Goku figures, the only paint is really the blue and the flesh-tone of the upper torso, the blue on the sleeves, and the boots. The boots aren’t as clean as they are on some of the other Goku figures I have, even the budget-friendly Target offerings, so that’s a bummer. He does appear to have some light shading in parts. It appears to be yellow on the legs and a little on the torso to help sell his glow, but it’s very subtle. I wish there was more paint as the orange has a very plastic look to it, as do his arms and neck, but this isn’t a line known for using a lot of paint. He still has the floating crotch pieces which have a tendency to rattle around and feel cheap, but they work with the articulation so I don’t mind them as much as some folks do. I do hate the sleeves and how they pin into the shoulders and handling this figure just illustrates how Goku is in need of a redesign. They can do better than this and this mold is getting pretty long in the tooth.

When you get those pieces in (hopefully without breaking them) and get Goku positioned just right the effect does look pretty cool.

For accessories, we get the standard assortment of hands: fists, splayed, martial arts posed, Kamehameha hands, and a set of hands in a two finger pose for his instant transmission technique. For faceplates, we have four varieties: stoic, cocky, yelling, and a teeth-gritting expression. The face printing on all four is terrific and very much in-line with the more recently released Super Hero Goku so at least that’s one advancement this figure possesses. The other accessory is the main one and it’s an aura effect. It’s a big, yellow, burst that can be positioned behind the figure. It’s a much sturdier part than the others I have and it’s cast in translucent plastic that alternates from being clear to yellow to clear and to yellow once again. It’s a new mold when compared with the stand-alone one Bandai sells and I’m guessing they did a new one because this has some extra bits. Four, blue, translucent, plastic, sparking effects are included. They attach to the yellow effect via a ball peg at the end. This allows them to be manipulated so when you place Goku in front of the backdrop effect the lightning can be positioned coming around him. It’s a terrific idea to try and sell the Super Saiyan 2 transformation, though the execution is lacking. The ball pegs are really hard to get into the yellow effect. I even snapped one trying to get it in and had to glue it back together. There’s no reason why it needed to be this challenging to pull off. Once they’re in they at least stay in and the effect works well enough. It’s very specialized so this isn’t an effect you’re likely to use with other figures, but if you wanted to I suppose you could use it with Majin Vegeta or the new Super Saiyan Gohan, but then your Goku doesn’t have an aura to stand in front of.

That’s essentially it though. I’m not going to run through the articulation since this is the same figure I’ve reviewed before and some of them are linked below. If you’ve been collecting DBZ Figuarts releases then you know this one pretty well. And if you have all of the Goku figures then Super Saiyan 2 is the missing link, so to speak, as they’ve never done it before. I’m guessing that made this one fairly popular. I’m curious if he’ll get a more standard release at some point without the metallic paint job and maybe without the torn shirt. It’s a bit odd to make the Super Saiyan 2 form an event exclusive, but it was also easy to get so I suppose it’s like any P-Bandai release. If you want it, you’ll have to venture out onto the aftermarket. Some retailers have this figure still in stock, but it’s pricey. I don’t think this release is worth paying over 100 bucks for, but if you really want a Super Saiyan 2 Goku and somehow missed out then I guess you have no choice. Just be prepared to keep your expectations in check. You’re paying for new hair and an effect part as the body has been done before. And if that’s fine with you then go ahead. I’m personally a little underwhelmed and certainly annoyed by the quality of the plastic as it relates to the sparking effects. I don’t resent having this in my collection, but I probably could have done without considering I don’t even have Super Saiyan Goku or Super Saiyan 3. I guess I like the Super Saiyan 2 form more than I realized.

Need to know more about how this Goku articulates or want to see how good he could be with a redesign? Look no further:

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Super Son Goku Super Hero

Back in the early 2000s I was a collector of Irwin Toys’ Dragon Ball Z line of action figures. When I started collecting that line, I just focused on my favorite characters which were primarily Vegeta, Trunks, and Piccolo. Gradually, the collector impulse took over and I started buying entire waves as they came out…

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by Joe

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Super – Ultimate Gohan Super Hero

As part of the promotion for the film Dragon Ball Super – Super Hero, Bandai released a wave of action figures from its S.H. Figuarts brand of characters from the film. The neat thing was, these releases were actually really cheap relative to other SHF releases with a MSRP of just $35. Of the four,…

Keep reading
by Joe

S.H.Figuarts Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Son Goku

That is quite the mouthful, is it not? The Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Son Goku is the latest action figure from Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts to arrive in Target stores in the US. This form of Goku is what happens when a Saiyan ascends to Super Saiyan God level, and then goes Super Saiyan again. Confused?…

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by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

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