Category Archives: Television

September 21, 2023

Mezco One:12 Collective Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Green Ranger

By Joe
Say it with me: “It’s morphin’ time!”

Remember San Diego Comic Con? That event back in July? Well, it turns out people are still waiting on product tied to that event. It’s become such a huge event in the world of collecting that most companies that attend have some sort of event exclusive to either sell or give-away. The action figure producers of the world all go about distributing those in different ways. Some companies strictly sell product at the event on a first come first serve basis. Others like to make the product available online too for non-attendees. Some setup preorders that ship after the event while others open preorders for a future production run. In short, the whole concept of an “exclusive” is barely hanging on, but no one cares because if a company has a neat figure ticketed for the show then most would like to be able to buy it without going to San Diego.

The Green Ranger is only my second figure from Mezco joining the 1989 edition of Batman.

For Mezco, one of their exclusives this year was the Green Ranger from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Mezco opted to sell the figure at the event and also allow fans to preorder one before the event which would ship once the event was concluded. NECA did the same thing and I got their set several weeks back. Mezco took their sweet time though and even though the event ended nearly two months ago, I’m just now getting my Green Ranger I paid for back in June. And that was after it sat in “label created” purgatory for a month in the FedEx app. Speed is clearly not Mezco’s strong suit. This figure, after all, was first unveiled more than 2 years ago. At least with this one Mezco didn’t put it up for preorder and take everyone’s money back in 2021, lord knows it was a long wait for Batman. Making the most popular Power Ranger a convention exclusive though was surprising, but maybe Hasbro limited the distribution. Either way, the figure is out and in people’s hands now and I’m here to tell you if it was worth the wait.

I’m not a huge fan of soft goods costumes on figures, which is why most of what Mezco puts out doesn’t appeal to me, but this figure works with about the only eyesore being this seam on the rear of the figure.

My experience with Mezco is very limited which I detailed in my Batman ’89 review not that long ago. In short, most Mezco figures don’t appeal to me. Their bread and butter is soft goods clothing and most of my interests are taken from animation or comics and soft goods on most superhero bodies just look frumpy and bad, to me. I wouldn’t pay 10 bucks for most Mezco figures, let alone the $95 and up many go for. Where Mezco’s strength lies with me is in live action properties. I got the Batman figure because it was based on a live-action movie and I wanted a figure that looked like it stepped off of the big screen, but at a smaller scale than what Hot Toys provides. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fits that aesthetic very well. Plus, it gets to compete with other versions of the characters released in just plastic. It’s apparently quite challenging to get these simple designs to translate well to plastic making the soft goods approach very intriguing. When Mezco first showed off its render of the Green Ranger, I knew I wanted it because it looked almost perfect. I’m basically a casual fan of MMPR, but I’ll grab a Green Ranger when it’s interesting or otherwise just looks good and I can be happy with just that. Mezco’s offering figured to be the most expensive Green Ranger I’d ever get, but it also looked like a safe bet to be the best.

The Lightning Collection (left) might be closer to true 1:12 scale. The Super7 version (right) is supposed to be 1:10.

The Green Ranger comes in the standard One:12 Collective box with insert tray inside. There’s some artwork on the front of the character which is repeated on the back. There are no product shots and no window, but since it was sold only at a convention where one was on display or online I guess it doesn’t matter. The figure comes covered with bits of plastic to protect the paint and soft goods, but isn’t otherwise held down by anything in the tray which is nice. Once placed on a surface, the figure cuts a pretty nice profile, though Mezco clearly took some liberties with the design. The figure is a little bulkier than the actors who played the character on television as well as taller. I mentioned this in my Batman review, but I find it amusing that an action figure line that lists the scale right in the name seems to play fast and loose when it comes to scale. Jason David Frank (R.I.P.), who played Tommy the Green Ranger in the American broadcast, was only 5’11” but this figure is about 6.5″ making it half an inch too tall. And if you’re thinking maybe Mezco was trying to match the height of the Japanese broadcast, that actor was actually a touch shorter. The scale isn’t really a huge concern for me as this is a one-off in my collection, but it might bother some.

“How dare you exclude The Shredder from the comparison shot?!”

The figure itself is quite impressive in hand. The helmet looks to be pretty spot on to the show, including sculpted seams and belt buckles on the rear. The helmet is a very saturated shade of green with a bit of a matte finish. Some may have preferred a glossy finish, but I really like how this turned out. There’s plenty of gloss on the visor and the painted details like the red diamond and silver dragon teeth are cleanly applied. The only detail it appears to lack are the nostrils for the dragon portion. The Dragon Shield is modeled after the Japanese costume and is painted gold with a slight pearl finish to give it that shine it had on television. The black is cleanly applied in the center and the arm bands match the finish of the shield. The Power Morpher is glued down to the belt and has all of the right details in place. The paint there is terrific, as is the black linework on the belt itself.

It would be great if the suit didn’t have this lined texture, but on a shelf it won’t be as visible.

The soft goods costume is stretchy and feels almost like a nylon material. The texture is a bit off from the show, but that’s going to happen at this scale. It also lacks that silk-like shine the material in the show had, but that would have likely been quite hard to duplicate and on a shelf this is going to look pretty damn good. You do have to accept that there are going to be seams in the costume, but most can be posed away. Where the suit is sewn shut on the rear of the figure’s torso is a bit ugly, but it’s also on the back and should be out of sight. The only real nitpick I have for the appearance is that the green triangles on the gloves and boots don’t quite fill the area carved out for the paint. Aside from that though, the presentation is terrific right down to the zipper placement on the gloves and boots. The white diamonds are present on the shirt portion and they’re printed on. The shield is removable (I have yet to remove mine as it looks like a pain to get back on) as well should you wish to display your Green Ranger without it. The arm bands are floating, but in order to remove them you would likely need to remove the entire glove first and I don’t know if they’re designed to come off.

Mezco went for a different look with the unmasked portrait. I don’t hate it, but I’ll also never use it.
In terms of capturing the Jason David Frank likeness, I might give the edge to Hasbro.

This figure comes loaded with accessories, many of which will feel familiar to those who purchased the Super7 Green Ranger. I suppose that’s because there aren’t a whole lot of obvious accessories for a Green Ranger figure, so companies end up doing the same thing. We do get a non-helmeted head featuring the likeness of the late Jason David Frank from his first appearance on the show when he had long hair held back by a green sweatband. The green is a dingey green and it has some brown paint over it to make it look dirty. He’s sporting a cocky expression that’s at least different from what we’ve seen out of other toy makers, but the likeness isn’t quite there for me. It’s not terrible though and the portrait is well-painted. Even if it was perfect, it’s not something I’d ever use for a display.

He has the required Dragon Dagger and the hands to “play” it, but getting him to pose with it is trickier than I’d like.
It is possible to fake it, but as you can see, the button pressing hand won’t actually be on the dagger. The button pressing hand also doesn’t actually grip the dagger so you can’t just do a one-handed pose with it.

The Green Ranger also comes with an assortment of hands. Out of the box, the figure features fists, but he also has five other sets of hands to choose from: clenching, gripping, trigger finger, open, and a set of flute/Dragon Dagger playing hands where the right hand is posed as if it’s pressing the buttons while the left is a gripping hand with two fingers extended. They obviously pair with the Dragon Dagger which looks fantastic. The little, gold, buttons on it are separate pieces though and I’ve read reports of them popping off for some folks so do be gentle when trying to slot the dagger into one of the hands. It pairs with the included black holster that just clips onto the belt. It has a strap on it that’s designed to come off to allow the dagger to slide in, but it’s really stubborn and took some courage to pry open.

Does the Green Ranger really need a Blade Blaster? No, but I’ll take it.
And it even converts into “pew pew” mode!

If you don’t want to display the black holster on the figure’s hip, there’s also a white holster which is what the other Rangers use to carry their Blade Blaster. The Green Ranger only used a Blade Blaster once, that I can recall, and it was when he was a villain, but Mezco still included one anyway. It’s pretty neat because it actually functions like the one on the show with just one alteration. That means it can convert from pistol to dagger mode and the only cheat is that the blade portion is a separate piece that pegs in. Everyone else who does Power Rangers at this scale or near it just does multiple pieces for the Blade Blaster so it’s pretty cool that Mezco was able to do one that works. The paint is also pretty nice on it. I normally would never consider displaying a Green Ranger with a Blade Blaster, but Mezco did such a nice job that I’m really tempted to.

Did you want the Sword of Power? No? Too bad!
Now that’s the sword you want! And it should probably go without saying, but this version is far better than the Hasbro or Super7 one.

And that’s not all as we have three more weapons to talk about. All three were also included with Super7’s Green Ranger (I bet they’re happy they managed to beat Mezco to market) and they are the Sword of Darkness, the Sword of Power, and the Mega Heater. The Sword of Darkness is the best version of this weapon we’ve ever received. The sculpt is perfect, there’s no bending or warping like there was with the Hasbro version, and the tassel was done with a black wire so it can be posed. The paint is also very nice and, once again, I’ll be really tempted to use it in my display because I just always loved the look of this blade. The Sword of Power is fine, but I don’t like the look of this weapon so it will never see action for me. The Mega Heater also looks like it should and this figure can hold it with both hands. It’s fine, but it’s just not as interesting to me as the other weapons available.

It’s lightning time!
There’s also some bigger lightning.
Blade lolly!

To spruce things up with said weapons are some effect parts. For the Dragon Dagger, we get two, green, lightning effects with one being shorter than the other. They can slot over the blade and add a little drama to your posing. You can also attach them to the clenchy hands, if you wish, which I think he did when he was evil in the show, but I could be mistaken. Both parts are done with translucent, green, plastic and have some bend to them, but they’re not so soft that they can’t hold their shape. There’s also a green wave type of effect that the Dragon Dagger slots into. I don’t recall this from the show and I also don’t think it looks particularly good. It just makes the Dragon Dagger look like an oddly shaped lollypop. Your mileage may vary.

Here we have the little blast.
And here’s the big blast! These things actually make the Mega Heater worth displaying.

For the Blade Blaster and Mega Heater we get some blast effects. They’re done in traparent plastic and painted red. The smallest, and thinnest, of the three is intended for the Blade Blaster when in gun mode. It does not slot in very easily, but I was able to get it in there. These pieces are a bit brittle feeling so you’ll want to be careful not to snap them. There is a little flex towards the end, but not where the peg is. My small one is slightly warped too, but it looks okay in the weapon. The other two blasts are for the Mega Heater. One is long with a more pronounced muzzle flash while the other is shorter and seems to get thicker as it stretches out from the gun. I definitely prefer the longer one, but both definitely enhance the otherwise ho-hum Mega Heater for me to the point where I could talk myself into using it at some point. Lastly, we have the traditional Mezco stand which has three hinges in the armature and ends in a rotating claw. The base is black with the Dragon coin painted on in gold and it looks fine. It also gets the job done for more dramatic poses or serves as a base.

And lets not forget the stand. It can be used as a foot peg stand, or you can attach the armature for something more dynamic.

That’s a whole lot of stuff in the box, but can the figure make much use of it with its articulation? Figures in soft goods are always limited to some degree when it comes to articulation because clothing over plastic is going to be more cumbersome than bare plastic. That’s just a fact. It doesn’t mean the figure needs to be articulated poorly though. The head is on a double-ball peg and it can look up and down a bit with plenty of room for nuance posing. The shoulders are likely just ball-hinged joints that can’t quite come out to a horizontal position. There’s forward and back rotation, but given the soft goods, you probably shouldn’t try to rotate all the way around. There is a biceps swivel and the arm bands slide out of the way easily to access that. Following that is a double-jointed elbow which bends past 90 degrees smoothly. The forearms swivel where the glove meets the arm and the hands are on ball-hinges so they have all of the movement they’ll need.

Did the Green Ranger ever make lightning snap from his hands? I feel like he did.

In the torso, it feels like a ball-joint in the diaphragm area. Tommy can arch back and forward some, though the Dragon Shield will get in the way a bit if it’s on. It also rotates just fine and bends to the side nicely. At the waist, it feels like there may be a twist, but it’s very tight and I don’t want to force it. The hips can go out to the side almost to a full split, but don’t quite hit 90 degrees kicking forward. There’s no range kicking back, but there is a thigh swivel under the clothes. The knees are double-jointed and bend well past 90 degrees and there’s a boot swivel below that. The ankles hinge forward and back an acceptable amount while the ankle rocker is pretty limited rotating in. It actually has more range going out which is a bit odd and not really useful.

If you don’t care about screen accuracy then you can have your Green Ranger play the flute one-handed.

Mezco’s Green Ranger, in some respects, moves better than I expected. The shoulders are a bit finicky, but the rest is all nice and smooth. There’s some trepidation that comes with the design because if that costume rips it’s game over, but it’s very stretchy so it’s not as scary to move as it could be. I probably wouldn’t leave it in too stressful a pose, but most should be fine. Really, the only thing I don’t care for is that this figure still can’t really play the Dragon Dagger. It can get close, and if you force it the dagger can reach the helmet’s lips, but once you stop forcing it the arms will snap back into place. It’s definitely easier to fake it with this figure than it was the others, but for $95 I feel like we shouldn’t have to. The Dragon Shield is pretty stiff and rigid, but it doesn’t appear to be causing any issues. The figure probably just needed a butterfly joint to really be able to pull it off, but Mezco declined to include such.

I bought this with the expectation being that it would be the best Green Ranger figure in this scale out there and I do believe it has delivered on that. I don’t begrudge those who wish to spend less and feel happy with one of these other two though.

That $95 price tag is really the biggest negative about this figure. Especially since most are going to have to pay a shipping charge to get it, unless you happened to get it at San Diego Comic Con. And since the item is waitlisted it may cost even more to acquire at this point. I don’t know if any figure in this scale should cost that much, but at least with this figure I feel like we have the best Green Ranger figure to date. And that goes for larger scales as well. It’s not a perfect 1:1 likeness to what was on television screens in 1993, but it’s 95% of the way there and the only differences seem to exist for the figure’s benefit. He’s not as skinny as he could be, but not jacked like some of the other action figures released. The soft goods give it a close to screen accurate look without the overly sculpted wrinkles and such we’ve seen from Hasbro. All of the little details are there and you’ll be hard pressed to want any additional accessories. Maybe the green candle?

This one is expensive, but damn does it look good.

Mezco’s Green Ranger was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. If you have the spare coin and a love for Power Rangers, then give this one a look. I think it’s an easier sell when you’re like me and don’t need the whole team because that’s a serious investment. As a one-off splurge, this figure is quite a treat. If you think getting it will tempt you to get the other five then I guess make sure you’re prepared for such an expense.

Interested in more Mezco or perhaps you want more detail on past Green Rangers?

Mezco One:12 Collective Batman (1989)

When it comes to the world of more high end action figure collectibles, I’ve been able to get my hands on a few. Some rather prominent companies have yet to cross my path though, and it’s not really for any reason other than they either don’t make what I like or I don’t really like…

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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…

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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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1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

August 22, 2023

Twisted Metal (2023)

By Joe

When I was a kid, Christmas was a big deal. Obviously, it’s a big deal for any kid that celebrates it, but it was an especially big deal for my grandmother on my mother’s side (Grandma). I wasn’t really aware of it, but she felt like she was in competition to get my sister and I the best stuff when it came to the holiday. It’s what she looked forward to the most. Unbeknownst to me at the time, but in the summer of 1995 my Nana, that’s my grandmother on my dad’s side, was already planning on giving me my own television for Christmas. Now, my mom has just one sibling, but my dad has eight. Nana had to figure out her own system for the holidays because she had nearly 20 grandkids to buy presents for. It kind of went when you’re little you get toys, and when you’re a teen, you get cash. It was that sweet spot in the middle where she tried to get you something nice, and in 1995, getting a TV was pretty damn nice even if it was a modest 13″ device. And because of the expense of the holiday, Nana had to plan that stuff out all year so she was in position to get the best deals she could.

To bring this on topic, me getting a TV meant Grandma had to really step up her game so the second the Sears Wish Book started showing up she had me seated at a table picking through it looking for the best possible item. I was pointing to little things here and there and I could tell she was getting uncharacteristically frustrated at my modest selections. She prodded me for something “big,” and in my memory, right after she said that I flipped the page and saw it staring right at me: the Sony PlayStation. At that point, PlayStation was brand new and retailed for $300. My mom immediately said “No,” but Grandma was quiet. I could tell the wheels were turning as she stared at that glossy print. Then came the bargaining. “Well,” she started, “between clothes and toys that’s probably pretty close to what I spend on each grandchild at Christmas.” Right then and there, I knew it was locked-in. Grandma had made up her mind and my mother was not going to talk her out of it. It would be the only thing I got that Christmas that came from a store. Grandma did knit me a blanket and I still have that blanket to this very day even though I haven’t had a grandma for over 10 years. And that PlayStation? Yeah, I still have that too.

Twisted Metal, the show, has settled on John Doe as its lead – a goofball smuggler who has somehow survived 20 years in this hellscape.

The funny thing about that PlayStation is, in my mind, it was an unattainable thing like a NeoGeo or a Sega CD. I never thought I’d have one prior to that day, so I didn’t even know what games were really on it. I asked “Santa,” even though I had long outgrown that, for Doom because I had played it a bit at a friend’s house on his PC and GamePro gave it a perfect score. Outside of that, I was clueless. When I did get that PlayStation, I was surprised to see it came with a demo disc. It had a few playable demos on it – I recall Jumping Flash having a level and you could try and three fighters from Battle Arena Toshinden could be tried out. In addition to those, there were video demos and one of those was Twisted Metal. It turns out, I’m not that into Doom, so I quickly spent whatever money I had collected between report cards and the holidays to get another game and Twisted Metal was the one I settled on. I loved it! And I loved the sequel even more when it came out. Twisted Metal Black is one of my all-time favorites, so yeah, you can consider me a fan of the series.

The uneasy relationship between John and Quiet is going to be relied upon as the pairing that anchors the show.

And since I’m such a fan, you would think I would have been excited when it was announced that the video game was being adapted for television. Truth be told, I could not have cared less. I assumed it would be hot garbage. How do you turn a glorified demolition derby into compelling television without it being just that – a glorified, now scripted, demolition derby? I’m no poet or anything, but at the height of my fandom in middle school I even tried turning the first game into a story and gave up. Even I, who enjoyed doing all kinds of fanfic and stuff like that, couldn’t make it work for an audience of one. There are definitely some colorful characters associated with the franchise and the story mode in Twisted Metal Black was fairly entertaining, but I just didn’t see how it could work.

Then it got some decent names attached to it. The game was adapted for television by the team of Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Michael Jonathan Smith. Reese and Wernick have worked together on films such as Zombieland, Deadpool, and their respective sequels. Reese even got started working with Disney writing films like Dinosaur and Monsters, Inc. That’s a pretty interesting resume, and Zombieland certainly feels like it might work with cars. Anthony Mackie was attached to star and the supporting cast was announced to include Stephanie Beatriz, Thomas Haden Church, Neve Campbell, and the duo of Joe Seanoa (better known to wrestling fans as Samoa Joe) and Will Arnett as Sweet Tooth with Arnett providing the voice for the character. I was forced to admit that I was intrigued, so when the show dropped on Peacock this summer I decided to take it for a spin.

Twisted Metal is set 20 years after the Apocalypse. The show doesn’t go into great detail about what happened, but essentially there was a massive failure in the power grid. I don’t know if it was a global catastrophe, or just related to the United States, but essentially everything went to Hell. Cities were sectioned off and the presumably wealthy and powerful remained inside the walled off municipalities while the rest of humanity was left to fight over the scraps. John Doe (Mackie) is a milk man. He basically does deliveries of various products between cities which makes him a target for vandals and such. It’s not an easy life, but it’s the only one he knows as he’s been doing it since he was a kid. He has no memory of his family or who he is, he just has a partially burnt picture to remind him of the life he once had.

Neve Campbell plays the mysterious Raven, who like a lot of characters in this show, seems to just be borrowing the name of someone from the games without being a true adaptation.

In the very first episode, John is given a special task by Raven (Neve Campbell), the head of the San Francisco city, to retrieve an item for her in New Chicago. The journey is essentially a suicide mission, but if John pulls it off in 10 days he’ll be invited inside to live out the rest of his days in relative peace. He gets a little taste of life on the inside as a show of sorts before accepting the job and we’re off and running. Along the way, he’ll meet Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz), a mute woman who was previously traveling with her brother until they ran afoul of Agent Stone (Thomas Haden Church). He’s the self-appointed lawman that’s going to bring the country back to law and order and his methods are brutal and fascist. He’s been able to amass a following though, which includes the duo of Mike (Tahj Vaughans) and Stu (Mike Mitchell). And then, of course, there’s Sweet Tooth who resides in Vegas and is someone no one wants to cross paths with.

Thomas Haden Church gives one of the best performances in the series as the uncompromising lawman Agent Stone.

Through circumstance, John and Quiet are going to end up an unlikely duo and that’s the foundation of the show. It’s basically an odd couple pairing that’s also a bit like a buddy cop road trip. Quiet and John are going to clash. John is a rather cheerful sort who wants everyone to like him, while Quiet is…quiet. She would rather not speak, though we’ll quickly learn that’s by choice. She’s had a tough go of things so it’s understandable that she would have a hard time relating to John, but she has her own priorities as well. And since our co-leads are male and female, there’s going to be some sexual tension to play up as well. It’s all very conventional, which is the show’s greatest failing. The dialogue is not nearly as inventive as we’ve seen in other projects by Reese and Wernick. Maybe that’s because the actors in those films did more ad-libbing? They want there to be a lot of jokes and witty remarks from our leads, but it all feels contrived. There’s not a natural chemistry between our leads, but it does at least get better. Oddly, the tipping point for me was the show’s eighth episode which is all about John’s car – go figure.

Come one, give us more of the clown!

What might frustrate viewers is the character of Sweet Tooth. He’s basically the star of the video game franchise and he’s introduced quickly in this show, but then disappears for long stretches. He’ll eventually get a pairing of his own (and I’m not talking about Harold, though he’s here too) that actually does work. I don’t want to spoil anything, but he finds himself riding with a character he plays off of well. Sweet Tooth is an aspiring performer and if people respond in an inauthentic way to his art he, well, kills them. He’s the type of character that others need to walk around on eggshells with even if he appears to be friendly with them. It’s pretty conventional stuff, but it works to create tension and at least with him I wasn’t always certain what was going to come next. The portrayal is great, there just isn’t enough of it.

As for the rest, there’s not a ton from the video games for viewers to latch onto. And that’s a good thing, as a direct adaptation would have failed spectacularly. There are plenty of references and even characters from the games, but they’re all changed-up quite a bit. They play more like homages, and in some cases the connection is little more than a name (wait till you see why they call him Mr. Slam). John Doe could be the same John Doe that’s in Twisted Metal Black, but his backstory is completely different. His car, which he named Evelyn, vaguely resembles some of the Roadkill vehicles from the series, but he’s basically a brand new character. As for Quiet, I’m not sure if she is modeled after anyone. If she is, it’s not obvious. Along the way, there are other vehicles that will certainly remind viewers of the same from the games. The show doesn’t just stick to the games most fans view favorably, meaning you will see some references to the 989 games so I suppose that’s good for those who grew up with Twisted Metal 3 and 4.

The presumed wealthy have been able to wall themselves off from the rest of the world and inside it’s basically like nothing happened.

The look of the show is very much in-line with other post-apocalyptic films and TV shows, though it’s merely window-dressing. This setting appears to have plenty of gas available and the characters have little issue finding food. They didn’t want it to be play like a survival genre show like The Last of Us, so I get it, but for some it may be irritating. It appears to have a solid budget as most episodes take place in a completely different location from the previous one. For a show based on a video game about car combat, there isn’t a ton of that throughout, but they did save some fireworks for the finale. And when it wants to, it can be a pretty cool exhibition of stunt driving and practical effects. Explosions, flipped cars, plenty of gruesome kills. You’re going to see a lot of people get killed in various and bloody ways. It’s all done with a pretty light tone which is what one would expect from Reese and Wernick. There’s a lot of jokes, many of which are of the obvious variety, but some genuine laughs can be found too. It’s probably not a great ratio though as I’d say 1 out of 4 one-liners land as intended. Some of the corny remarks are certainly intended to be just that, but plenty are not and will likely induce a groan or two.

Mike Mitchell’s Stu is perhaps the most sympathetic character of the first season and the one that’s easiest to root for. He was great.

Twisted Metal is definitely a show that’s probably better than it has any reason to be, but is it good? I waffled on that one as I watched each of the 10 episodes over the course of two weeks. Rarely when an episode ended did I feel compelled to jump into the next one, which is how I was able to spread it out. I can’t tell if the actors were just handed subpar material to work with, or if they’re just not getting it. I poked fun at the humor elements, but even the dramatic stuff can fall flat. It did at least get better and I was satisfied with where it ended up. Outside of the Sweet Tooth stuff, it just took until really that 8th episode before it became something I wanted to watch as opposed to something I was just killing time with. There’s one episode that’s essentially a bottle episode where John and Quiet are stuck inside a fast food joint for the entire duration of the episode. I felt like that was supposed to be the most important episode of the season, but it just didn’t land, and again, it’s because the leads just didn’t gel in a satisfying manner. There’s a way too on the nose metaphor about letting go in that episode that is supposed to land as a poignant moment, but for me it just looked like amateur hour. And even after 10 episodes, I’m still not sure if I’m sold on the John/Quiet pairing. And while I liked the performance of Beatriz probably more than any other actor in the show, I felt Quiet too often changed gears. She went from angry, tortured, woman who refused to speak to a quip-machine way too quickly and often for me. It’s like the show was only interested in the opposites attract aspect of their leads for a little while and then decided they should both essentially be the same and bounce one-liners off each other.

If there is a second season, it sounds like we’re for more of this and less ball pit shenanigans.

The first season ends with a setup for a second season. And if that second season comes to fruition, it looks like it could be more like the video games than this season. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but I suppose they’ve earned the right to try. Per Peacock, where this show is streaming, it supposedly had a strong debut and the critical reception seems to be at an acceptable level. The budget for the first season was around $45 million and unless Peacock locked-in the cost for a second season with the talent involved, it stands to reason a season two will cost a little more than that. Is it enough? I have no idea as I don’t think anyone can figure out what streaming shows merit additional seasons and what don’t. And presently there are some pretty big strikes taking place over that issue so who knows? If you want some light entertainment (with gory violence) or are just curious to see how Twisted Metal could work as a show it’s probably worth a look. With each episode being about a half hour, it doesn’t take long to get through it. It just sucks that it takes a while to get going so some may not see it through to the end. As for me, I don’t regret spending approximately five hours of my life in this world and there was some enjoyment in spotting the references. It’s probably about as good as an adaption of the game could be and I think it does a reasonable job of finding the game’s ton as something between the wackiness of Twisted Metal 2 and the dark and grim Black. I’m not really that curious on where the show goes from here, but it definitely left me wanting a new, and good, Twisted Metal video game. Make it happen, Sony!

If you’d like to read some dated thoughts on Twisted Metal, or maybe a Twisted Metal-adjacent toy review, then check these out:

Greatest Games: Twisted Metal Black

The vehicular combat genre of games has been around for almost as long as video games have.  They either take the form of a more traditional tank battle or a more outlandish game of chicken with machine guns and rocket launchers.  As such, tracing its origins proves quite difficult.  For me, the vehicular combat genre…

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by Joe

Twisted Metal (2012)

If you frequent this blog you may have noticed that I do not post many negative reviews.  That’s because, for the most part, I’d rather talk about things I like and enjoy and not things that irritate me or make me mad.  There have been some exceptions.  I set out to review all of the…

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by Joe

Marvel Legends Deadpool 2 Two-Pack

Look through my various toy reviews and you’ll probably notice that I’m not much of a Marvel guy. That wasn’t always the case for me though as I was huge into Marvel Legends once upon a time. I basically stopped around the time Hasbro was awarded the Marvel license. I felt there was a dip…

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by Joe

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August 17, 2023

S.H.Figuarts Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan Trunks – The Boy from the Future

By Joe
He didn’t exactly travel through time to get here, but he did have to cross an ocean.

The most captivating character in all of Dragon Ball Z for me back in the 90s was unquestionably Trunks. The offspring of Bulma and Vegeta who traveled back in time to warn the heroes of the day about impending doom on the horizon was unique for many reasons. For one, he actually looks like a normal person. Or rather, his hair does when compared with the likes of Goku and Vegeta. He wields a sword which is pretty different, and he sports some sort of half-jacket or 3/4 jacket that, while nothing I’d wear, he’s able to pull off. Mostly though, he was captivating to me because he was a character I knew was coming, but since the english dub of the show was stuck in Namek for so many years, he remained a mystery. And when FUNimation finally resumed dubbing DBZ when it became popular via Cartoon Network I finally got to see what all the fuss was about. It turns out Trunks is pretty okay. A tragic backstory, a determined will, and who is pure of heart – what’s not to like? Plus, he shows up and absolutely dominates Frieza, the enemy Goku spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 episodes fighting, dispatched in mere moments. Pretty bad ass stuff.

When it comes to Future Trunks, I definitely needed an upgrade. And Bandai, please, pretty please, re-issue the Dragon Ball Super Future Trunks!

Trunks, as one of the more involved character designs on the show, has always made for a rather desirable action figure. His figure in the old Bandai Super Battle Collection was, for me, one of the few worth getting. When Irwin Toys started making their own sculpts, a Trunks figure arrived before even Goku or Vegeta (actually, light praise since the same could be said of Yajirobe and King Kai) with a Super Saiyan version not far behind in their action feature subline. For a character with comparatively few episodes compared with the main cast, the show did get a lot of looks out of him which allows toy companies to do the same when it comes to figures.

We’re all in agreement, right? Trunks is cool because he has a sword.

When I got back into DBZ toy collecting, a Trunks figure was on my short list of figures I wanted. I almost picked up the battle armor version of Super Saiyan Trunks in the waning days of Toys R’ Us. A store near me had one with liquidation pricing, but it was still over 40 bucks and I just wasn’t that into the figure. It turns out, I was playing the long game as a better version of that figure is getting re-released later this year at the budget price of $35. I win again, universe! The real version of Trunks I wanted though was his first appearance. That’s the blue jacket, sword, short hair, look. Preferably, a Super Saiyan portrait, but it’s always nice to get both. My patience has paid off as recently released (okay, well, a few months ago because this sat in my Pile of Loot for a bit at Big Bad Toy Store) is a new version of Trunks from his debut episode. It is, as far as I know, an all new sculpt from an earlier version of the same which is why it doesn’t get the budget pricing (unlike Vegeta, who was released alongside him). That’s fine though as I don’t want a dated figure, just a good one. It’s a popular character we’re dealing with and did Bandai do Trunks justice?

Was this the last thing Frieza saw before he kicked the bucket?

Trunks arrives in the standard window box packaging for the S.H.Figuarts line. Out of the box, he stands approximately 5.25″ not counting the hair. As is often the case with this line, much of the figure is done with molded, colored, plastic with little in the way of paint hits. His jacket is a soft rubber with a very matte appearance while the sleeves are part of the arm’s sculpt. They’re a touch glossy when compared with the jacket so it’s not the most uniform look. The Capsule Corp. logo on the left bicep is more gray than white, but the opacity is at least appropriate. There’s a touch of paint at the ends of the sleeves where some gold buttons are featured, but that’s it for paint on the coat. The chest is painted flesh-color and it matches the neck, which is unpainted, better than some of the other figures I have. It’s not, however, especially clean as the left side is pretty rough looking where the flesh meets the shirt. There’s a little paint on the belt and boots and that is at least cleanly applied. The pants feature no shading that I can tell, and the plastic in his crotch region is more glossy than the pant legs which is a bit of a bummer.

Or maybe this was the last thing Frieza saw? He seems to be able to survive when in pieces.

What does look great though is the face. Bandai has really upped their game when it comes to their face-printing and Trunks is no exception. The linework around the eyes is sharp and clean and I like the little paint hits on the creases of his skin and at the ends of his eyebrows. The Super Saiyan hair is cast in a pale yellow, but with a kiss of light orange paint in the center. I honestly think they could have gone a touch heavier with the shading, but I’m glad to see it’s here. This is probably the approach to Super Saiyan hair I like the most. The translucent hair is a bit fun, but not really screen accurate, and the gold color they sometimes use is overkill. And then there’s the Super Saiyan Gohan head which is just pale yellow with no shading which was definitely lacking.

No energy effects, so I had to improvise.

In terms of the accessories, this is one of the most complete Bandai releases I can think of. Trunks comes with two heads and five faceplates. Four of the faceplates are for his Super Saiyan look. We get a neutral expression, yelling, teeth gritting, and a side eye. For that look, he also has two pieces for his bangs, one that’s basically neutral and another for when he’s powering up that’s pointed skyward. The second head is a base Trunks head with his very 90s haircut in molded, purple, plastic. He has one faceplate for this hair and it’s a neutral one. If you’re only going to have one, then it makes sense for it to be neutral. I’m a little disappointed that the upcoming Trunks in the battle armor doesn’t come with another base Trunks face as it would have been a clever way to expand both figures, but that’s not a shortcoming of this release. The base head is nice to have though, but it looks a bit off to me. The hair sits rather high, and while I’m happy the figure can be both super and non, I do wonder if I’ll ever really use this one. To go with the faces, Trunks has six sets of hands: fists, gripping, clenching, open, flat palm, and a more nuanced gripping hand. The extra gripping hands are kind of unnecessary, but I do like that his right hand and left can have a different grip which is kind of neat.

He looks pretty great with this aura effect. I’m going to have to make some room for it.

And Trunks needs those gripping hands because his signature accessory is his sword. The blade comes with its own scabbard which looks to be sculpted in a silver and then painted brown with light blue straps. I’m not sure if this brown is from the manga or something or just an error as it was more of a red-orange in the anime. The paint isn’t perfect on the straps, but it’s featured on the figure’s back so it’s not going to be displayed prominently in most cases. It slings over the figure’s shoulder via a strap done in a soft plastic. It’s painted well enough and seems to stay in place just fine. When posing the figure the strap might pop off and it is annoying, but it’s easy to work with, at least. The sword itself is sculpted in the same silver and the handle is painted brown. I like the shape of the blade and it comes to a nice point, something the old Irwin toy couldn’t do because of safety standards. The pommel of the sword is removable which is how you’re supposed to slide the handle into one of the gripping hands, which is a nice idea. The pommel does pop off rather easily though, so do be careful as it would be an easy thing to lose given its size.

Here comes the Burning Attack, or whatever he calls it.

Trunks comes with everything he needs (save for a blast effect), but does he have the articulation to wield it all properly? The head is on the usual double ball peg, though the hair covers the back of his neck enough to limit the figure’s ability to look up. Looking down isn’t a problem and the ball peg at the base of the neck enhances that range. Otherwise, you get rotation and plenty of nuance posing there. The shoulders are hinged ball pegs which fit into a socket attached to a butterfly joint. Trunks can raise his arms out to the side past a horizontal pose, rotate all around, and the butterfly has quite good range. It comes with a visual trade-off though in that Bandai did the rear of the jacket in segments. I don’t know that they needed to. On one hand, it’s on the rear of the figure and is also further obscured by the scabbard if that’s in place. On the other, it’s pretty ugly and visually unappealing. We also have a biceps swivel and the left one, for some reason, has a tendency to pop off. It’s easily popped back into place, but can be annoying. The double-jointed elbows bend well past 90 degrees and the wrists use the usual ball peg setup. They’re recessed quite deep in the cuffs of the jacket though so the range isn’t as robust as usual.

The figure also comes with a base head, if you want that.

In the torso, the usual ball-jointed diaphragm is present. There’s no hinge that I can see, and it mostly provides some lean to each side and rotation. The range back and forward is minimal, and if you turn too far you will expose some gaps on both the side of the torso or on the back and front. The waist is ball-jointed as well and it’s actually elevated more than usual. This is because the floating belt obscures the gap and it does let the figure bend forward and back quite a bit. Plus, it provides the customary swivel and a little tilt. The hips will allow the figure to do splits and also kick forward about 90 degrees. The range going back is minimal, and there’s a thigh swivel as well. The look of this joint is a little ugly though as they felt it necessary to have the paints continue up the side of the thigh all the way to the hip and I don’t know why. Or maybe they shouldn’t have the cut-out in the crotch, but it looks goofy. This is also the lone loose joint on my figure. It will hold a pose, but it’s a little floppy which is unusual for a S.H.Figuarts release. The knees are double-jointed and will go a bit past 90 degrees. There’s no boot swivel, and the ankle joint will bend back pretty far, but has almost zero range going forward. The ankle rocker is just okay and there’s a toe hinge, if you want it.

Trunks has great range in the shoulders, but it does come with this wonky setup with the jacket.

The articulation on Trunks is mostly good. I like the range in the shoulders and torso as he can hit a variety of sword poses. He can easily grip the sword with both hands or just one and he can also grip the handle while it’s sheathed, a favorite of mine. I don’t really like the hips though. The range there is great, but the looseness is unpleasant. This one was made in the Vietnam factory and it has that cheaper feel to it some of the figures out of that factory have possessed. Most of my nitpicks though are with the presentation. The jacket is over-engineered and the hips as well. I don’t like that there’s a sizable gap between the base of the neck and chest, but at least the strap on the scabbard can obscure that. The paint could also be better and the boots stick out to me as looking especially cheap. They need a wash or something to just class it up a bit. This is, after all, not one of the $35 efforts.

“Wait! Your dad’s Vegeta, and your mom is an inventor who knows me…?!”

Presentation nitpicks aside, where Trunks flourishes is with the display options. The faces all look so good that picking just one is a challenge. Maybe I would have traded the side-eye one for a smirk, but I also do like that one. The only accessories that could have made this release better is the usual blast effect, which most figures forego, or optional bare arms so he could have his end of arc look. That would have caused problems with the butterfly joint though which is done in blue. They would have had to include some caps or floating pieces to obscure that in addition to the arms, so I get why they didn’t pursue that further. Plus, I prefer the jacketed look more and I wouldn’t want that to be compromised at all to make way for such a thing.

These Super Saiyans practically grow on trees.

Trunks is one of the most popular characters in Dragon Ball Z and I think anyone who collects this line should probably grab this figure. It’s not perfect, but it looks nice on a shelf. I just hope we get more Trunks from Bandai down the road. We’re getting the battle armor reissue which features Trunks as a Super Saiyan with his hair tied back, but I’d really love a bulked-up Super Saiyan Trunks from when he challenges Cell. Yeah, it ended up being a bad form for fighting, but damn did it look cool!

Interested in more Dragon Ball action figure reviews? Here’s a few to check out:

SH Figuarts Super Saiyan Vegeta

He’s the Prince of all Saiyans. The last survivor to have laid eyes on Planet Vegeta, home world of the mighty warriors and birthplace of the legendary Goku. And he’s also a pretty fine toy. Vegeta, arguably the most popular character to emerge from Dragon Ball Z, has seen his likeness cast in numerous forms…

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by Joe

Bandai Dragon Stars Super Saiyan Trunks

Dragon Ball Super did to me what basically every cartoon/anime does:  it made me want toys based on it. It’s a compulsion I’ve never outgrown, apparently, and Bandai has made it fairly easy (but not cheap) to get what I want. Months ago I did an entry on the SH Figuarts Super Saiyan Vegeta. That…

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by Joe

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

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…

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by Joe

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

July 4, 2023

NECA TMNT Toon Donatello’s Portable Portal Generator

By Joe
Hokum Hare not included.

Is this it? Have I finally hit the point where my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy collecting is out of control? It just might be, for today we have Donatello’s Portable Portal Generator, the latest piece from NECA’s line of toys based on the vintage cartoon series. And it’s not that this is a bad release or anything, it’s just the sort of thing that I don’t think I would have ever asked for when this line was in its infancy, but here we are.

NECA’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure lines have been hugely successful, especially the one based on the cartoon. TMNT is hot right now and it’s fixing to get even hotter with a new movie on the way. NECA has released basically all of the major characters from the show and now we’re onto the obscure like Bugman and Jersey Red. More are expected to follow, but as the roster of characters fills out even further the company has started to turn its attention towards releases that enhance the display of the collection. We first saw NECA re-release its street diorama, but with a new paint job to accentuate the cartoon world these characters inhabit. The company also last year solicited a Turtle Van which is due out later this year and we also got a peek at a multi-part sewer lair diorama. That was expected to go on-sale last fall, but did not. We’re likely in for an update at San Diego Comic Con on that item, if not sooner.

This is what comes in the box: 3 lenticular images and the frame.

An item that would seemingly exist to complement that diorama release is Donatello’s portable portal generator. If you recall from the show, Donatello was able to reverse engineer the portal Krang possessed and make it smaller leading to various confrontations with extra-dimensional beings. It was probably a pretty easy thing to rely on for story pitches since a number of stories could begin with the premise “Donatello’s portal generator goes haywire and this weird mutant enters their world.” NECA first unveiled this item in promotional shots for other figures and it wasn’t long before collectors were asking how they could get one of their own. Some may have expected it to be a pack-in with a lair set, or maybe even something to include in the recently released accessory set, but for NECA it apparently made more sense to go the stand-alone route. Since it is a bit of an odd item, NECA sold it as a preorder on their website last winter and it’s now arriving in the hands of collectors, so just what is this thing and is it something every TMNT collection needs?

“Donatello! What have you done?!”

The portal (it’s just easier to call it that than by it’s official, very long, name) is really just a lump of sculpted plastic with room for a lenticular insert. It’s roughly 7.5″ tall and nearly a foot long. The maximum depth on the unit is only 2.5″ though so it’s not the space hog it could be. It comes in its own special packaging with artwork from Daniel Elson and Merle Mustard which is evocative of the old VHS releases. The actual piece is well-sculpted and painted all over. It looks just as I remember it from the show. It just doesn’t do anything. There’s a handle on the far side of it that is articulated, but the wheel near the opening for the portal image is non-functioning. It’s just basically a plastic frame with a spot for an insert.

Here is your articulation.

And those inserts number 3. They are lenticular so there’s two images per insert and I assume they’re taken directly from the show. There’s some samurai pigs, sentient vending machines, some odd looking aliens, a tropical setting with Technodrome, Japanese house, and a foreign planet. They all have a third layer on-top that’s the wavy lines the portal would generate before an image of another dimension would appear. I’m surprised we don’t have the option for a screen that’s just those waves. I’m also surprised that there’s only three. It seems like there was a lot of room to create some fun cameos here, but NECA opted not to.

There is no detail on the rear of the unit. I don’t know that there needs to be, but it might matter to some.

That’s it though. One plastic frame and three pieces of lenticular cardstock. The price for this set was $45 plus NECA’s $15 flat-rate shipping. And since this is a NECA store exclusive, you might as well consider the price of the item $60. Ouch. For what it is, it’s nice. It looks the part and will enhance Donatello’s sewer lab should it ever see release. It’s just pretty pricey and there’s no added incentive to get it. I’m surprised NECA didn’t toss-in any trinkets or just something fun into the set or even another Mouser. There’s really no creativity here like an insert with a hand coming through or something more interactive. This is really a case of what you see is what you get and if it’s too much for you then so be it. It’s also admittedly an odd thing to have without the sewer lair as it feels like it has no home. I will do something with it until then, but I don’t know what just yet.

Yeah, that’s not going to work. It’s a shame that NECA wasn’t able to come up with a way for collectors to display figures in the portal.

Since this was solicited quite awhile ago, there’s no option to buy-in any longer. I don’t know if NECA made extra to sell on their website or at conventions, but if you want your very own portable portal generator you’re going to have to head to the secondary market. I have no idea what this will be like there, but I bet some people bought two with the hope of flipping one. There may be an initial surge in price, but I could see this being a losing investment for those hoping to do such a thing as it’s extremely niche. At the same time, it wouldn’t shock me if this is the oddball thing that does end up being pricey a year from now. I definitely don’t expect multiple production runs unless NECA wants to pair it with Donatello’s eventual laboratory so don’t wait too long if you think this is something you need.

Can’t get enough NECA TMNT or think this would work well with other releases then maybe check these out:

NECA Cartoon TMNT Accessory Set

We’re well into the cold of winter and spring feels like it’s just around the corner which means it must be time for another NECA Haulathon. Haulathon, if you don’t recall from last year, is basically a tandem promotion between NECA and Target which was just an excuse to get NECA some more visibility in…

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by Joe

NECA TMNT Cartoon Street Scene Diorama

It was early last September that NECA made available for pre-order a redesigned version of their Street Scene diorama tailored specifically to fit-in with the company’s growing assortment of action figures based on the animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fans had been asking for this set for even longer as NECA had been featuring…

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by Joe

NECA Cartoon TMNT Mousers Pack

It’s been a little while since we had a Turtle Tuesday around here. NECA was keeping me quite busy in March with release after release and really putting a hurting on my wallet. Not only were sets hitting stores, but items were going up on NECA’s website for preorder, all of which require payment upfront.…

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by Joe

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

June 27, 2023

NECA TMNT Toon Bugman and Electrozapper

By Joe
Come for the Bugman and Electrozapper review, stay for the frog butt photo bombs.

No, that is not a typo in the subject line as this latest two-pack from NECA Toys features the incomparable Bugman, defender of justice, and Electrozapper. Not versus, but an and. I don’t know why since a lot of these hero and villain two-packs from NECA have gone with a versus in the middle, but this time they chose not to. Whatever, it’s just a box. What’s inside the box is what matters most as we have two characters who many may not even remember from the old cartoon, but for me, I’ve been hoping for this set for a long time.

When I reflect back on the original cartoon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I find I mostly remember the characters that also appeared in the toy line. A majority of the time I watched that show I think I just shut my brain off and stared at the TV like a zombie. When the show was over, I’d go play with my figures and if nothing I saw on TV made it into my roleplay then it faded away pretty quickly. Bugman, on the other hand, did not. He was not featured in the toyline at all which is a bit of a surprise because he has a very “toyetic” design. He’s basically the show’s version of Spider-Man, but with the body horror element of The Fly (he also transforms via anger, so toss in a dash of Hulk too). I think it’s that body horror part that made him memorable for me as the sounds his body made when his antennae popped out of his head and his mouth elongated into the pincers of an ant just stuck with me. They were kind of gross, a bit unsettling, but also cool?

This is looking like it’s going to be quite the set.

It certainly made an impression, and I made sure to go rewatch the episode “Michaelangelo meets Bugman” before doing this review to re-familiarize myself with the character and his foil, Electrozapper. It’s actually a pretty entertaining episode of the show. Bugman is clearly a parody of many superheroes. To drive that point home, the show even got Dan Gilvezan to voice the character. Gilvezan was best know to kids of the era as the voice of Spider-Man himself on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Meanwhile, Electrozapper is a fairly straight parody of Spider-Man’s villain Electro, but with some elements of The Shocker tossed-in too via the design of his gloves. He looks like a cheesy 60s comic book villain and was a suitable choice for the episode. In it, the two are characters in a comic book series Michelangelo enjoys, but the book was apparently based on real people or something (it’s not explained). It’s worth a look even if you, like me, mostly think of the old cartoon as pretty bad.

The hero you want, right?

This two-pack comes way of Target once again and is currently showing up in stores in fairly substantial quantities. Most stores seem to be getting anywhere between 4 and 6 units, and for two obscure characters, those numbers are probably pretty healthy. In other words, I don’t think this one will be too hard to come by once the initial mad rush to get anything new dies down. And unlike some of the other recent releases, the price tag isn’t too bad at $55, pretty much the new standard for two-packs. That’s cheaper than some of the other two-packs we’ve received over the past year and these figures feature a lot of new sculpting and plenty of accessories.

The tail looks fine, but I wish it had more function.

We’ll talk Bugman first. He’s in his heroic form which means he looks like a bug…man. Sculpted by Josh Sutton, Bugman stands at around 6.75″ to the top of his head and a full 7″ to the top of his hair (and even taller if you factor in the antennae). His face is appropriately hideous with the elongated mandibles and giant, red, eyes. His hair is blond and streaked with brown which is quite similar to how it was shaded in the cartoon. His wings are new and painted a very light brown. He has his large, extra, legs poking out of his shoulders and the big, red, scorpion tail protruding from his back. He has a green bodysuit with his bug logo painted onto the chest. The toon shading NECA often relies upon is in place with a darker green on the rear of the figure. That’s the only shading though which is a bit odd. The boots and flesh bits lack the same approach. This one relies on the linework to help give it that “pop” and the linework in place is pretty clean.

Time to fly.

Bugman looks the part, and he mostly looks pretty good. His bracers around his forearms feature spikes on them which may get warped in the package. The left arm on my figure is fine, but the right arm does have a bent, middle, spike. I’m guessing some hot water can cure that though. NECA also chose to paint them gray when they look pretty white to me in the show, but it’s a minor inaccuracy as far as I’m concerned. Visually, I only have one real issue with Bugman and it’s that bulbous tail coming off his back. It plays into the articulation, but I’ll just mention it now that I feel like it needs more range. It looks like it just pegs into the figure’s back so it really only swivels. I’m surprised it’s not a hinged peg to move it off of his back or even a ball peg would get a little more range. Instead, it’s kind of stuck against his back. You can move it off to the side, or have it dangle between his legs, and neither option is great.

“Oh, wow, thanks for the save, Bugman.” “Don’t mention, Ms. O’Neil. By the way, would you like to have dinner sometime.” “Umm…no.”

We might as well go into that articulation now. The tail just swivels all the way around. A bendy tail would have been neat, but it’s just solid plastic. His head is on a ball peg as is the base of the neck so he gets great range in basically all directions. This also allows him to look forward when in a flying pose, something a lot of figures struggle with. The shoulders are standard hinged ball-pegs, but the shoulder pads plus the leg things protruding from the shoulders limit what they can do. He can rotate his arm as long as it’s out to the side enough to clear the shoulder pad, but the antennae or whatever won’t let him raise his arms out to the side. Those leg-things can rotate, maybe a hinge would have helped, but would have hurt the aesthetics, I think. There is a biceps swivel and the double-jointed elbows will bend past 90 degrees.

“Oh no! These…chain…coated in…leestanite…my one weakness!”

In the torso, Bugman has a diaphragm joint that lets him rotate, tilt, and bend forward and back a bit. More forward than back, which is good. He also has a waist twist that works, but is a little unsightly once you rotate too far. The hips are the standard ball-socket hips and Bugman gets great range there. He can do full splits and kick forward past horizontal. He can’t really kick back because of the diaper piece, but I’ll take it. The thighs pivot a bit and the double-jointed knees go past 90 degrees without issue. The ankles are the typical hinge and rocker and they work fine. The wings are hinged ball-pegs so they rotate and move in and out. All of the joints are nice and tight, not stuck, but comfortably tight and secure. This torso, with the diaphragm joint added, has me dreaming of a Shredder 2.0 with the same.

“Muahahahaha! There’s more where that came from, Bugman!”

For accessories, it can sometimes be hard to figure out with two-packs, but Bugman appears to have two plus the usual assortment of hands. And for hands, he has fists which come on him in the box, trigger hands, and gripping hands. His hands all appear to be reuse from Dirk Savage which might be why he gets trigger finger hands despite not using a gun. There’s also a lump of blue plastic that may confound a few, it certainly confused me, but it’s meant to be a lump of “Leestanite” which is his Kryptonite, if you couldn’t figure that out on your own. It looks exactly like it did in the show, so it’s not exciting, but suitable. He also has the leestanite coated chains that Michelangelo finds him in during the episode. It’s a plastic chain cast in transparent, green, plastic. It’s fine, though the chain in the show was gray. Maybe some wires got crossed or NECA just thought this was cooler. If so, I can’t disagree. It’s not an exciting array of accessories, but there’s not much else he could have. I suppose I would have preferred some style posed hands instead of trigger ones that will never see use. A flight stand would be cool too, but I don’t really like NECA’s flight stands so I suppose I don’t need another one of those.

Here comes the zapper!

And now for the villain, Electrozapper! Sculpted by Tomasz Rozejowski, Electrozapper stands at about 6.25″ to the top of his head and is featured in his show-accurate battery suit. This thing is goofy as hell and I love it. He’s got the emblem of a battery on his chest and then what look like D batteries strapped to his belt and biceps. It’s something I thought was funny as a kid that I kind of forgot about until I held this figure in my hands. He has a rather unique physique in the show and this figure captures that. His shoulders are just massive relative to his body which has a figure 8 shape to the torso. The legs are long and skinny and he’s got some pretty beefy arms as well. The look and shape of his head is dead-on with that almost beak-like mouth. If anything, I would have liked a little more size to his head as it’s pretty big in the show, but that’s a minor quibble on my part. I love the silly lightning bolts on his head.

This guy is all about stuff.

Like Bugman, Electrozapper has a lot of new parts. I don’t see any obvious reuse with him except whatever is under the shirt. The shirt is a soft plastic overlay so there’s probably just a skeleton of sorts beneath it. It looks good, but will limit articulation. The paint is very clean on my figure and basically every inch of this guy is indeed painted. The linework is crisp and I’m very impressed with the yellow piping on the thigh high boots he’s rocking. Yellow can go bad when applied in such a fashion, but it’s done very well here. The toon shading is featured fairly prominently. The only surfaces not shaded is the flesh of his arms, the gray of his thighs, belt, and his gloves. They also didn’t bother to shade the yellow piping, which I think is fine. Really, the only thing I don’t care for is the cape. It’s a very plain, gray, cape. It at least features the ties in the front, but the texture and feel is cheap and not like most NECA capes. And after getting that really nice, wired, cape with Dark Turtle I was hoping that would be the standard for capes going forward, but this is probably the worst NECA cape I own.

The fist blast might be my favorite of the bunch.

Electrozapper isn’t as well-articulated as Bugman, but he’s pretty much par for the course with this line. The head is on a double-ball peg and he can look up, down, rotate, and gets some nice tilt. The shoulders are ball-hinged and he can raise his arms out to the side to a horizontal position and rotate. The biceps swivel and the double-jointed elbows can sneak past 90 degrees. The gloves do rotate and the wrists swivel and hinge. In the torso, I can’t seem to find anything in the diaphragm, though the overlay probably would render anything there moot anyway. The waist feels like a ball peg so he can rotate and tilt and bend forward and back a bit. The ball-socket hips can nearly achieve a full split, but kicking forward they tend to go off to the side. There’s some twist at the thigh, and the double-jointed knees are fine. The ankle hinge is really nice though as his foot can go all the way back and forward quite a bit with a solid ankle rocker.

It’s a pretty standard assortment of articulation on Electrozapper and I think it’s fine for the figure. The only omissions for me are the wired cape and no diaphragm joint. After seeing NECA more open to that approach with the likes of Dirk Savage and this guy’s box-mate, it’s a bit of a bummer to see a step back here. Especially because his shape lends itself well to such a joint and the only complication is the chest logo, but oh well. If someone were to make a custom, wired, cape for this guy I’d have to seriously consider it as he’d likely be a homerun with such a simple addition.

“Come on, Bugman, let’s teach this jerk a lesson!”

Articulation may be ho-hum, but Electrozapper absolutely brings it when it comes to the accessories. He has a secondary head with an angry, open-mouthed expression which I think is much more appropriate than the neutral one he comes equipped with. It’s so much more appropriate to me that I don’t know why they bothered with the neutral one. For hands, Elextrozapper has a set of fists, pointing hands, open hands, and gripping hands. Two of those hands have peg holes in the rings he wears on his fingers: the open left hand and the right fist. They can accept his effect parts which are really neat. They’re done in a semi-transparent pink, plastic. He has a small, blast, effect which I believe is to simulate his hand glowing. It’s for the open hand and slots onto it with ease. The long, lightning bolt effect clips into the fist and looks great. I absolutely love this type of effect. There’s a skinny lightning bolt which clips onto the pointing fingers and that looks great too. Lastly, he he has two orbs with crackling lightning on them that peg onto the index fingers as well. I suppose you could also slot them onto the fingers of the open hands if you wanted, or have him palm them. I kind of wish the hole for the finger was on the bottom though, or at least in both places. Instead it’s on the back so they look best when he’s pointing his finger forward as opposed to up.

“Thank you for your assist, Michelangelo.” “Like, are you looking for a sidekick?”

These effect parts really make the figure for me. It’s wonderful to get a figure like this where there’s almost too much to do. I like all of these, so which do I actually display?! It makes Electrozapper a very fun figure to just mess around with because you can keep changing things up. I almost wish we had more! I would have scrapped that neutral head to just double-up on the two lightning bolt effects. I may have even traded the gripping hands for the same because I’m always going to have him posed with the effects, what need of gripping hands do I have? As is, it’s still a great spread and much better than some recent releases from NECA so I’m pretty happy with what we have here.

It’s a gathering of bug people!

The Bugman and Electrozapper two-pack is low key one of the strongest two-packs in the line. It’s up there with the likes of Antrax and Scumbug and the Groundchuck and Dirtbag set. I really like how these guys turned out. Bugman is pretty much spot-on with the show and looks great. The only gripe I really had with him is the tail articulation. Electrozapper is right there with him and the only thing really bugging me about him is the cheap looking cape. It’s a shame that cape prevents this set from being an all-timer, but it’s still damn good and I think anyone who gets it will have a lot of fun with it. Perhaps best of all, the price feels right so while I haven’t been crazy about the price creep with other TMNT releases from NECA, at least we still have sets like this one that just leave us feeling pretty damn good about it when all is said and done.

If you like bugs and TMNT, there’s plenty more to see:

NECA TMNT Cartoon Antrax and Scumbug

I’ve been looking forward to this one for awhile. Antrax and Scumbug only appeared in the cartoon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles once, but like last week’s figure review, they were present in the toy line long before their animated debut. And these later period episodes, such as “Night of the Rogues,” tended to just…

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by Joe

NECA Turtles in Time Baxter Stockman

When NECA finally received access to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles license to release product at retail, the company decided to focus on three pillars: cartoon, movie, video game. The cartoon product, being the most sought after, was exclusively sold at Target stores in the United States. The movie line, probably nearly as desirable as…

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by Joe

NECA TMNT Cartoon Splinter vs Baxter

I didn’t intend for so many TMNT reviews to hit one after the other, but Christmas pushed a bunch of stuff into the final week of December and then some surprise difficulties with another review has moved this one up. So be it. 2020 had a final surprise in store for collectors of Teenage Mutant…

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by Joe

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June 20, 2023

NECA TMNT Toon “Colossus of the Swamps!” Deluxe Napoleon Bonafrog

By Joe
Napoleon smash!

NECA’s line of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures based on the animated series which debuted in 1987 has had some big figures. Most of these are what NECA terms “deluxe” releases and have included the likes of Krang in his android body, Chrome Dome, and the more recently released REX-1. The latest addition to this cast of characters is the one that caught me by surprise the most. Napoleon Bonafrog had the misfortune of getting mutated into a rampaging beast in a one-off episode of the show. A version of this character was unveiled last year at San Diego Comic Con. I saw the images, but for whatever reason I didn’t truly process his size. Then my lovely wife, who found this figure along with the other latest toon releases, handed me the box and I was aghast at how heavy it was and at just how much real estate the figure took up inside it.

That’s one big frog.

Napoleon is not the tallest figure in the line, but I think he’s the new heaviest. And prior to him, that honor probably went to REX-1 who was released earlier in the spring, but Napoleon is like a brick. This is a figure you can keep by your bedside and use to scare prowlers in the night who are foolish enough to invade your home. I don’t have a scale suitable for weighing this guy, but height-wise he stands at 8.25″. This makes him rather close in height to REX-1, but a lot shorter than Chrome Dome who gets to continue its reign as tallest in the line. That weight though is something, and the circumference of the shoulders is quite massive. Picking him up, he feels most similar to one of the quarter scale figures in the line as opposed to any of the standard or deluxe figures. It’s certainly an experience and adds an undeniable “fun” factor to the package.

“Looks like frog legs are on the menu tonight!”

And that package comes at a cost. Napoleon rang-up a shocking $55 at Target. I had not given it much thought prior to release, but with REX-1 being $50 I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised at that, but another 5 bucks? That was unexpected. And sure, 5 bucks isn’t exactly a lot in a vacuum, but it does suck to keep seeing the price go up with this line. And this one may not even be the worst offender, but we’ll get to that when we do. At any rate, is this guy really worth it? That’s a tall ask especially for a very obscure version of an already reasonably obscure character. If it weren’t for the fact that Napoleon did get a figure in the Playmates line (albeit, a totally different interpretation of the character) few would likely remember him by name.

“WHAT?! You’re just in time – looks like I’m makin’ my mama a new luggage set!”

We already covered the size, but the sculpt overall for this one is also pretty damn fun. Even though he’s a hell of a lot bigger than his previous figure, he actually has the same basic construction and outfit. The skin is a very dark green with some freckles done in black outlines in places. He still has the toon shading so his skin is lighter on the front, and darker on the back. The shirt is a soft plastic overlay that basically floats on him. If you were to pull out his arms from the socket, you could easily remove it as it’s not glued down anywhere. It’s yellow on the front, and an ever so more saturated yellow on the back that’s barely noticeable. The single orange strip runs around the shirt and it’s painted fairly well. Rather than make it a darker orange on the rear of the figure, NECA painted it red which looks a bit off. Dark orange and bright red aren’t exactly interchangeable. The necklace is glued in place and the shorts are painted a light purple on the front, dark on the rear. The edges are tattered and I wonder if Napoleon was chosen by the show for this mutation because he wore shorts that reminded the writers of the Hulk? Where the shorts separate at the fly is painted purple, which looks a bit odd. Even the smaller figure got that detail right as it’s painted green. There’s some sloppy paint on the left bracelet as well, and a smudge or scuff on the back of the shirt on my figure. Nothing that will show on a shelf, but worth mentioning.

“Rocksteady! Use that muta ray to make me a colossal frog!”

There’s not a whole lot of room with this guy for the paint to truly “wow” the holder, so it’s going to have to do that with the overall sculpt. And in that respect, it’s got a good argument as being a “wow” piece for the shelf. The default portrait is this angry, snarling, expression. The eyes are set a bit deep in his skull with black rings around them to give off an enraged vibe. He’s got this massive underbite with his teeth jutting out. They’re huge, chunky, blocky, cartoon teeth and they’re outlined in black and it all came out very clean. NECA sculpted and painted a pink tongue within the mouth and it’s a head with a lot of personality. The biceps on Napoleon are just plain massive and I love the exaggerated proportions of his upper body vs his abdomen. Sculptor Brodie Perkins did a tremendous job here. He’s going to command attention no matter where he’s placed in your collection and I think that’s what most want out of these deluxe releases.

“Put me down you idiot!”

Because the figure’s anatomy is essentially the same as his smaller counterpart, so is the articulation. There’s really only one difference between the two. The head is on a double-ball peg which lets the figure look up and rotate. Because it sits so deep in his shoulders, he can’t really look down and there’s little room for tilt. He also has a hinged jaw, but it’s range is very limited. It basically goes from closed to just open enough to see his tongue. The shoulders are standard hinged ball-pegs and the figure can raise its arms out just past horizontal. Rotation is fine and there’s a biceps swivel past that. The big change from the smaller frogs is the introduction of double-jointed elbows. Because his biceps are so massive, he can only bend there a little past 90 degrees. The wrists swivel and hinge horizontally.

“Gee Napoleon, what happened to you?!”

In the diaphragm we get a ball joint of some kind. It’s probably a double as he can lean back a solid amount, forward a little, and he gets good tilt to either side plus rotation. There is a standard waist twist below that and then the hips are connected via the ball and socket setup so many NECA figures utilize. There is a little bit of pivot action at the joint, but mostly it’s for kicking forward and back which he can do very well. The leg will go out to the front all the way and back pretty far. They also go out to the side almost to the point of full splits. Plus, they’re not loose which is definitely important for such a large figure. My regular Napoleon’s hips were so loose that he couldn’t even stand without sliding into a split. I had to apply super glue to the joints to finally fix that. The knees on this guy are double-jointed and will bend past 90 degrees. The ankles feature a hinge and rocker combo. The range forward and back on the hinge isn’t great, but it should be enough. The rocker works fine. And also, it’s very snug which is, again, super important for such a heavy figure.

He’s also capable of being a gentle soul.

So far so good, but where this figure does start to come up short rests with the accessories. There just isn’t much a colossal frog needs so there isn’t much he gets. For hands, he comes with a set of fists in the box plus a set of open hands and a set of gripping hands. He also has a second head which features a calm, almost befuddled, expression. It’s sort of cute, I suppose, but I’m guessing most will want their giant, hulking, frog to look a little more angry. The second head also drops the articulated jaw.

He has a gun, but it isn’t really for him, or anyone for that matter.

And that’s it! Well, that’s it for the main figure. NECA did throw a couple of other items into the box to try and sweeten the package. There’s the included muta-shooter which is the weapon that did this to Napoleon. It’s mostly gray with some linework and darker bits painted on, but the most striking aspect is the green “liquid” inside the barrel. It’s basically transparent plastic with a semi-transparent green insert. It looks fine, but only from certain angles because the green piece inside isn’t solid. From the top, the illusion of it being an actual liquid is ruined and it’s kind of crummy looking. I don’t know why they didn’t just make it a solid piece of green plastic, but oh well. It’s also not really conducive to being properly held. It’s a very weird shape and I couldn’t really get anyone with a trigger hand to properly hold it. I was able to basically balance it in Rocksteady’s hands to fake it for a pic, but it’s probably getting the bin treatment after this is done.

I do like these extra heads for Napoleon and Genghis. The Napoleon head has a shape more representative of how the frogs were actually drawn for the show while the Genghis head is just outrageous.

The last accessories are two new heads for the previously released Napoleon and Genghis figures. The new Napoleon head features a scared, or concerned, expression like he’s about to shit a brick. It’s very similar to the box art expression and I like it well enough. The Genghis head is a more exagerrated, screaming in terror expression that makes me think of the video game Battletoads. It’s pretty silly looking, but I confess that I do love it. Mostly, it’s nice to be able to break up the expressions of the Punk Frogs as they all had the same two expressions to choose from. Now they can all have a different expression, so I do like that.

“We just love our new, giant, brother!”

That’s all though. It definitely doesn’t feel as substantial as past deluxe releases. We just looked at April who came with a ton of stuff and REX-1 before this release also had quite a bit. One could argue that this figure didn’t need anymore than what it comes with, but for added cost it’s a bit of a tough pill to swallow. If he came with additional heads for the other two frogs that would have gone a long way to sweetening the package. I also wish he had another set of gripping hands, something wider, for grabbing other figures around the waist. His existing ones are too tight for that, and they’re way too big to handle really any of the weapons in the whole line. I’m surprised NECA didn’t toss-in the rhin-bug that was featured in the episode as a gag and also appears on the back of the box. Napoleon also shot his tongue out in the episode and that could have been a fun extra head or accessory. I definitely feel a bit short-changed as is which isn’t typical of NECA.

Is Napoleon “The Colossus of the Swamps” Bonafrog worth the pretty steep asking price of $55? It’s hard to say. It’s definitely a case where I look at the figure, then consider the price, and my immediate reaction is, “No.” On the other hand, now that I have him and that money is gone, I do like him. He’s a really cool figure and I like that his existence makes my Genghis and smaller Napoleon a little more interesting, but I do hate that I gave NECA $55 for it as I’m endorsing the price at that point. He’s an obscure character, and if you never cared about getting this version of Napoleon in figure from then maybe continue living your Napoleon-free life. On the other hand, I never really desired this character in figure from, but it does make me happy so it’s not the end of the world that I overpaid for it. I would suggest finding this one in store and seeing what your reaction to holding it in hand is. If it makes you giddy like a little kid and losing $55 won’t hurt you, then go for it. If it doesn’t stir anything within you and you’d only be buying it because it’s new, then don’t be afraid to put it back on the shelf. Chances are, if you reconsider you’ll see it again.

Want some more frog content or are you just into big action figures?

NECA TMNT Cartoon Napoleon and Attila

It took almost five months, but the Punk Frogs are now complete. NECA, recognizing that they were about to release the same sculpt four times, decided to space out the frog two-packs in its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line of cartoon action figures. Genghis and Rasputin arrived back in May, while Napoleon and Attila started…

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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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by Joe

NECA Cartoon TMNT From the Files of Pizza Squad (Deluxe Rex-1)

When you’re doing a syndicated cartoon expected to air basically every day, you need to pull story ideas from anywhere you can. I think that’s why parodies are so popular in the cartoons of the 80s to the point where it didn’t matter if the show was parodying something kids would actually know. Take REX-1,…

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by Joe

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

June 14, 2023

Star Wars: The Vintage Collection Dark Trooper

By Joe
Isn’t he a cute little fella?

I’m back with another Star Wars action figure review! Actually, I don’t do these very often. This is only the third such review out of me because I usually don’t collect Star Wars. Sure, I think the franchise is fine and I did collect figures as a kid, but it’s not something I’m drawn to in the same way I am other properties. And that’s worked fine for me since there’s tons of Star Wars content and reviewers out there. And when it comes to Star Wars, I’m basically just an original trilogy fan, but the recent output of television from Disney has actually been pretty solid so it’s no surprise that this is yet another review of a character featured on The Mandalorian.

The Mandalorian is basically Star Wars as a spaghetti western. It’s easy to digest, but has some overarching plots (especially Season 3), and the characters are plenty likable. One of my favorite designs from the show came from the Season 2 finale which featured the Dark Troopers. These robotic replacements for Storm Troopers are these big, hulking, glossy, black instruments of death, though I don’t think they actually kill anyone in the show (it’s been awhile). The design was great though and it was only a matter of time until action figures arrived. The emphasis being on the word “time” there as Disney apparently didn’t give Star Wars license holder Hasbro any advance notice of what was coming in that season so even though it aired over two years ago we’re just now getting to the figures.

So…he looks a bit different on the box, no?

If you are a collector of Star Wars action figures from Hasbro then you probably know that the company has three styles of releases: The Black Series, The Vintage Collection, and the Retro Collection. The Black Series is the roughly 1:12, 6″ scale characters that Hasbro has made a focus of its action figures division ever since it brought back Marvel Legends. The Retro Collection is basically a 5 points of articulation line that harkens back to the original Star Wars line from Kenner. It’s a style that’s basically been resurrected by Super7 and it’s ReAction series and Hasbro wanted to tap into that themselves. The Vintage Collection, which is where the figure we’re talking about hails from, is like a combination of the two. It’s a 3.75″ scale line, but it features modern sculpting, paint, and articulation. It’s the only line from Hasbro that has much appeal for me. I’m not a scale snob when it comes to my collecting and I appreciate a variety, it just so happens that most of the properties I enjoy most either come in 1:12 or 1:10 scales. The smaller 1:18 stuff is a scale I’ve always found really charming and it’s a scale that’s perfect for Star Wars given the presence of vehicles. The one figure I did review from the line (I did also purchase a Koska Reeves figure, but never reviewed it) was a release I really enjoyed so adding to that has always been a possibility.

And I probably would have added more to it by now if not for one thing. Hasbro, for awhile, seemed to resist raising prices during the pandemic and was holding strong for awhile. However, it being a publicly traded company, eventually caved to shareholder demands and we’ve seen price hikes across the board from Hasbro over the past year. And it’s like they’ve been playing catch-up as the increases have been rather extreme. The Vintage Collection was basically Hasbro’s best bargain just a couple of years ago. I want to say the Koska figure I bought was only $12. Recently, I was at my local Target and saw the new, Kenner-inspired, Boba Fett and I was fixing to add him to my tiny collection, but he rang-up at $23! Yeah, no way. And the figure I knew I wanted when I first saw the episode was this Dark Trooper, but Hasbro wanted $26 for this one and I had to pass. Then, somewhat out of the blue, the figure hit clearance at the more palpable price of $17.50. Still higher than I think it should be, but I had wanted this for over two years so I gave in. And since the order pick-up option I selected actually sold out before the unit could be secured for me, I got free shipping out of it so let’s take a look and see if this thing is even worth the discounted price I got it for.

This guy is a bit of a nightmare to try to photograph. He’s so dark the camera often doesn’t want to focus on him.

The Dark Trooper comes in Hasbro’s plastic-free packaging which I think they’ve already backtracked on. It’s just a cardboard box with an image of the figure on the front and a hanger affixed to the back. Inside the box is a cardboard tray that the figure is slotted into plus a brown paper pouch with the accessories. I buy most of my toys online so I have not cared one bit about the loss of the plastic bubble on the packaging. This hobby I and many others enjoy unfortunately is a big polluter since they’re primarily all plastic so I was in favor of Hasbro’s move to plastic-free, regardless of the company’s true motives (which I’m not speculating on). It seems to be going away though, so be it.

Bang!

The Dark Trooper stands at just about 4″ tall and at first glance, wow, this thing does not look like the figure on the box. It’s cast in all black plastic with almost no paint. The paint is limited to the metallic portions of the elbows, wrists, and knees plus some patches on the biceps. There’s also some red dots on the chest, but that’s it. In the helmet, is red, transparent, plastic to create a light-piping effect that really doesn’t work very well at this scale. You have to basically hold a light to the back of the head (where the rear of the plastic is present in the form of a red square) to get anything out of it. They may have been better off just trying to paint glowing red eyes, or better yet, they could have done both and given us some options. As it stands, the eyes mostly get lost in the face.

“And now I squish your little friend!”

That is unfortunate, but what is really disappointing for me is the lack of a chrome-like finish. The image on the box is either a render or placed under some very harsh light. Even blasting white light on my figure at close range I can’t get it to resemble that finish even a little bit. It’s a glossy plastic, but not overly so, and it very much looks like plastic. There is no illusion here that this guy could be made of the same material as the actual character. The black plastic almost seems to suck in the light more than throw it back. And that could be due to its composition as it’s a soft plastic, there’s a gummy-ness to it, and not something harder. I think a harder plastic would have thrown more light back at the viewer and helped sell the figure. Or maybe it just needed some paint. The face, especially, just doesn’t translate because of the all black plastic. The sculpt is there, but you have to get in close to appreciate it.

“Whoa! How did you do that?!”

And that’s an issue with the whole figure. Granted, this scale is not the best choice to celebrate a sculpt, but it still can if the finish is done properly. And the sculpt looks pretty nice. There’s a lot of detail in the abdomen and the limbs, and really, all throughout the figure. There is a floating crotch piece that has these little pistons on them, at least I think that’s what they are, that can get a little messed up. It’s a softer plastic and one of the four pistons on mine is warped a bit, but at least it’s on the rear of the figure. The left shoulder is also a little jacked-up, it probably didn’t come out of the mold clean, but otherwise I don’t have any issues with the sculpt. At first glance I thought the hands might be a little on the small side, but after a little research, that seems to be a case with the design and not the figure.

::Muffled screams::

The Dark Trooper does come with a handful of accessories. For extra parts we get two fists. I don’t see myself using them, but I guess it’s always useful to have some fists. The default hands are a trigger finger right hand and a gripping left which work well for two-handed weapon poses. And the main weapon is a blaster rifle of some kind. It’s all black plastic and it can be either held by the Dark Trooper or it can be slotted into the right thigh. There are thrust effects that peg into the feet. They’re a semi-transparent orange plastic and look okay, but without a flight stand they’re kind of useless. The Dark Trooper also comes with its own, personal, hangar. It has to be assembled as it comes in three pieces and it was a little harder than I expected it would be. It’s black plastic with some red paint in places and it’s fine. It perhaps creates some desire for people to army build these guys so you can have some inactive units in your display, but at these prices I don’t know if many collectors want to do that. The hangar also has two cables that plug into it that I guess are supposed to curl under the arms. I guess they’re like charging cables? I don’t know. They don’t really hold the figure in place so they’re rather perfunctory.

Go to bed, Dark Trooper, I’m sick of looking at you!

One of the hallmarks of this line is you get small, retro-inspired, action figures that move like modern toys. The Dark Trooper mostly comes as advertised in that regard, but it’s not without its flaws. The head feels like it’s on a ball peg of some kind with another joint at the base of the neck. You get your rotation and the figure looks down well enough. The range going up is minimal and you only get a little bit of tilt out of the joint. The shoulders are ball-hinged and the trooper can just about raise its arms out to a horizontal position. Rotating forward and back is fine, though the shoulder pad will prevent full rotation there. At the elbow there’s a swivel point which is basically your biceps swivel and the hinge will allow for a 90 degree bend. The wrists swivel and feature a large hinge as well that moves in a horizontal fashion. There is, sadly, no vertical hinge on the trigger hand. In the diaphragm, there’s a ball joint that’s mostly for rotation. There’s a little tilt and a tiny amount of forward and back, but not much. The hips can kick forward about 90 degrees and they go back a little bit as well. Out to the side, you basically get to a full split so that’s good. There is a thigh swivel that’s pretty well hidden and at the knee we get a swivel and a hinge that will go about 90 degrees. The ankles feature a hinge, but it’s very clicky. You basically have a neutral position, one click forward, and two clicks back. And really, all of the hinges are like that including the knees and elbows. It can make it a challenge to stand this guy to not have something more nuanced. There is an ankle rocker that too is a bit on the clicky side. It will move a little, then just jumps to a full tilt, which makes its usefulness limited.

Issues aside, I think the Dark Trooper will move well enough to get it into Dark Trooper poses. It basically just stomps around blasting foes and shrugging off the weapons of others. It’s not much of a melee fighter, because it doesn’t have to be, and when it does get in close it just swats away its prey. It also comes with enough stuff and the only thing missing is a flight stand to better take advantage of the thruster effects. I suppose a blast effect might have been preferred, but oh well. What’s going to determine if you like this figure or not is just how good do you think it looks? And for 25 bucks I don’t think it’s good enough. I didn’t seek out any reviews on this figure before buying it, so silly me for thinking the image on Hasbro’s packaging was indicative of what this figure looked like. Even at the discounted price I got this one at, I don’t think it’s really there. This should be a $12 line, and the fact that it’s double that is crazy and unfortunate as I think Hasbro is going to kill The Vintage Collection with these prices. I don’t hate that I have this figure, but it’s also not something I can whole-heartedly recommend.

If you want to read all of my Star Wars coverage you don’t have much to catch up on, but if you just like laser fodder, I’ve got plenty of reviews of such characters:

Star Wars The Black Series Mandalorian Warrior (Holiday Edition)

We’re getting to Christmas coverage at The Nostalgia Spot one day early this year with this look at one of the latest in the Holiday Collection from Hasbro’s Star Wars line of action figures referred to as The Black Series. I have previously looked at a figure from the very popular streaming show The Mandalorian…

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by Joe

Bucky O’Hare Wave 3.5 Aniverse Storm Toad Trooper

It’s been a long time between releases by Bucky O’Hare license holder Boss Fight Studio. The last figure released by the company was 2018’s Storm Toad Trooper, a figure that arrived at my doorstep on Boxing Day 2018. Since that time, Boss Fight Studio has had sculpts and specs to show off, most notablyBruiser, but…

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by Joe

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June 11, 2023

NECA TMNT Toon “Mutant Interest Story” – Deluxe April O’Neil

By Joe
The long-awaited April O’Neil update has finally arrived!

Whenever I approach my rankings for NECA’s now long-running action figure series based on the 1987 cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I don’t always just pick the objectively best or worst toy in the line to slot them into the rankings. It’s a combination of the figure’s quality and the character’s importance. A great figure of someone like Scrag can only go so far because how many people really care about Scrag? Similarly, if NECA were to whiff on an integral character, say April O’Neil, that’s going to get a lot more attention than a subpar Screwloose. And NECA did whiff on April and my disatisfaction with that figure has earned it the dubious honor of worst in the series. NECA must have seen my rankings (I kid) because they decided to take another stab at April and the long anticipated redo is now hitting Target stores across the US. Is it a real improvement and is it worth the wait?

New on the left, old on the right, you tell me which is better.

NECA’s been seemingly so disatisfied with their April figure that they’ve never even re-released it up until now. And it makes sense if you think the figure is bad. Unfortunately, that original one was released during the summer of 2020 during that time when TMNT figures were just so hard to come by. Many never found one and the aftermarket prices have been ridiculous for what is a pretty mediocre action figure. A lot of collectors have had a pretty big hole in their collection as a result, but it looks like this new April is hitting stores in pretty substantial quantities.

There’s a ton of interest in this figure so I’m going to throw a bunch of comparison shots at you. Here she is with Zach and Casey Jones.
With Usagi and Hamato Yoshi.
With Bebop and Smash and the Triceratons always watching. Always watching…

This time around, April is getting the deluxe, or ultimate, treatment. She is single-packed in a box featuring artwork by Dan Elson designed to mimic the f.h.e. VHS releases from the 80s and 90s. It looks great and the window flap provides for a look at the figure itself before making a purchasing decision. Now, the problems with the previous April were that her scaling was off leaving her way too short and just overall small compared with the turtles. And her headsculpt was just bad. It was oversized, too round, and just soft in appearance. The opinion of me was that the body looked fine, but needed to be scaled up, while the head was the right scale, but just not well-executed from a sculpting standpoint.

“Hah hah, I can’t believe they thought you were good enough to be me!”
Here’s the figure alongside some reference art from an early episode of the show. You can decide for yourself how it looks.

NECA’s new April stands at just a tick under 5.75″ while the former stood at…5.5″. Okay, so we didn’t get much height out of this new one and that’s because…it’s basically the same figure. NECA reused almost the entire figure from before replacing only the upper torso and the head. The good news is the head looks much better. This actually looks like April and has her features. It’s tough to translate female characters from cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because they usually have slim features with no markings on their face. It’s all about getting the shape of the eyes right and their size, really. This April looks fine and sculptor Tomasz Rozejowski did a good job. What some people seem to dislike about this new April is her neck. To say that April has a swan-like neck would be an understatement. And she often was drawn that way so it’s a feature that I think she should have. Did NECA go too far? I don’t think so. And the more I look at it and reference art from the ’87 mini series (which should be the template for every character that made an appearance in the first five episodes) I really see no issue with it. Maybe if her collarbone was a little higher it lessen the illusion? Mostly, it seems a lot of the promo shots didn’t have her head seated all the way (the collar of her jumpsuit should come up just past her hair) which made it look worse, but in hand, this looks good and I’m happy.

“This is April O’Neil – Happy Hour news!”
“Come on, Vernon! I know where we can find a great story!” “Ohh, April, do we have to go back into the sewers?!”

As for the rest, well, the sculpt is fine. It’s just very slight. She looks fine on her own, but put her next to a turtle and she starts to look like the cosplayer from the old MGM Studios parade because the turtles just look so big by comparison. Height-wise, she’s a touch taller than them, but needs a little more. It’s unfortunate and I have to assume it was done this way just to save money. They could have taken the digital files, just upped them 10 percent, and cut new molds based off of that, but that was obviously deemed too expensive. She’s retailing for $37 with mostly old stuff (which we’ll get to) so she definitely doesn’t feel like the best value in the bunch, but it’s April and people will buy her. Scale with this line definitely isn’t its strong suit anyway, so I think this will be a case of your mileage may vary. Some will see this April as totally fine, others will want more size. I would like to see her bigger overall, but admittedly it’s mostly a nitpick on my part.

“Come on, April, I need you dig up some dirt on those so-called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!” “Oh come on, chief, I keep telling you they’re the heroes!”
“April, maybe you should just do what the boss tells you.” “Never, Irma, out there are the real stories that I was born to tell!”

The paint is still mostly the toon shading with a golden yellow on the front and a more mustard on the back. In comparison with the original release and cat April, the yellow is darker as the old one looks practically neon by comparison. Interestingly, the boots are no longer shaded gray on the backside. And actually, they’re not painted well either. The plastic underneath must be yellow as there’s a lot of yellow coming through the boot. The hinges are at least the right color and the feet are fine, but the main part of the boot is not. There’s still an abundance of black linework on the figure and it’s mostly clean. It’s a little messy around the belt, but otherwise okay. The flesh part of her chest has no linework on it, which is in contrast to the first version which had some lines for her clavicle and neck. I don’t know why they opted not to do it this time as I think it would have looked fine. The other area that’s a little messy are the elbows. NECA paints the joints and the paint flakes off because it just doesn’t adhere to that type of plastic. The hinge is flesh colored on that portion of the elbow and yellow on the other, which is fine, but it looks almost gross when it has pieces just flaking off.

“Nice kitty…”
“Whoa! Not nice kitty!”

The articulation for April is also the same as the past one, but we do have one, not great, difference. And that’s the head. NECA is using a double ball peg, which it did with the previous April, but it sits pretty low in the neck. That means you don’t get much play. She gets very little tilt and very little up and down. Her head also fights the ball peg when trying to rotate it. I think that’s because it’s designed to seat pretty deep into her head. It wants to snap back to a neutral position so I think it’s just not sliding nicely on the peg. Aside from that annoyance, the rest is the same. Diaphragm joint in the torso works well for rotation and some forward and back. Arms hinge out to the side just fine and the unusual NECA double elbows are in place which go way past 90 degrees. They’re a little stiff to rotate though, and her arms are very thin so do be cautious. Hips can do splits, kick forward and back, and the double-jointed knees work great. The feet hinge forward and back with an ankle rocker. Her feet are pretty small though so she can be a little tough to stand. This April should be able to handle just about any pose the character needs with the only real bummer being the stubborn neck articulation.

April has a lot of stuff, most of which is rather familiar.
“Wow, you guys REALLY like this story!”

As for accessories, well, April is pretty loaded. Unfortunately, most of her accessories are just rehash from the first release with very little new. For hands, we get a set of gripping hands that come on her in the box as well as sets of open hands, pointing hands, “peace” hands, thumbs up hands, and wide open hands. All of her hands have a standard, horizontal, hinge which you might think is fine for April, but vertical hinged gripping hands would work better for a microphone and hand camera. And she does have a microphone and hand camera and they’re the same as before. As is the tape recorder with wired mic. She still comes with the hamster statue, a baby pizza monster, and her turtle communicator. She also has another copy of The Hare and the Tortoise. And there’s also the doku plant. It’s a little darker than the previous one, so I guess you could treat one as the gazai plant if you also have the Splinter and Baxter two-pack.

The new heads will fit the old body just fine.
“Whose sick idea was this?!” “Uhh, umm, certainly not Master Splinter’s!”

As for new stuff, well we get some extra heads. April has a fairly neutral head by default and also comes with a smiling portrait and a blindfolded head. The smiling head looks lovely while the blindfolded one pairs well with the same headsculpt we got for Vernon. Unfortunately, they all fight that head peg just the same so the articulation isn’t any better. And if you’re wondering, yes, the new heads do fit on the old figure and make that figure look noticeably better. April also comes with the capture clamp/body manacle (it’s listed as both on the box) which is a metal restraining device that can lock around her. This may have been on her when she was blindfolded? I don’t remember, but it’s relatively neat and well-painted. Getting it on her isn’t the easiest thing, but it can be done. April also has a potted venus fly trap, mutated of course, that looks cool. And lastly, she has a photo frame of dear Aunt Aggie. Aggie, like other characters who have appeared in photo frames, is done as a digital render of a would-be action figure. Will she actually get immortalized in plastic? That seems doubtful, but never say never with this line.

“So Donatello, do you think my dear Aunt Aggie deserves her own action figure?!” “Don’t take this the wrong way, April, but no.”
“Sorry Irma, I couldn’t find you a date for tonight, but I saw this adorable house plant that I thought you’d like!” “How pathetic do you think I am April?! …I’ll take the plant.”

Was April 2.0 worth the wait? I don’t know. I guess if you didn’t have an April at all, then yeah, absolutely. Even if you did, like me, this feels like getting the character for the first time in some ways. I kept my April inside the street scene diorama out of view because I just didn’t like it very much and space is a precious resource. While I do wish this figure corrected the issue of April’s size vs the rest of the line, I do think this is a much better interpretation of the character. And if you have the other figure, it’s especially great that this one has multiple headsculpts so that old one can be tossed into a bin and never spoken of again. Is this April perfect? No, but it comfortably fits into the line and is a worthy entrant. I like the updated colors and some of the new accessories are fun. Just be mindful of the boots. Hopefully mine are just off and most of the rest feature better paint there, but otherwise, yeah, go get her.

At long last, the real fifth turtle is here and she’s good!

NECA’s deluxe version of April is sold exclusively at Target. She just started showing up and in pretty substantial quantities so if you haven’t come across this figure yet, just keep looking. Target is also planning on doing online drops for the next several Fridays at 9 AM EST as part of their Summer Geek Con. As of this writing, there’s no confirmation of what will actually be part of that drop, but it definitely wouldn’t be a surprise to see this figure included. Good luck!

Interested in more April O’Neil figures? Here’s a few more you can check out:

NECA TMNT Cartoon April O’Neil and Bashed Foot

There’s a line from one of my favorite Christmas movies, Bad Santa, in which the main character, Willy, says to The Kid, “Well, they can’t all be winners,” when The Kid pulls a candy corn out of his advent calendar. Bad Santa isn’t a movie for everyone, but the sentiment expressed by Willy in that…

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NECA TMNT Movie Ultimate April O’Neil – Signature Edition

NECA’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line has so been so successful that it’s allowed the company to branch out. It wasn’t that long ago that Playmates was the only game in town when it came to TMNT action figures and the company showed little to no interest in releasing anything other than the turtles themselves.…

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Hasbro MMPR x TMNT April O’Neil and Michelangelo

We have arrived at the last two-pack in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers x Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line of action figures from Hasbro and it’s that bodacious dude, Michelangelo, along with the ravishing reporter April O’Neil. There’s not going to be a whole lot to say about these figures at this point as, if…

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June 7, 2023

Mondo X-Men TAS 1/6 Scale Jubilee

By Joe
Let’s welcome young Jubilation Lee to the world of sixth scale action figures!

When one hears the phrase “mall babe” it implies a certain visual. Probably a short, young, girl with intentionally messy, short hair. There’s a certain confidence the phrase exudes so she has to have style. Maybe hot pink, bright blues, and certainly a long yellow coat with gloves to match! There has to be an attitude present in anyone deigning to call themselves such a thing so shades are a must. Boxy, hot pink shades would do best and we might as well toss some bubblegum for added effect. And just what part of the mall does a self-proclaimed mall babe setup shop? The food court – where else?! Any mall babe worth her weight in quarters needs a steady supply of chili fries and soda to wash it down. It’s a staple of the mall babe’s diet.

If what I am describing does not meet your own personal definition of a mall babe then clearly you weren’t watching X-Men in 1992. That paragraph describes Jubilee, the self-proclaimed mall babe of the team who was our gateway to the world of Marvel’s most famous superhero team (well, before The Avengers became a household name). This role as the audience surrogate is perhaps what has made Jubilee so popular, or at least, why both Mondo and Hasbro perceive her as popular enough to introduce her relatively early in their respective action figure lines. Jubilee had the privilege of being the second figure and second member of the X-Men introduced in Hasbro’s line of Marvel Legends based on the animated series and Mondo has essentially bestowed upon her that same honor. The only difference is Mondo went to a villain for its second release where as Hasbro held off on the villains for a little longer. For me personally, I always found the kid characters in shows as more patronizing than anything. Jubilee didn’t offend me though, and it was a great choice to use her as a way to introduce the audience to the X-Men, but she was never a favorite of mine. And with the price of Mondo’s figures being north of $200, I thought Jubilee was going to be one for me to skip. Then I saw the full reveal of her and found myself sucked in, and you know what, I don’t regret it one bit!

In addition to being an expert at blowing stuff up, as she puts it, young Jubilee is also an accomplished bubble blower.

Jubilee arrives in the same style of packaging as Magneto before. Mondo partnered with storyboard artist for X-Men, Dan Veesenmeyer, to adorn the box with actual model sheets production art of Jubilee from the show plus a brand new illustration by Veesenmeyer to shine on the front. It’s a five-panel, window box design though Mondo packages their figures very carefully so opening the Velcro front flap basically just reveals a bunch of tissue paper concealing a figure behind it, but it’s still nice. On the inside of the flap is a profile of Jubilee from X-Men showrunner Eric Lewald and his wife and fellow writer Julia which just adds to the overall atmosphere that this figure is a labor of love by those involved, something the Hasbro releases most certainly don’t possess.

“Wow! You’re so small and sucky!”

Jubilee stands at approximately 9.25″ once removed from the packaging. She’s close to 9.5″ factoring in her hair and if I pull out the handy-dandy reference art from the show, I can see that Jubilee is supposed to be right at 5′ to the top of her hair making this figure a little small if we’re talking true sixth scale. It’s not a big deal on its own, but it is going to compound things a bit when she’s placed beside Wolverine who came out a little tall if we’re talking true sixth scale with him. My assumption is that Mondo isn’t taking a literal approach to the scale and it’s more subjective. It’s one of those things that I think most won’t care about that much, but I do have to point it out as part of a review.

Attitude to spare.

Jubilee is depicted in her traditional show attire: pink shirt, blue shorts, blue boots, yellow gloves, and that big, yellow, trench coat. It’s a style that could only come out of the 90s and I can honestly say I have never in my life, 90s or any other decade, seen a person sporting such a look. It’s always been something that’s amused me about Jubilee. The sculptor for this figure is Alex Brewer and I think he did a great job of nailing Jubilee’s proportions. Her sunglasses are part of the headsculpt which I think is the right call to preserve the look of the character as she appeared in the show. The coat has her sleeves rolled up and the strap on the back. She also has those little rings by the collar which really captures the details present in the show. The coat is all plastic, no soft goods, but it is soft and pliable. She also has her yellow gloves, instead of the blue she had in the comics, and it looks like Brewer took a bit of a creative license with her face as more of her Chinese ancestry is reflected in her eyes. Jubilee, as presented in the show, was mostly white-washed, though I don’t think it was for any nefarious reasons.

I love that Mondo seems committed to spotlighting the opening title of the show as much as possible.

As was the case with Magneto, what really stands out with Jubilee is the paint work. Credited to Tom Rozejowski, the cel-shaded paint job on Jubilee really makes the figure pop. I’ve admired Tom’s work as a customizer for years so it’s great getting to see him show off with an official release. It starts at the hair where streaks of gray-blue are added for shading, a common tactic for cartoons and comics when dealing with black hair. I love the light pink streaks on her glasses and the black linework all throughout the coat and rest of the clothing. Three shades were used for the coat as the primary shading color is orange with a more brownish yellow for the interior of the coat. The direction of the shading is with purpose and follows the curves of her body and the flow of her coat. It looks fantastic and the paintjob is very clean across throughout the figure. About the only nitpick I can offer is that the orange on her coat is perhaps too orange when the show used more of a marigold to shade her coat. It would also often use a very light yellow in places that was almost white. Yellow is a hard color when dealing with paint and I will say this looks much better than that mustard color Hasbro utilized.

All you need is a spark.

In keeping with the other releases in this line, Mondo saw fit to include plenty of extra parts and accessories with Jubilee. For hands, she gets a set of fists, open hands, and clenching hands. She also gets two sets of effect hands and a pointing right hand with a couple of sparks at the end of her index figure, probably a callback to breaking out of her restraints. The effect hands are terrific. The first set has her hands in an open pose with stars shooting out in a nod to her appearance in the show’s opening. The effects are attached to the hands and done with red, translucent, plastic with painted, gold, stars at the end. The other effect hands have her powers coming from her palms in a big, conical, blast with stars shooting off the ends. It has a metallic paint job that does a great job of capturing the color spectrum to mimic Jubilee’s powers as best as can be. These ones are a tad on the heavy side, but I was able to get Jubilee posed with her blasts going forward so they can be worked around.

And now you know why she has the shades.

Jubilee also comes with a variety of heads to choose from. I did get the deluxe version of the figure, so I will have some extra stuff the standard version does not come with. Her default portrait is a neutral expression that very much looks like Jubilee to me. She can swap to an open-mouthed smile that works for a Jubilee getting in a quip type of expression and it would be my guess that this one gets the most use out of those who buy this set. She also has a glasses-down head with teeth-gritting and her hair is a touch more wild, good for use with her blast effects. For something more fun, there’s a bubblegum blowing head where the bubble is sculpted and painted pink with a couple swashes of white.

This one is here if you want it. Only putting it on once resulted in a little scuff on the neck of my figure. Would not recommend.

The “deluxe” edition of Jubilee includes two additional heads and another accessory. The first is a head depicting Jubilee as she looked in the episode “Jubilee’s Fairytale Theater” from the show’s final season. That season featured a redesign for the characters that gave Jubilee long hair and ditched her sunglasses. For this particular episode, Jubilee tells some kids a fairytale where she puts herself and fellow X-Men into the roles of the heroes. Jubilee was some sort of elf Robin Hood, so the head features her with long hair, a headband, and oversized elf ears. It looks fine, but since she featured an entirely different costume during the story, it’s not a particularly useful addition and more like an in-joke. I would have preferred just a normal Season Five head with long hair, though admittedly I would not have been likely to use such for display purposes either so I guess it doesn’t matter.

A sidewalk surfer.

The other bonus head features Jubilee with her shades down and a skateboarding helmet on. This is from the episode “Red Dawn” where she’s briefly seen skateboarding. To complete the look, she also has a pair of purple kneepads which are made out of a very soft, rubbery, plastic and fasten over her knees pretty easily. A skateboarder obviously needs a skateboard and she has one of those as well. It’s all blue with some shading and it features sculpted wheels. I’ve seen some gripes out there that the skateboard doesn’t have real wheels, but I don’t need my $200 action figure to roll around and potentially fall. It does not have peg holes either so I am hesitant to actually display her standing on this thing without some support. She stands on it fine though, and overall this is a pretty fun look and one that I think will see some use from me.

Jubilee is never far from her chili fries and soda. That’s, like, her thing, right?

Lastly, Jubilee has a couple of “mall babe” accessories. One of her first scenes, and possibly her best, features her accidentally nuking an arcade machine and sarcastically responding with “Yeah, a quarter,” when the manager asks her how much she thinks that machine cost. She gets a cup, and it’s modeled after that scene and it says “SLUR-P” on it and has some bubbles or something. It looks really cool for what it is and there’s even a bubble on the top that’s been pushed in to indicate what flavor she selected. One of Jubilee’s other lines from the show was “Does a mall babe eat chili fries?” which she says in response to her foster parents asking her if she’ll come visit them now that she’s going to live with the X-Men. Jubilee does indeed consume chili fries and she has a tray of them and they too were featured on the arcade cabinet she demolished by accident. It’s a yellow fast food tray and the fries inside have a red-brown sauce slathered over them. It’s not super detailed, but it’s from a cartoon that couldn’t be super detailed itself so I think this works just fine and it’s a really fun inclusion. Between the heads, hands, effect parts, and accessories, it’s going to be a lot of fun switching up Jubilee on the shelf. She also comes with the standard Mondo action figure stand. I consider it pretty useless, but maybe others find some use with these.

“Me and Wolverine can take on anyone!”

Okay, last and maybe least, we should break down Jubilee’s articulation. The articulation for this line has been adequate. It’s not really a homerun, but the designs are also limited and the articulation can’t interfere as much with a sculpt at this scale, plus there’s paint to be considered. Jubilee, for her part, has basically all of the points of articulation one would expect, save perhaps one area. And I think she moves about as well as could be expected. It starts with a double ball peg for the head so she can move around quite well up there. She doesn’t look up really at all, but everything else is fine. She at least doesn’t rub the collar of her coat with most of her heads and it’s really only the elf head that introduces any paint rub concerns, but we already established that few are likely to do much with that accessory.

“Did you say ‘anyone,’ girl?!” “Gulp.”

At the shoulders, we get the standard ball-hinge setup. They’re very tight and getting Jubilee’s arms out to the side takes a little work. Her biceps swivel where the arm meets the cuff of the jacket and that works fine. The elbows are single-hinged and will get pretty close to a 90 degree bend, but it’s basically that one area I mentioned before where some may have been hoping for more via a double joint. The hands are on ball-joints and Jubilee’s work much better than Wolverine and Magneto’s. I had some QC issues with Magneto, but Jubilee’s hands have been free and easy out of the box. The peg goes in and out of the forearm very easily and the hands will spin on the ball to allow you to line her hands up however you wish. Some of the effect hands aren’t as easy to move, but I’ve mostly left them alone as I want them to be on the tight side considering the heft they present.

In the torso, Jubilee has a diaphragm joint that lets her tilt to the side a bit and grants some rotation. You have to work around the coat to do so, but it’s not too difficult. There’s a ball joint at the waist that provides for some forward and back and rotation. At the hips, we get some big ball and socket joints. They’re done at an angle, so it limits her ability to do splits by quite a bit limiting her to about 45 degrees out to the side. Kicking forward is only a little better as she can’t get her leg all the way up into a horizontal position. I’m also backing off as the “diaper” piece gets in the way and those willing to push it could probably scratch out a little more. There’s a little play on the ball joint at the hips in the form of a thigh twist, but it’s minor. I’m surprised they didn’t sneak a cut into the thigh itself where her shorts meet her legs. The knees are double-jointed and are very smooth. She bends past 90 degrees there without effort. There’s no boot cut that I can see, and at the ankles we get a hinge and an ankle rocker. The hinge is pretty tight and seems to only go back one “click” and doesn’t really go forward at all. The ankle rocker is not steep at all and is more for adjustment purposes. Lastly, the little rings coming off of the collar of her jacket do move. They’re pegged in so they can be positioned slightly. I think this was done to prevent them from snapping off accidentally when posing her arms and they’re not really intended for anything else.

This figure is just a lot of fun. I’m even going to make use of this silly look!

Jubilee’s articulation is basically as expected. She’s going to be able to hit plenty of Jubilee poses on your shelf and she has enough range to cooperate well with her accessories. I do wish she could do wider stances a bit better than she can, but even that’s fine and it’s more her feet won’t stay flush on the surface due to the limitations of the ankle rocket. I’m mostly happy that it seems a lot of care was taken to try to prevent paint rub as there’s plenty of clearance at the head for her to look around without fear of rubbing on the collar. The angled hip joints are a bit weird, but they also have the benefit of reducing rub at the joint so I don’t think it’s a bad trade-off. She probably moves as well, if not better, than Wolverine which is impressive considering she has the big coat to work around. Magneto has a similar handicap with his cape, but came out far more limited than Jubilee.

The animated series shelf didn’t even exist a little over a year ago. Now it’s looking mighty crowded and we need to make some room for Gambit!

At the end of the day, the only thing stopping more people from buying this figure of Jubilee is price and scale. Some people just don’t collect sixth scale figures and I get it – they take up a lot of real estate. Even Jubilee, who is small for a sixth scale figure, still takes up more space than a Marvel Legends Build-a-Figure and you do have to be more thoughtful about where to ultimately place her since shelf dives are likely to be far more destructive considering the amount of paint present. Excepting those two hurdles, it’s hard to imagine someone making a better figure of Jubilee from X-Men than what Mondo has produced. She just looks fantastic and has so many useful accessories and optional parts that just adds to the enjoyment. I loved the Magneto release, but even I have to admit I’m likely to never use most of the heads he came with while with Jubilee I’m having a hard time picking one. Which is why I have to remind myself that what she looks like on my shelf today doesn’t have to be what she looks like tomorrow. It goes without saying, this figure absolutely blows the Hasbro one out of the water and it should considering the price difference. At the same time, it’s easier to tell that Mondo set out to make the definitive Jubilee from the cartoon. The attention to detail is present in almost every facet of this release where as the Hasbro one always felt like a cheap cash grab. If you love X-Men and want the characters from that show on your self in the best way possible, then you’ll be pretty content with this Jubilee.

I purchased Jubilee direct from Mondo which included the extra parts. A dedicated retail version is expected to follow at other locations and is supposed to be priced at $195 (you can still preorder that version direct from Mondo right now). It’s pricey no matter what version you get, but in my opinion she’s worth it. And up next is sure to be another fan-favorite as the cajun himself, Gambit, is expected before summer’s end and I cannot wait to see how he turned out.

Interested in the rest of what Mondo has to offer for X-Men, or maybe you want to check out a smaller scale? I’ve got you covered:

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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by Joe

Mondo X-Men TAS 1/6 Scale Magneto

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:…

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by Joe

Marvel Legends X-Men Animated Series Jubilee

There’s a belief when it comes to children’s entertainment that the young audience needs a surrogate on screen, someone who they could believably place themselves in the role of. For the animated series X-Men, that character was Jubilee. The role was of such importance to the property that the earlier pilot, not affiliated with the…

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by Joe

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May 31, 2023

NECA Gargoyles – Ultimate Broadway

By Joe
Broadway’s here and he brought snacks!

We are getting oh so very close to assembling the original Manhattan Clan in action figure form! Disney’s take on gothic beasts originally included the following gargoyles: Goliath, Hudson, Bronx, Brooklyn, Broadway, and Lexington. The clan would grow from there, but those six are still the first that come to mind for me when I think Gargoyles, and with the release of Broadway we’re just one figure away from having the entire crew in place. Broadway arrives hot on the heels of Brooklyn, or in tandem, depending on where you got your figures. For me, it was basically simultaneous and the arrival of both was very much welcomed by me after only getting one Gargoyles release over the past calendar year. And like virtually all of the rest in this line, Broadway is pretty much as expected. That’s not to say it’s all good, but it is mostly good and I do think that today’s figure will be the favorite in the line for some folks out there.

Broadway arrives just like the others in an oversized NECA Ultimates five-panel box with new artwork by artist and sculptor of the figure Djordje Djokovic with paint by Emiliano Santalucia. I was a little critical of the design of Brooklyn’s box as I felt he didn’t mesh with the background, but for Broadway, it looks terrific and there’s even a little easter egg in the background. As nice as the box is though, I couldn’t care less as I’m interested in what’s inside the box. Broadway, in his neutral stance, is about 6.5″ tall give or take. It’s an inexact science considering the gargoyles always have their knees bent to some degree and that’s true of how I have Broadway. Like the other releases, there’s influences from the cartoon series present in Broadway’s design as well as some added realism. It looks fine in some respects, but maybe not so much in others. His headsculpt is pretty damn close to the show as he has his underbite and there’s a nice roundness to his features. The proportions look great to my eye between the size of his head his fin-like ears and the head is well-painted with some nice shading to help bring out his features.

Broadway is usually pretty cheerful, but he can get angry with the best of them.

Below the head, I have some issues. Broadway is the chubby one of the bunch as seemingly all 90s cartoons needed a fatty who loved food. I don’t recall many jokes at his expense in regards to his weight, and it’s just a feature of his character. NECA did include his rather rotund belly, but they also made Broadway look pretty well-defined when it comes to his muscles. In some ways, it reminds me of 90s Marvel cartoons where seemingly every male character was jacked, even the more portly ones. This wouldn’t bother me if NECA stopped at just the limbs, but it looks like they tried to sculpt some definition to his abs which is weird. And it’s made more weird by the shading along the sides of his belly and a random stripe across his pectorals. It strikes me as a case of just overdoing things. We love our chonky-boy Broadway, just let him be himself, NECA. Not every character needs to be absolutely shredded.

I’m not sure this guy needs weapons to look scary.

Beyond that, the figure does look pretty good. I may disagree with the approach subjectively, but objectively this is a well-sculpted figure. I also think NECA nailed the color of Broadway which is basically a pale teal. There’s more green to him than Demona and I like how his flesh blends with the more saturated blue of his loincloth. The inside of his wings has a lot more yellow applied to create a grassy looking green that’s shaded well. There’s a nice gradient to the membrane with the rear being a dark blue. Unlike Brooklyn, Broadway likely shares some parts with Goliath and Hudson, but it may only be limited to the hands and feet. If they are reused, it’s appropriate reuse and Broadway is going to make up for it with quite a few accessories to pick through.

“What is this?! Vegetables?!”

And those accessories include a bunch of hands, some weapons, food, and a secondary portrait. Broadway has a set of open hands, a set of fists, a tight gripping right hand with vertical hinge, and a loose gripping left hand. His secondary portrait features an aggressive, open-mouthed, pose with the eyes whited-out, which is what we’ve come to expect in a secondary portrait for the line. It looks good, but I always think of Broadway as the most light-hearted of the group so I doubt I’ll make much use of this head. For weapons, we get more Kenner homage stuff with an axe and a morning star. They’re styled and painted in a manner similar to Brooklyn’s lance and they also fit together to form one, long, super weapon. It’s a bit of a bummer that he doesn’t have two, tight, gripping hands to properly wield it with two-hands. Then again, sort of like with the head, I’m unlikely to pose him with random weapons when he comes with food! There’s a turkey leg with a big bite taken out of it that feels right at home with a comic-relief, food, monster. He also has this piece of green sludge, or moss, or algae, or whatever it is which is from the first episode of the show and was consumed by Broadway in the rookery. Best of all though, is the container of popcorn which is well-sculpted and lovingly painted. Yeah, that’s the one going into the display for me.

“Hey bro, let me have some of that popcorn.”

Articulation hasn’t really been a homerun for this line of figures and Broadway is basically more of the same. His more rounded proportions make him feel rather similar to Hudson in some ways, but since he lacks clothing he has a bit more freedom of movement. The head is on the customary double-ball peg which will allow for plenty of rotation and nuance posing. He can look down pretty well, but lacks much range going up as all of these figures seem to have their necks at a bit of an angle coming forward, and without any independent neck articulation they can’t really look up. Which is a shame considering the wings, which peg into the back and are hinged. They’re ratcheted, so you get a handful of positions and they do swivel, but are so damn big and cumbersome. They’re essentially flight wings, but the gargoyles always have to look at the ground since they can’t look forward when flying. Yeah, I’m as sick of complaining about the wings as you probably are reading said complaints, but it’s going to be out there until NECA comes up with a better solution.

“BACK OFF MAN I’M STARVING!”

At the shoulders, we have the usual ball-hinge setup that allows for full rotation while limiting Broadway to a less than horizontal position when trying to raise his arms out to the side. The biceps swivel works fine and the double-elbows will go past 90. At the wrists, we get swivels and hinges with at least one gripping hand having the preferred vertical hinge. In the torso, there’s what feels like a double-ball peg in the diaphragm. It really doesn’t offer much in the way of forward and back, but the figure can rotate there pretty easily and there’s some side-to-side tilt as well. At the waist, we get another twist. For the hips, good old ball and socket joints which allow Broadway to kick out to the side to a position quite close to a full split. Kicking forward works better than it did with Brooklyn, though like the rest in this line, his leg tends to want to go out to the side the further forward you push it, but it can get up to waist level and a little beyond. Kicking back works pretty well too, if you value that. The single-hinged knees bend about 90 degrees, though these monster types are intended to stand with knees bent, though it can go straight if you would rather that. They do swivel, and below that we get ankle and toe articulation where both feature a hinge and rocker. The ankle rocker works pretty nice, while the toe rocker forces you to fight it a bit due to the shape of the sculpt, but it works. At the tail, the usual hinged peg plus bendy wire provides for some freedom of movement. It’s nice and tight on my figure, better than it’s been with most of the rest, so it works like a third leg if needed. Funny enough, Broadway is probably the easiest for me to stand so far and I haven’t really needed to rely on the tail for much help.

Broadway is basically as expected for those who have been collecting the line. I think he’s a little better than average though as I like his sculpt, for the most part, and I think both portraits turned out well. He probably articulates the best out of all of the male gargoyles, understanding he still has his limitations. I do kind of wish he had an articulated jaw since he has lots of food accessories, but I do like how the neutral head turned out. Maybe they could have scrapped the extra weapons most will never use in favor of a third, eating, head. Where he could have been improved is with a softer approach to the torso and more focused shading. The sculpt preference is more subjective on my part, but the shading is a bit weird. And, of course, the wings remain an issue. Especially for Broadway who many are likely to pose snacking on their shelf. He doesn’t need his wings spread out in an aggressive posture when chowing down on popcorn. He, more than perhaps the rest, would have been better served with something more casual.

They look pretty good together, but damn these wings.

If you want to add Broadway to your Gargoyles collection he can be found in various places online and at local comic shops. He is likely to head to the big box retailers in the near future as well so if you primarily get your figures in those places just keep an eye out. He may also run a few dollars cheaper when that happens. MSRP appears to be about $37 or $38 with some retailers charging over $40. He’s a solid enough value at that price considering he does feature plenty of unique tooling and a solid assortment of accessories. I think this one is likely to be a favorite among those who collect this line, and if you are collecting it, well you have to have Broadway in your display.

Looking for more Gargoyles reviews? Check these out:

NECA Gargoyles – Ultimate Brooklyn

For the first time in a long time, we did not have a Turtle Tuesday post this week. We do, however, have a Warriors by Night Wednesday for you! It feels like NECA’s Gargoyles line is the most stop-and-start action figure line I’m into of late. The line has seen large gaps between releases and…

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by Joe

NECA Gargoyles – Ultimate Thailog

One of last year’s biggest announcements in the world of action figures was NECA’s acquisition of the Gargoyles license. It had been decades since Gargoyles figures occupied real estate at the toy and hobby shops of America and fans of the series were eager to see what NECA had cooking. It being 2021 though, collectors…

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NECA Gargoyles – Ultimate Bronx

Well, here’s something different. Bronx, the good gargoyle dog, is NECA’s fourth entry in its relatively young line of action figures based on the beloved Disney Afternoon series Gargoyles. And not only is Bronx here all on his own, he’s also got something for his buddy Goliath that collectors of this line have been begging…

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by Joe

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