September 5, 2024

Dragonlance – Dragons of Fate (2023)

By Joe
Cover art by Philipp Urlich

What’s this? After only doing one novel review in the 10+ year history of this blog we have two in the span of a week? That’s what happens when yours truly stumbles upon new stories in a beloved franchise. I outlined my experience with Dragonlance in last week’s review of Dragons of Deceit so there’s no need to do so here. To summarize, I loved the series as a kid and was surprised to find out that the writing duo of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had returned to the world of Krynn with a new trilogy. I read through Dragons of Deceit in a somewhat leisurely manner, but it picked up near the end which catapulted me into the second book in the trilogy, Dragons of Fate.

Dragons of Deceit introduced the character Destina Rosethorn, a literal child of destiny and daughter of a Solamnic Knight who perished battling the forces of the Queen of Darkness in the famed battle at the High Clerist Tower which also claimed the life of Sturm Brightblade. Destina was a difficult character to latch onto. She is somewhat cold and detached due to her devotion to The Measure, a strict set of rules laid out by the Knights of Solamnia. She’s also a privileged woman raised in a castle. When much of that life of luxury is taken from her she is willing to abandon her morals and put the world in extreme peril to basically regain her castle and her status. Her plan is to travel back in time using the famed Device of Time Journeying and essentially trick her father with a cowardice potion so that he abandons his post and survives the battle.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Destina found herself mixed up with a kender named Tasslehoff Burrfoot. We know Tas well as he’s a featured character in most of the Weis/Hickman novels and through some polymorph magic he even comes to think he’s married to Destina, but not Destina. She tricks him by disguising herself as a kender which basically secures Tas’ devotion to her. She also impresses a monk named Kairn and it’s he who is in possession of the Device of Time Journeying. And because of Tas and his unwillingness to return to the site where his friend Sturm died, he, Destina, and Kairn end up getting sent back through time to the Inn of the Last Home on the night the Companions gathered and the events that would lead into the War of the Lance are put in motion.

It’s here that all goes wrong. Raistlin, being a magic user of some proficiency, sees through Destina and notices the gem dangling around her neck: the fabled Graygem which contains the essence of the god, Chaos. He also notices her trying to slip a potion into Sturm’s beverage for it would seem Destina changed her plan on the fly and hoped to make a coward out of him in a bid to save her father. Bad move, because it sets a string of wild events into motion where Raistlin goes to strike at her with his staff, Tas tries to stop him with the blue crystal staff of Goldmoon, and Kairn hastily tries to reactive the Device of Time Journeying to send them all back to where they came from. Only it’s just Kairn that gets transported back. He winds up back in Palanthas in the present with the Device of Time Journeying blown to bits. And the others? Destina and Tas wake up in a forest outside the High Clerist Tower, only it’s still under construction. Raistlin and Sturm are with them as well and they soon see a Solamnic knight pass by with a wizard at his side: the famed duo of Huma Dragonbane and Magius, fated to die in the coming dies driving off the Queen of Darkness.

That is where the story begins. It presents quite the predicament as our time-displaced friends need to figure out how to survive in the past without also upsetting the past. Meanwhile, in the present, the wizards Justarius and Dalamar the Dark are tasked by Astinus (who is the god of neutrality, Gilean, in his human aspect) with repairing the Device and coordinating a rescue effort. And it’s only via Astinus that they even know where to look. Astinus is an immortal being who records all of history as it’s happening, and when they go to research the past they find his pages have been wiped blank and the names Raistlin Majere and Sturm Brightblade have been added to the roster of those who stood in defense of the High Clerist Tower during the Third Dragon War.

If you read my review of the previous book, then you know I was only lukewarm on the material. The new characters weren’t particularly engaging and it felt like it was all just a long ruse to provide Weis and Hickman a chance to play with their old toys – the Heroes of the Lance. Dragons of Fate doesn’t really do much to dispell that suspicion, but it is a far more entertaining read. Destina is basically sidelined and the story leaves her with little to do. This is more the story of Raistlin and Magius. Magius is basically a hero to all wizards of the future because of his prowess as a war wizard and his friendship with Huma. The legendary Huma is celebrated, while only the wizards choose to acknowledge the contributions of his greatest friend. Raistlin will be gifted his staff after passing the dreaded test at the Tower of High Sorcery. It was more like a consolation prize since he emerged from said test in such dreadful condition, but it’s a treasured artifact of his and now he has a chance to meat the man who crafted it.

The story also introduces new wrinkles to how time travel works in Dragonlance. Previously, time was always referred to as a river. One person cannot hope to have much influence over how a wide river flows. It takes something much more which is why Destina had no fear about harming the future by saving one man. We also have it confirmed that actions in the past do not immediately impact the present. Time is a river, and when the past is altered it’s like letting water through a dam. Those downstream can see the oncoming rush of water and can either act in response or wait for its arrival. This is illustrated by the blank pages in Astinus’ book and I suspect it will play an even bigger role in the third part of the trilogy which I plan to start after I finish writing this.

The other new wrinkle thrown in is that time does not affect the dead, so to speak. When Raistlin and Sturm are thrust back in time we find out the keeper of souls essentially lost them. They have returned to their mortal body to inhabit it at a specific point in time (the gathering at the inn), but they retain all memories of the lives they lead including the stuff yet to come. This impacts Sturm very little who died a hero’s death, something he aspired to. As for Raistlin, he redeemed himself at the end of Test of the Twins, but his fate is rather miserable. His former apprentice, Dalamar, fears what he may do in the past with access to the Graygem. The Graygem is Chaos and Chaos is the one being that can influence the past with relative ease. Its presence at a moment in time when Takhisis, Queen of Darkness, was roaming the world is incredibly dangerous for if she were to obtain its power it would likely allow her to triumph over the other gods and claim the world as her own.

And that’s the main conflict. The people in the past need to find a way back to the present, the people in the present need to find a way to reach the people of the past, and everyone needs to keep the Graygem away from Takhisis. The book is basically the same length as the prior one, sub 400 pages, and it moves rather quickly. Momentary conflicts are resolved quickly almost like the authors are handwaving it away. Broken Device of Time Journeying? No problem! The battle between Huma and Takhisis is the thing hanging over everyone’s heads, including the reader’s, and it’s a conflict that the book will save for the end to decide if it happens or not. There’s a detour with Tas that’s kind of ho-hum, and a romance angle for Destina that doesn’t land. What does work is basically everything with Raistlin. Weis and Hickman seem to love writing Raistlin as much as they love writing Tas and they’re quite proficient at it. While I do worry this may be a bit too much of a redemption arc for a character they clearly love, I can’t deny I did not enjoy seeing him adventure with Magius. And if anything, it’s a shame Weis and Hickman waited so long to actually write for the character of Magius because he’s another fun one.

The story is obviously not over as we have a third book just released to wade into. I enjoyed the ride Weis and Hickman took me on with this one, though I have some reservations about where it leaves us. Perhaps those worries will be unfounded, but it almost feels like we’re doing a relay race with the Heroes of the Lance and we may get handed off to the less interesting characters for the finale. Hopefully, I am wrong. I do still wonder what the ultimate resolution will be here and what kind of lasting impact, if any, it will have on the world of Dragonlance. Could this be some really exciting reset or will time right itself and ultimately this was just a fun diversion for three books? Who can say? Well, those who have already finished the new book can and I plan to join them in the coming weeks.

Dragonlance – Dragons of Deceit (2022)

My favorite series of books as a youth belonged to Dragonlance. The Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that spawned numerous novels was a world I enjoyed inhabiting. I didn’t fall into Dragonlance until I was in middle school and my very first book in the long-running series was Dragons of Summer Flame by Margaret Weis…

Keep reading
by Joe

NECA Dungeons & Dragons Strongheart Ultimate Action Figure

It was roughly a year ago that I added Warduke to my collection from NECA Toys’ Dungeons & Dragons line of action figures. Warduke is basically a modern rendition of the character as featured in the vintage D&D toyline from LJN in the 80s. While I wasn’t a fan of that old toyline, I could…

Keep reading
by Joe

NECA Dungeons & Dragons Warduke Ultimate Action Figure

When it comes to the subject of New Year’s Resolutions, I consider the topic to be a fairly silly one. If there’s something in your life that you could improve upon, or a habit that should be broken, don’t wait for a new year to try to make that change – just do it! Making…

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by Joe

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September 3, 2024

MOTU Turtles of Grayskull Splinter-Skull

By Joe
Things are getting out of hand so here comes Splinter to lay down the law.

A couple week back I bemoaned the Walmart exclusive Krang from Mattel’s Masters of the Universe Origins – Turtles of Grayskull line for being particularly troublesome to track down. I couldn’t even find one in store or online to purchase at MSRP and had to buy it from a third party – on Walmart’s website no less. Contrast that to today’s review of the Splinter-Skull figure (from here on just referred to as Splinter) that’s exclusive to Target. It went up for preorder probably six or eight weeks ago with an actual release date. I missed the preorder, but when release date rolled around there it was online and in-store. No problem.

There’s a lot more sculpted detail than usual with this figure.

Splinter is the third deluxe figure in this line released at Target. The deluxe tag doesn’t really refer to the figure itself, more the fact that it comes with a build-a-figure part for Metal-Boto, the Metalhead Roboto mashup. Aside from that, Splinter is not much different from the rest of the line in that you get a figure and an accessory. The difference with Splinter is while he’s on the MOTU Origins body, he’s a rat so he needs a little added texture. I don’t think what’s here is anything new, there are other beast men in this line that likely benefited from a furry sculpt, but it is new to me.

If you want something closer to a vintage Splinter you can ditch the cape and even the harness.

Splinter is basically the sensei we know and love from TMNT crossed with King Grayskull. That means he gets to wear a harness over his usual kimono and has a big, fur-trimmed, cape and spear. The head portrait seems to very much be drawing from the classic Playmates Splinter as he has a very large nose with his teeth poking out. The kimono is in the same color as it was in the ’87 animated series and is done with soft plastic that clasps in the front. The torso piece is separate from the portion that covers his thighs which is basically done as a belt. The cape is cumbersome, but stays on. It just clips around his neck somewhat loosely, but certainly adds a regal quality to the presentation. Splinter is also rocking some braids this time and the typical MOTU bracers and leg wraps.

Welcome to Hot Rat Summer.

What really stands out though is the physique. We’re just not used to seeing Splinter as anything but a somewhat frail, old, rat-man. This Splinter is positively jacked and it’s almost funny to behold. He looks great and Splinter can be a big, tough, guy if he wants, but it is very different for the character. I don’t know if that is something that will bother anyone, but it’s the first thing I see when I look at him. He’s a big, beefy, rat boy and I’m tempted to display him shirtless for maximum effect.

“Whoa Sensei, have you been workin’ out?”

Splinter actually comes with two accessories: a spear and an extra hand. The extra hand is a left hand and it’s in a clawing pose, I suppose. The default hands are standard gripping hands. The spear has a translucent blue tip and bronze handle. It feels just a tad short and I wish there was an extra half inch to the handle, but it’s fine. The spearhead can separate from the handle and be held like a sword as well, if you so choose. Articulation for Splinter is the same as always with the only addition here being the tail which connects via a hinged ball peg. It’s slightly preposed to begin with so it has limited use. A bendy wire would have been neat, but I wasn’t expecting one either.

Some assembly required.

The other accessories are the build-a-figure pieces. Splinter comes with the torso and shell of Metal-Boto which is welcomed since we previously received the right arm, hips, thighs, and head. Now we have something to connect those stray parts to and the only pieces missing now are both feet and the left arm. He also has a few more weapons expected too. Since this is a modular line, you can assemble the figure with parts from other previously released characters for a Frankenstein approach. Before, that couldn’t be done because the head joint is unique in that it has an action feature. Turning Metal-Boto at the waist causes the red cover for the jaw to move up and down. It’s kind of cool, I guess. The rest of the figure will be included with the upcoming Two-Bopsteady expected in October.

It’s not hard to find some parts to make this guy both complete and creepy.

Splinter is a figure I wasn’t that excited for initially and was only planning on buying to get the Metal-Boto pieces. I’m happy to say I have been pleasantly surprised by what Mattel did here. I dig this look for Splinter and there’s enough of the original character preserved in this version to make him feel familiar as well. His weapon is more interesting than most and his armor pieces have actual utility. I think this figure looks pretty cool with everything on or everything off and even some mix in between. He’s a nice addition to the collection and I’m really looking forward to assembling Metal-Boto in the near future.

And this will continue to go on forever.

Check out more from Mattel’s MOTU Origins Turtles of Grayskull line:

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Shredder

For today’s latest Turtle Tuesday action figure review, I think we can go a little light. That’s because I am looking at yet another action figure release from the Mattel Masters of the Universe Origins – Turtles of Grayskull crossover line between the heroes and villains of MOTU and those of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.…

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by Joe

MOTU Turtles of Grayskull Krang

Two words that are much hated in the toy collecting community are “Store Exclusive.” Add a “Walmart” in front of that phrase and you get something akin to a worst nightmare. The world of “collectibles” has always relied on same degree of scarcity. The 90s saw a collector boom across various mediums which created a…

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by Joe

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Skeletor

When it’s come to the Turtles of Grayskull line by Mattel, I have mostly stayed in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side of the pool. I have all four turtle boys plus Sla’ker, who is more Slash than Faker if you ask me. The one exception has been Mouse-Jaw, but the classic Masters of the…

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by Joe

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August 29, 2024

Dragonlance – Dragons of Deceit (2022)

By Joe
Cover art by Philipp Urlich.

My favorite series of books as a youth belonged to Dragonlance. The Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that spawned numerous novels was a world I enjoyed inhabiting. I didn’t fall into Dragonlance until I was in middle school and my very first book in the long-running series was Dragons of Summer Flame by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. If you know anything about Dragonlance then you know that’s a really odd place to start. I ended up there because I needed a novel to read for school and my best friend had just finished reading it so he let me borrow it. A dragon composed of molten lava on the cover while a knight in clad in black armor challenged it certainly looked interesting enough so I jumped in and enjoyed. Sure, I was confused by some aspects of the story and I had to piece things together either on my own or by peppering my buddy with questions.

And I had to do that because Dragons of Summer Flame is basically the seventh novel in the series, though someone just looking at the various titles would think it was the fourth. That’s because the first book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, continued through to …Spring Dawning which concluded the first story and gave way to the Twins trilogy. And those are just the books written by the chief architects of Dragonlance, Weis and Hickman. Numerous other authors contributed to Dragonlance and I would go on to read some of them, but mostly stuck with the original authors. I would end up reading the main series almost backwards as after Summer Flame I went to Time of the Twins. It would be years before I finally read the original trilogy. I would also read the first fifth age trilogy by Jean Rabe and Weis and Hickman returned with the War of Souls which I read as well as The Dark Disciple and the Forgotten Chronicles. Until now, the last Dragonlance book I read was Dragons of the Hourglass Mage released in 2009.

Like a lot of things, I’ve lost touch with a franchise I once adored. Some of that was due to the dreadful animated movie released based on Dragons of Autumn Twilight. It did not spawn a franchise. I thought the franchise was dead as Wizards of the Coast seemed to favor other settings, namely Forgotten Realms, and I had heard rumblings of legal entanglements where Dragonlance was concerned. I basically found out recently that those issues had been resolved and Weis and Hickman have returned for what I suppose is assumed to be their final Dragonlance trilogy which they have dubbed Dragonlance Destinies. It worked out rather well for me as I had two books to catch up on with the third set to release in August. It’s like a no wait cheat code!

Dragonlance novels are basically intended for those in their teens. I do not go into this first book expecting something more than that. I don’t know if the authors reject that assumption or not, but it is how they read. Dragonlance is anchored by a handful of well-developed characters dropped into a fantasy world that’s fairly idealized and often cliched. It’s not a harsh or realistically portrayed environment, or rather, as realistic as fantasy can be. There’s no mention of chamber pots or flesh rot. The government operates as it should, for the most part, and there are pretty clear lines of good and evil. The main character in this new trilogy is literally named after the word destiny so there’s often a lack of subtlety. The setting appealed to me as a kid because, well, dragons! They’re D&D dragons so they’re magical beasts of various colors that can communicate as well as humans, if not better. There are gods who play a huge role in the machinations of the mortals that dwell on the world of Krynn with most getting directly involved in the plots. In other words, this is definitely not A Song of Ice and Fire, the most recent fantasy setting I immersed myself in.

The Destinies trilogy begins with Dragons of Deceit. It’s an interesting place to start as it’s set during the War of the Lance. Destina Rosethorn is a young woman of noble birth. Her father is a Knight of Solamnia and a minor character from the Dragonlance Chronicles books. He’s mostly known for dying in the battle at the High Clerist Tower which also claimed the life of Sturm Brightblade. We begin just before that and then move past it. Destina is left with just her mother who came from a tribe of humans more aligned with nature than chivalry. Solamnic law would have her father’s estate pass to the next male heir, and Destina being an only child complicates that. There was a will in which her father named her heir, but it was burned in the raid on the city of Palanthas around the time of her father’s death.

As is probably expected, everything collapses. Destina’s cousin is able to secure a court order to her father’s estate meaning she loses Castle Rosethorn, which has been in her family for generations. Her betrothed leaves her since she no longer has the backing of a noble family and even her mother returns to her people. Destina is left all alone, though worth noting she is not homeless as she was allowed to retain the family’s home in Palanthas which her father kept for when he needed to do business in the main city (she had a really hard life up to this point…). Still, she is unable to reconcile this new life as her own, but a story she comes across in one of her father’s books about the Device of Time Journeying gives her an idea.

It’s at this point that Dragonlance veterans known what Destina found. The Device of Time Journeying is a central part of the Legends trilogy. Destina wants to find it so that she can go back in time and save her father so that none of this will ever happen. The problem there is her father died a noble death which is essentially what every Solamnic Knight aspires to. Destina displays a knowledge of The Measure, a list of rules and laws that guide all Solamnic people, but is willing to betray her own self and her own moral code to undo what has been done. That’s because she hatches a plan with a renegade wizard named Unger to give her father a potion of cowardice so that he would flee the battle and thus spare his own life.

The issue that arises from her plan is that Dragonlance has established some strict rules when it comes to time travel. Time is explained as a river and one person alone cannot impact its flow. It is said that only the races of chaos can actually change time. Destina, being a human, is not among one of those races. That is why Unger suggests she carry with her the Graygem, which is a gem that contains the essence of the god, Chaos. It’s a central item in Dragons of Summer Flame so we basically know what’s going to happen with it, but at this point in time Unger has simply stumbled upon on it. He has seen a vision of the future which includes this gem being smashed and the gods vanishing. Seeking to either avert that future or profit from it somehow, Unger has tracked it to a Dwarven kingdom, but he was savagely beaten when trying to obtain the artifact through deceitful means. Unger is the catalyst for this adventure, and it wouldn’t be much of a story if this threat of time travel didn’t bare fruit.

Without getting too in the weeds and spoiling the plot, I will say that Destina’s journey puts her on the path of the famed Heroes of the Lance. She is merely a conduit for the authors to play with these characters once again, and by time travel no less, they can essentially revive those who are dead. It’s an interesting choice since it’s been preestablished that time is hard to change in any meaningful way, but Dragons of Summer Flame presented an ending that was pretty controversial at the time. It was basically a reset for Dragonlance and one that may have been essentially mandated by the forces in charge of the actual game. When Weis and Hickman came back to write The War of Souls trilogy, some viewed it as them “fixing” what had become of Dragonlance in its fifth age. Is this story going to be a way to undo essentially all of that? Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought.

The movements of the plot are a bit plodding, but the book itself is less than 400 pages so it’s not exactly sloth-like. It’s biggest obstacle is Destina herself. She feels inconsistent. She’s a smart and capable woman apparently devoted to her father and The Measure, but lacks any sort of conviction. If we had been spending stories upon stories with her, some of the events of this book would feel like a real betrayal of her character. At times, the book itself even brings this up, but merely acknowledging it doesn’t remedy it. The introduction of the other Heroes of the Lance feels a bit like a crutch too. Weis and Hickman appear disinterested in writing a novel without the kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot and he will worm his way into this one essentially becoming a de-facto main character by its end. If Dragonlance has a main character, it’s basically Tas. There are also moments where the plot moves quickly, and I don’t just mean time skips. Things that need to happen or items that need to be found basically just are. It’s remarkably convenient that a character like Unger exists for Destina to come in contact with.

The conclusion of this part of the story is, by far, the most interesting part of the book. Everything leading up to that point was fine. I was carried by my nostalgic affection for this series and I spent considerable time lounging on a beach in Jamaica with nothing to do except drink and read. I didn’t become invested though until that end. I suppose one of the hallmarks of a good book is it makes you want to immediately crack open the next one, should it exist, Dragons of Deceit did accomplish that. I won’t know how worthwhile it is until I’ve read the trilogy, but for now, it’s a start.

Is D&D your thing? Well, I hope you like toys then:

NECA Dungeons & Dragons Strongheart Ultimate Action Figure

It was roughly a year ago that I added Warduke to my collection from NECA Toys’ Dungeons & Dragons line of action figures. Warduke is basically a modern rendition of the character as featured in the vintage D&D toyline from LJN in the 80s. While I wasn’t a fan of that old toyline, I could…

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by Joe

NECA Dungeons & Dragons Warduke Ultimate Action Figure

When it comes to the subject of New Year’s Resolutions, I consider the topic to be a fairly silly one. If there’s something in your life that you could improve upon, or a habit that should be broken, don’t wait for a new year to try to make that change – just do it! Making…

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by Joe

Hasbro Dungeons & Dragons Drizzt Do’Urden and Guenhwyvar

I was quite surprised when Hasbro unveiled a deluxe action figure set starring the Forgotten Realms hero, Drizzt Do’Urden. Drizzt was a character I was familiar with going back into my middle school days when I traded Star Wars novels for Dragonlance. Even though my nose was buried in stories about Raistlin Majere and Tanis…

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by Joe

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

August 27, 2024

Transformers x Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Party Wallop

By Joe
A collaboration 40 years in the making.

The list of properties the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles haven’t crossed over with gets shorter by the day. When I look back to the 1980s, I view the big action figure lines as Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, Transformers, The Real Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. TMNT has crossed over with Ghostbusters in the past and we’ve covered much of the current TMNT x MOTU releases from the past year as well. We also know, thanks to the book Rad Plastic, that Playmates wanted to do a TMNT x Star Wars line, but it didn’t come to fruition. They did get to touch on Star Trek, and the turtles have also had releases with the likes of Batman, Stranger Things, Cobra Kai and Street Fighter.

Now the turtles can aid the Autobots in their never-ending fight against the Decepticons. And I guess save Christmas.

Well, scratch another off the list as 2024 is the year that TMNT and Transformers got together to make a baby. A robot baby. Transformers are no stranger to a bit of cross-promotion. That franchise has collaborated with Back to the Future and Ghostbusters as well as current Hasbro property G.I. Joe. Transformers has even collaborated with Pepsi and Target, so that’s a brand that’s pretty much up for anything. It’s actually surprising that it’s taken this long for TMNT to get the Transformers treatment. Hasbro already did some work with the brand via the Power Rangers cross-over so a relationship was already established. Plus, the turtles have their own iconic vehicle to contribute to Transformers just like BTTF and Ghostbusters which is precisely why we have Party Wallop.

Turtle Vans – Assemble!

TMNT fans know that the turtles drive around in a battle van of sorts. In the 1987 animated series, it’s known as the Turtle Van. When it made the jump to toys, it became the Party Wagon though the name was never altered in the cartoon. The two are similar, but different. The Party Wagon is a little closer in style to a VW Microbus without being so close to it that a license was required. The Turtle Van is more of its own thing. It’s armored and boxy while both incarnations of the vehicle include a turtle shell pattern on the roof, twin laser canons, a spare tire on the front with the group’s logo, and a front bumper fashioned to resemble a turtle beak. For the Transformers collaboration, Hasbro (or Takara, I don’t know who makes the call) opted to match the look of the vehicle from the show, while referencing the Party Wagon name via the robot’s name of Party Wallop. There’s a TMNT x Transformers logo on the packaging which uses an image of the Party Wagon, so if you’re confused I guess you have every right to be.

Of course, he’s not going to be to scale with your 1:12 or 1:10 figures.

Party Wallop comes in a somewhat complicated blister package. It’s adorned with licensing art from the TMNT franchise and the Transformers logo across the top. There’s images of the toy in both vehicle and robot mode on the back as well as a call out to the fact that this toy can function as a robot version of each of the four turtles so make sure you go out and buy 3 more. There’s also a call-out to how both franchises are celebrating 40 years this year so I guess 2024 was just the perfect time for this collaboration to happen.

Party Wallop can resemble whichever turtle you please, like the best turtle: Leonardo.

Full disclosure, I am not a big Transformers fan. I think they’re wonderful toys, it’s just a rabbit hole I never went down wholeheartedly. I had maybe one or two toys from Gen 1, and a few from Gen 2. On this blog, I’ve looked at the RED Soundwave, the Super7 Optimus Prime, and the Christmas themed Optimus Prime released in 2022. Of those three, only the Christmas figure is one that actually transforms. I do have the first Masterpiece Optimus Prime and Megatron because when they came out I was flush with money from graduating college and needed something dumb to spend it on. I missed my window to sell both as there are better Transformers toys out there now. All this is to say that I don’t know the ins and outs of Transformers. I can’t speak to how complicated this figure is compared to others or if the quality is noticeably better or worse.

If it needs to do machines, there’s Donatello.

Party Wallop, in robot mode, stands right around 6.5″ to the top of its head and 7″ to the top of its “shell.” The figure is primarily constructed in colored plastic featuring yellow, green, and gray. The painted areas are sparse. There’s the teeth on the robot’s head and the dark green linework on the rear of the shell. The front of the crotch is painted yellow and it’s over a hard plastic that I initially mistook for diecast. The plastron, or chest, is also painted a slightly darker yellow than the colored parts. There’s blue paint for the windows of the vehicle and some other minor paint hits for metallic parts and lights. The paint is all applied well, it’s just limited, but that makes sense for a complex, transforming, action figure such as this one.

When Party Wallop is feeling rude, there’s Raph!

As for the actual look of the figure, it’s pretty solid. It looks like a robotic turtle and the designers did a good job of incorporating some finer details into this figure. The head of the figure by default is just a generic turtle head, though shaped like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle head. The figure also comes with four extra skull tops that feature a colored bandana for each turtle. You simply pop one off to slide your preferred turtle into place. The front belt buckle also folds down and can rotate to display either a blank, gray, circle or a circle with the initial of your chosen turtle. The chest looks like a Ninja Turtle chest, or you can clip-on the front of the Turtle Van for a different look, or have that clipped to a forearm like a shield. The proportioning is good with full formed arms and legs.

And when it’s time to party, there’s Michelangelo.

Aspects of the presentation that don’t work quite as well is just the overall look of the mostly plastic approach. There’s no getting around how a lot of the yellow and gray plastic imparts a cheap look to what is not exactly a cheap figure ($50 MSRP). There’s not a whole lot that can be done to change that though, yellow plastic especially has a tendency to not look premium, but you’re not going to fully paint a transforming toy. It would just be a mess after a few transformations because of all of the parts rubbing together. The shell, which is basically the roof of the Turtle Van, is a little awkward looking too. From the front, it’s fine, but from the side it’s clear that the figure has no back. It’s just an open cavity that the shell is supposed to hide, but since the shell isn’t curved, it doesn’t really accomplish that as well as it could. The one thing that does bother me that probably could have been fixed are the tires. They’re done with hollow, plastic, wheels and they just look like crap. Some actual rubber tires would have been nice, but I’m guessing such things aren’t as common today as they were 35-40 years ago when it comes to a Transformers toy.

Every turtle, robot or organic, requires pizza.

Party Wallop does come with a few accessories. Out of the box, the spoiler of the vehicle needs to be attached along with the front of the van. The nose of the van is basically an accessory too as it’s removable and the reverse side features a pizza pattern. Do robots eat pizza? This one does, apparently. Also included are the weapons you would expect: twin katana, nunchaku, sai, and a single bo staff. The weapons are done in gray plastic with the nunchaku being connected by actual chain links, though they’re made of plastic. They’ve been redesigned to have a more techno appearance befitting that of a Transformer. There’s also storage for the weapons and extra head-toppers on the figure which is appreciated. There are slots on the underside of the shell for the heads and bo (which has two hinges in it so it can collapse into a rectangle) while the other weapons all have tabs on them to slot onto the hips, the sides of the shell, and under the shoulder pads.

There’s storage under the shell for the extra head parts and the staff.
The swords and sai have spots to plug into while the ‘chuks slot in under the shoulder pads.

As an action figure, Party Wallop articulates rather well. I am used to older Transformers that basically swiveled at the head and shoulder and often not much else, but this figure can do quite a bit. It has a ball-jointed head so there’s tilt and some rotation with a little up and down. The shoulders rotate and go out to the side just fine while the elbows bend a full 90 degrees. The wrists can tilt in like a horizontal hinge and they also rotate. There is a waist twist, and the hips go out to the side almost all the way for splits while kicking forward and back a full 90 degrees. The knees bend 90 degrees and there is a thigh swivel. The ankles can pivot in and can hinge up as well, but not back. The shell is basically on an armature so you can move and position that if you need to, mostly for adjustment posing. It’s a pretty damn good spread though and all that’s truly missing is an ab crunch or butterfly shoulders. Having that ankle rocker is a pretty big deal for stances all by itself.

Party Wallop has a twenty step transformation process to convert it into the Turtle Van. For someone who doesn’t buy a lot of these, I found the process almost intuitive enough to transform it without referring to the instructions. And most of the stuff I did have to turn to the instructions for was just to confirm I was doing it right as the joints are all very tight and I didn’t want to break something. It does not feel fragile though, it’s just firm to prevent loosening overtime. There are portions that need to clip together and those can be a pain, but I didn’t find it overly annoying.

If you have some TMNT minifigures (I don’t) in need of a Turtle Van, this might work okay.

The completed Turtle Van looks the part in that no one would mistake it for something else. No one is also likely to confuse it for a non-Transformer as there are some unsightly seam lines on it, mostly on the side windows. I guess that couldn’t be avoided. I also wish the shell lines on the nose of the vehicle were painted like they are on the roof because that piece looks especially cheap. There are also two large hinges on the side of the vehicle that are unsightly, but also somewhat blend in with the texture of the van. In order for the front plate to function as a shield for the robot, the rear windows required peg holes for it to slot into and they look awful. I feel like they could have figured out a better way to do that which didn’t require unnecessary holes. The weapon storage for the sai and swords also switch to the bottom of the vehicle. The sai work fine, but the katana (if you can even get them into the slot properly) stick out of the front of the vehicle a little and it looks silly. They were so close to getting it right with the storage options – oh well.

As a vehicle for your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles display, this Turtle Van won’t scale with anything. It’s way too small to fit in with any prior toy line. I suppose if you bought a set of those World’s Smallest Toys Turtles they would scale okay. It’s almost big enough that you could fake it with some Lego turtles, but probably still a tad undersized for that. That’s, of course, fine as this isn’t designed to scale with anything other than Transformers. Compared with my Christmas Prime, it seems fine so if you are someone who just collects these Transformers collaborations and prefers to display them in alt mode it should hopefully work out okay. I am guessing most will display it in robot mode though as their chosen turtle.

Party on, dudes.

For someone who is not really into Transformers toys, I do like this figure. I think it achieved what it wanted to do in creating a robot version of a Ninja Turtle that transforms into the Turtle Van. The details are all there and the van is fairly on model. If you’re someone who has a whole bunch of Turtle Vans at this point, it’s fun to slot into a collection as it’s bigger than both Hot Wheels versions, but smaller than the Jada one (which I don’t have). Having the robot be able to represent whichever turtle one chooses is a genius idea. It adds a fun factor to the package and also encourages people to buy multiples. At $50 a pop, I don’t have any desire to buy more than one, but it was a nice try on Hasbro’s part. If you’re into these Transformers collaborations then I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t find enjoyment with this release too. And if you’re a TMNT collector primarily, this is a unique item to add to the collection.

If you read and enjoyed this review then here’s some other items you may want to check out:

Rad Plastic

I think it was during the summer of 2020 while spending one of the many days of that year inside and isolated that I stumbled upon a Twitter post about an upcoming book titled Rad Plastic. I believe the tweet was from the account The Toys That Made Us, which is (was?) a Netflix series…

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by Joe

Transformers R.E.D. Generation 1 Soundwave

Full disclosure here: I’m not much of a Transformers guy. Transformers took off when I was a wee one and I kind of missed the boat. I had some friends and cousins really into it, and I even had a few myself that were gifted to me, but it was nothing I gravitated towards. And…

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Transformers Generations Holiday Optimus Prime

We interrupt our regularly scheduled holiday posts with something very familiar to this blog: a toy review! Yes, we have ourselves another Christmas toy to talk about and it too comes from Hasbro. We already looked at a Star Wars toy at the end of November, and now we’re turning to what I suppose is…

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by Joe

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August 20, 2024

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Shredder

By Joe
Shredder has entered the fray.

For today’s latest Turtle Tuesday action figure review, I think we can go a little light. That’s because I am looking at yet another action figure release from the Mattel Masters of the Universe Origins – Turtles of Grayskull crossover line between the heroes and villains of MOTU and those of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These figures are essentially all the same. They have the same build, engineering, and some even have the same weapons. The differences are mainly in the head sculpts and whatever additional clip-on armor is provided. And for today’s release we are looking at the chief villain of TMNT: The Shredder!

Looks like this Shredder chooses to bring an axe to a sword fight.

When I first saw this MOTU-ified Shredder I wasn’t 100% sold on it. Even though Shredder figures are usually among my favorite in a given TMNT line, this one wasn’t an instant hit. It evokes memories of the original Playmates Shredder, one of the few Shredder figures I don’t care for, with its bare chested approach and black pants. It is, of course, on a MOTU Origins body so it’s not in that ridiculous preposed position of that figure, nor does it have any soft goods or blue metal. Instead, we have Shredder with a full helm and a Shredder/Foot-themed harness across his chest with a blue, plastic, cape affixed to it. The promo images made the armored pieces on his arms, shins, and helm look very plasticky. I am happy to say that in-hand it looks noticeably better.

I suppose he looks menacing enough.

That’s not to say I’m in love with what I see here. And it starts with the helm. Mattel gave Shredder a full helm that basically just has some eye holes in it. The eyes are red with black surrounding them. The fins atop the helm are a little different in that the two going around the helm connect in the back, which looks fine. It’s textured like crudely smithed steel with impact marks and the rear of the helmet which surrounds the head has a texture similar to that of movie Shredder, specifically Secret of the Ooze just without the gold coloring. That stuff is all fine, but what I don’t really care for is the face. Mattel sculpted the mouth area like it has an actual opening mechanism. And the shape of that mouth is like that of a crudely made robot with a severe underbite. I don’t like it and it makes him look like a dinosaur to me.

This duo looks rather formidable.

The rest of the figure is mostly fine. The pauldrons at the shoulders and forearm guards basically slide on while the shin armor clips on. It’s all snug and stays in place and it all has the same color and dented texture of the helm. What I don’t like is that the blades which go on the backs of Shredder’s hands are part of the forearm piece. You basically position that armor so that it appears to be affixed to the back of his hand. It probably would have been too cumbersome to have the blades slide onto the hands, but I think this is the rare spot were uniquely sculpted hands were called for.

I’m told this is a Horde Crossbow.

And speaking of hands, Shredder features one gripping hand and one open hand, which is pretty unique from my limited interactions with this line. It’s just like the old Playmates figure with the right hand for gripping and the left open and I’m guessing it’s a nod to that figure, because why else would Shredder need an open hand? For slapping jerks? The gripping hand is useful for his included axe accessory. It appears to be new since it has a 2003 era Foot symbol stamped into it. It has a serrated edge and looks pretty nasty, though it’s just the one color which matches the other “metal” parts of the figure. Shredder’s other weapon is a crossbow which can snap onto a forearm. It’s a dark gray with what I guess is a dragon head in the center of the bow itself? There are two tabs inside the apparatus that look like they have a purpose, but I don’t know what that could be. It’s possible this weapon is reused from some other release that had a clip-on arrow or something for it that is not included here.

He has enough articulation to, more or less, achieve his “classic” pose.

Articulation for Shredder is exactly like the other figures in the line so there’s not much to discuss. The added armor at the shoulders doesn’t hinder movement there, nor do the armored parts on his forearms and shins. The ankle rocker continues to be a sore spot with this line. I felt it worked fine with the turtles, but most of the other figures have more of a swivel than a true ankle rocker. The angle of the pin going into the foot isn’t severe enough for it to function properly which is a bummer. Shredder at least has fairly wide feet relative to his body and even with the added weight of the cape coming off of his back he’s fairly painless to stand, unlike Skeletor which has fallen over multiple times since entering my shelf space.

“You guys look like a couple of dorks.”

This Shredder is fine. Nothing really spectacular going on here or anything unbecoming of the character. It’s a fairly unimaginative take on Shredder and the few, subtle, changes made to his design to fit into this MOTU aesthetic offer little. The axe accessory, while a little unusual for Shredder, is at least fine and looks pretty violent. The crossbow kind of sucks though. At the end of the day, I bought this figure because he is Shredder and my Turtles of Grayskull collection is large enough that Shredder felt like a necessity. He’ll likely end up being one of my least favorites though and I’m holding out hope for a Super Shredder deluxe figure to make up for this one (Note: since writing this Mattel has shown off a mutated, snake, Shredder for this line that might be interesting).

Shredder vs Splinter. The cosmic ballet goes on.

Check out these other reviews from Mattel’s Turtles of Grayskull line:

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Deluxe Sla’ker

It’s a Tuesday, and I have a new Turtles product to talk about, so let’s make it another Turtle Tuesday! And today brings us the second in the line of deluxe Masters of the Universe Origins – Turtles of Grayskull line exclusive to Target – Sla’ker: The evil cybernetic snapping turtle! This is Slash, the…

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by Joe

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Skeletor

When it’s come to the Turtles of Grayskull line by Mattel, I have mostly stayed in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side of the pool. I have all four turtle boys plus Sla’ker, who is more Slash than Faker if you ask me. The one exception has been Mouse-Jaw, but the classic Masters of the…

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MOTU Turtles of Grayskull Krang

Two words that are much hated in the toy collecting community are “Store Exclusive.” Add a “Walmart” in front of that phrase and you get something akin to a worst nightmare. The world of “collectibles” has always relied on same degree of scarcity. The 90s saw a collector boom across various mediums which created a…

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by Joe

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August 13, 2024

NECA Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) Tatsu Ultimate Action Figure

By Joe
“I, Tatsu, now lead! Let any who challenge, step forward…”

NECA’s line of action figures based on the 1990 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might be my favorite part of my collection. The figures have just been so good at capturing the likeness of a film that is my favorite iteration of the beloved franchise. Over the years, we’ve received lots of action figures from this line including the turtles, April, multiple versions of Casey, Shredder, and more. It’s a nice selection of characters from the film, but one guy has been missing. Well, NECA kept at it and almost stealthily released the latest addition to the film toy line in the form of Master Tatsu.

Looks like he was worth the wait.

Tatsu, portrayed on the screen by Toshishiro Obata (with Michael McConnohie providing the voice for some reason), was Shredder’s right hand man and field general for the Foot. He was an all new creation for the film as in the comics Shredder didn’t really have a named lieutenant and in the cartoon there was an assortment of characters that would not have fit in with the spirit of that film. There wasn’t a whole lot to Tatsu’s character. He mostly stalked around and grunted often sporting an expression like he just smelled a fart. In short bursts we saw he was tolerant of the children around him, but also vicious in the dojo. He seemed like a tough, capable, guy for the job, but he took Casey lightly and took a driver to the face on account of that. In the sequel film, things went even worse for him and following that he was never heard from again.

Tatsu may lead the Foot into battle, but he’s also in charge of the clan’s laundry.

Tatsu may not have been a superstar in the films, but he played a large enough role that his absence from the toy line has been felt. He’s been the missing link, but despite repeated attempts, it seemed like NECA was never going to be able to get Obata onboard. I don’t know what changed, but obviously something did and now we finally have Tatsu in all his glory. My assumption is this version of the character is based on his appearance in the first movie, though I don’t think there was much difference in his costume for the sequel. The sculpt and fabrication of the figure is credited to some new names for me in May Thamtarana and Trevor Grove. If they do sculpts for NECA’s other lines I don’t know, but it’s always nice to see new names on the box.

Tatsu comes with a bunch of stuff, but he may just look to be at his best when armed only with his fists.

Tatsu stands at approximately 6.5″ tall. His default portrait is that scowl we all know and love from the film and it’s quite a good likeness for Obata. The body is an interesting mixture of sculpted and soft goods. That “flap” over his shoulders with his insignia on the back is plastic, while he has soft goods for his robes which he wears underneath. There’s a sculpted sash across the waist with the usual (for this line) spandex belt for weapon storage. The pants Velcro in the back and I suppose the soft goods could be removed if you were determined, but I’m content to leave as-is. The body is sculpted underneath and he appears to have black pants and boots similar to that of the Foot Soldier, though I don’t think the parts have been reused. The arms are bare so it’s possible you could create a bare-chested Tatsu if you wished, though he may not have any sculpt in his abdomen. I suppose it’s possible the torso is reused from the Shadow Warriors set, though I didn’t inspect it close enough to determine that for certain.

Channeling his inner Steve Blackman.

We’ll jump to the articulation as there’s always a concern there when it comes to soft goods. I’m happy to say that the pants and sleeves are pretty loose-fitting and don’t hinder the articulation much. The head is on a double-ball joint and works fine while the arms can raise out to the side without hindrance. Rotation will be a little bit of an issue with the soft goods, but probably not to the degree where it will prevent you from achieving a certain pose. The elbows are just single-hinges with a swivel and the wrists swivel and hinge. All are horizontal, which is a bummer. There is a joint in the torso, but it’s limited as it is with most of the figures in this line. There’s a waist twist and ball-socket hips which work well for splits, but kicking forward will be a small issue with the soft goods, though it can be worked around. The knees are double-jointed and the ankles hinge and rock very well. He’s pretty much standard for the line. Could it be better? Yes, but there’s nothing surprising here for good or bad.

I kind of like the fan, though I concede it doesn’t really fit his character.

Tatsu does have quite a bit of stuff in the box which is amusing since he didn’t wield weapons in the films. For hands, Tatsu has a set of fists, chop, and gripping hands. There’s also an additional right gripping hand that’s in more of a pinching gesture. It seems intended to work with his fan, of which he has two. One is open and one is closed. The closed fan is a pretty boring accessory since it’s just a black stick with a little white paint, but the open one looks nice. I believe it’s from a Tatsu trading card associated with the movie and was a prop that never made it to screen. I think the same may be true for the red, demon, mask he comes with. There was a version of Tatsu in the 2012 series that wore one so it could be a reference to that. It’s really well painted and looks awesome, but I don’t know what to do with it. Tatsu can wear it if his mug upsets you, but this may upset you more.

I don’t know why this is here, but it looks pretty cool.
Swing and a miss.

Tatsu does have an extra portrait which is him yelling. It’s not great. The scowl face is great and the perfect expression for the character so I don’t know if there’s a portrait I’d have wanted over it, but this yelling one is poor. I’ll never display it. Tatsu can just look grumpy as he wields his other weapons which include a katana and a kendo stick. The katana looks lovely and has a sheath with some ties on it. It also slides into the elastic sash with little effort. The kendo stick is well-sculpted and painted just as well. I don’t know what to do with it, but it looks nice. Tatsu also has a Foot mask if you want to recreate the scene where he passes it on to Shredder for a graduation ceremony. It’s all sculpted plastic so it’s not an actual makes any character can wear. It’s fine, but it’s pretty odd that Tatsu doesn’t come with the one weapon we see him brandish in the film – a knife. At least Shredder came with one, though the handle is so thin that the gripping hands won’t work with it very well.

We’ll just stick with this face.

How do we feel about having Tatsu finally in the collection? Pretty damn good, if you ask me. I think as a figure, it looks great. I was surprised by the soft goods, but they seem to work fine. A more cut-up, all sculpted, Tatsu might have looked unsightly so I get why NECA chose this route. The likeness is terrific where the standard head is concerned and there’s certainly plenty in the box. Is it anything you’re likely to display Tatsu with? That I don’t know since I’m used to just seeing him stand around looking pissed. NECA did a good job, and I credit Trevor Zammit with this, of digging for some worthwhile accessories to fill the box. The fan is a fun cut, and I love how the Oni mask turned out even if I’ll never place it on the figure. It makes me wish we learned a little bit more about Tatsu in the films. We were deprived of him having some crazy alter ego or something.

He may be armed with sports equipment, Tatsu, but I’m betting a driver to the noggin doesn’t feel very good.

If you would like to add Tatsu to your collection, he’s currently shipping out to Walmart. Some people have been able to get him off the website, but I had no such luck. Finding nothing but empty pegs all over my area, a fellow collector stepped in to help so a very special shout out of thanks to fellow Danzig fan @adamoverboard who sent me this figure all the way from Texas. Without his help, I’d still be making too many fruitless trips to Walmart, which I’m still doing anyway since I know other people still on the hunt and I’d love to pay it forward. Hopefully, Walmart gets more stock soon or NECA just puts this guy on their website. Too many people have been waiting a long time for Tatsu and it would be nice to see everyone be able to get him without much fuss. It does leave me wondering though if this is it for the 1990 movie line for me? I don’t need a Charles or Chief Stearns and I’m really happy with the figures we already have. I’m sure NECA will find something to do that will give me pause (there appears to be a new Casey in Foot disguise on the way), but if my collection ends here then I won’t be disappointed.

Some parting words of advice from Master Tatsu: Never lower your eyes to an enemy.

We have plenty more figure reviews from NECA’s TMNT movie line:

NECA 1990 TMNT Movie SDCC Set

For the past several years, the folks over at NECA have been making San Diego Comic Con an annual event for fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, it’s always an event, but it’s been especially fun for TMNT fans because NECA has been able to release limited action figure sets based on…

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by Joe

NECA TMNT Secret of the Ooze Ultimate Shredder

For the first time in a long time we went a week without a blog entry here. That’s because I took a much needed vacation and didn’t schedule anything. I’ll probably be backing off a little bit as we dig deeper into 2022 since there’s a certain holiday I need to get crackin’ on if…

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NECA TMNT Secret of the Ooze Keno and Foot Soldier

I’ve been spending parts of the past month or so ducking in and out of any Walmart I come across in search of the Masters of the Universe Origins Turtles of Grayskull Krang. You see, it’s a store exclusive and if you know anything about toy collecting it’s that toy collectors hate store exclusives. Especially…

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by Joe

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August 8, 2024

Batman: Caped Crusader

By Joe
Batman: Caped Crusader (2024)

In the far off land of 2021 we received word that a new animated Batman series was in development and attached to it was none other than Bruce Timm. Timm was one of the main creative minds behind Batman: The Animated Series and the DC Animated Universe it spawned so this news was met quite enthusiastically. Then Warner stepped in and muddied things up. The series was originally pitched as an HBO Max/Cartoon Network joint affair, but corporate reshuffling nixed that idea. Still, Caped Crusader is actually here now in 2024 which some other projects can’t say the same. It was shopped around for much of 2022 eventually landing with Amazon. This past Friday, the entire first season was dropped all at once on the Prime service ensuring talk of it will likely be ancient history once this goes live, but we should talk about it, nonetheless.

Caped Crusader is said to have come about as a result of Timm not wanting to continue with the universe he helped create starting with Batman. That’s understandable since a lot of that cast has either retired or unfortunately passed on and trying to recreate the magic of that series seems like a fool’s game. Timm instead used the opportunity of a new animated Batman to do things he couldn’t do with the other shows. This was to be a younger Batman set in a distinctive noir setting, not some time-locked version of an otherwise contemporary Gotham. It would not be beholden to any past era of the character, but would also be free to draw from the classic comic run. It could be more mature with its action and plots since it wouldn’t be airing as part of a network television kid’s programming block.

One of the most dramatic redesigns is that of The Penguin, which I rather enjoyed.

Alongside Timm is a host of other executive producers: J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves, Ed Brubaker, James Tucker, Daniel Pipski, Rachel Rusch Rich, and Sam Register. Brubaker was hired as the head writer and directors Christina Sotta, Matt Peters, and Christopher Berkeley split the 10 episode series (4, 3, 3 respectively). Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions would handle much of the animation with DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation also credited. Amazon MGM Studios is also listed, though I don’t know if that’s more branding or if that studio did actual work on the show. Frederik Wiedmann was brought on as the composer for all ten episodes.

Wiedmann had some big shoes to fill taking over for Shirley Walker, but equally as large is the role of Batman himself. Kevin Conroy left one hell of a mark on the character, but he had essentially retired from the role when the show was announced and would sadly pass away before this show could be completed. Dawning the cape and cowl this time is Hamish Linklater. He is joined by Jason Watkins who serves as loyal butler Alfred Pennyworth. This is a story of a Batman just starting out. We can assume he has been at this whole crime fighting thing for a little while because he has the costume, the car, and the cave all in place. What he doesn’t have are connections just yet within Gotham’s police department and other legal institutions. Most of the citizens seem to regard him as a myth and over the course of this first season the Batman will become more established and will be known to people like Commissioner Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart) and his daughter, Barbara Gordon (Krystal Joy Brown).

Two characters featured quite a bit in the first season are Barbara Gordon and Harvey Dent.

I will say upfront that I came away from the first season of Batman: Caped Crusader with mixed feelings on the show. The design is definitely one of the elements I took issue with the least. Batman resembles his original design of black and gray with those tall, wide-splayed, ears on the cowl. He does not have the purple gloves, which is probably a solid choice. Alfred has a younger, rounder, build while Jim Gordon seems noticeably younger than usual while Barbara is noticeably older. She’s a career woman who is a public defender in Gotham. I don’t know how that is supposed to work, her being a public defender for those whom her father essentially locked up, but I suppose it makes for good conflict in a TV show. I just know I wouldn’t want the police commissioner’s daughter representing me if I were to find myself in trouble with the law.

The desire for a noir atmosphere is captured in the setting quite well. Technology is of the 1940’s with old style vehicles, phones, and televisions. There isn’t much technology on display in the rogue’s gallery, possibly to keep the show firmly locked in its setting, though it does give way to more supernatural elements. Batman has always encountered such and the 90s show had villains like Clayface, the Man-Bat, and others, though I can’t recall him fighting an actual ghost at any point like he does here. There are still villains who are very much of the gangster type. The first we meet is The Penguin, who has been gender-swapped to a female crime boss voiced by Minnie Driver. The first screenshot I saw of this version of the character looked a bit silly, like it was just the classic Penguin in a wig and lipstick, but the character model is much better in the show. I actually liked this change and found that bird-influenced appearance suited a female quite well. Another villain, Clayface (Dan Donohue), was redesigned to more resemble a Dick Tracy villain while the eventual Two-Face (Diedrich Bader) appearance was surprisingly simple.

I was routinely disappointed in the lighting in the show.

I could take or leave certain character designs, but what I found myself most disappointed in consistently was the animation on display. Characters have very stiff, sometimes robotic, movements. Walking animations with a character in full frame are surprisingly ugly for a 2024 show. Did Warner really cut the budget on this once it was no longer going to appear on one of their platforms? The lighting also isn’t always up to task. The very first shot in the series is a classic police interrogation scene under a single light. It looks awful as there’s a real lack of shadows being cast by the light. It’s a huge downgrade as far as I’m concerned. There are a few shots where more effort was put into it, but also plenty where it doesn’t even feel like the episode is taking place at night. It was never going to come close to matching the efforts from the 90s, but compared to X-Men ’97 this one leaves a lot to be desired.

The voice cast is a mixture of recognizable names as well as talent that is new to me. Most of them are quite good in their role. The only one I was left disappointed by was, unfortunately, Linklater’s Batman. Like a great many to do it before him, Linklater plays Bruce Wayne and Batman differently. Bruce is more personable, more perky, while Batman is curt and speaks in a lower voice. There’s an art to voicing Batman and I think Linklater needs more time in the role to really get it. His Batman is stiff to the point of sounding robotic. It’s possible he was receiving direction to play a character still trying to figure out his tough guy persona. Linklater is a talented actor so I’m assuming he’ll grow into the role, but it’s a little disappointing since a perfectly good Batman, Diedrich Bader, is right here on the cast already.

I don’t mind some supernatural elements in my Batman stories, but this guy is a little too Scooby Doo for me.

The ten stories of the first season are mostly stand-alone, but with some connecting tissue between them. The final three episodes are more purposefully connected and I suppose it can be considered serialized, but you wouldn’t miss a whole lot by mixing up the first 7 episodes. One villain, Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung), is introduced as her therapist persona first before the villain shows up and that’s one of the few aspects of the early episodes that wouldn’t work out of order. Speaking of, Quinn appears here in an origin separate from The Joker which was a somewhat bold choice. She’s her own thing this time around and I thought the show did a solid job with her. The tone of these stories is also allowed to be more mature. We see lots of people get shot, though gratuitous violence isn’t present. Batman is also free to punch guys in the face and sometimes the show feels a little preoccupied in pointing this out. There’s alcohol and even some romance making the show feel like it’s something akin to a PG-13 rating.

Other episodes were just okay. Few felt like they had heavy stakes and I found it hard to establish an emotional connection to any of the villains of the day. The best Batman episodes found something interesting to say about their bad guys, but this show struggled there. There’s even a kid villain in one episode that I think the episode wants us to have a response to at the end, but it just didn’t do enough to earn it. It at least does a good job of getting us to hate its crooked cop characters, but I think it also mishandles the character of Harvey Dent. We all know what Dent’s fate is to be when he’s first introduced, but this is an unlikable Dent. He’s arrogant and far more consumed with making the jump from District Attorney to Mayor of Gotham than actually doing his job so when the thing we all know is coming does, there’s no emotion. Plus there’s no one close to him to be affected by his transformation that we can feel something for instead. The Bruce/Harvey friendship is shoehorned in too late to make much of an impact, but I will give the show credit for finding another angle to play that at least puts Batman and Alfred at odds with each other. That’s also probably the only real character development we get out of our lead. We spend a lot of time with Gotham’s finest, but not a whole lot of time with Bruce or Batman. The show needs to find a way to make its lead more interesting.

When the show really wants to look good, it can. It gives me hope that a second season will be stronger.

I went into Batman: Caped Crusader not expecting to find something on par with Batman: The Animated Series. That would be an unfair expectation. I did expect to find something good and the product I got was at least approaching that. Caped Crusader is not a bad television series, but is it exceptional? No, not really. It’s a pretty easily digestible 10 episode season that mostly just gets credit for existing. Most of its “bold” choices for the Batman universe are just doing gender and career swaps with its characters. A lot of the story beats felt too predictable, too ordinary. The best episodes of the season were the ones that felt like stories that hadn’t really been told before, but they were few. I don’t expect it to make much of a mark on pop culture and I don’t know if a second season is even a sure thing. The show definitely expects one and it does the predictable thing of teasing a major villain at the very end to try and drum up some excitement, but it all feels a bit played out. Amazon did order a second season back in 2023, but if the streaming numbers are bad then nothing is stopping them from going back on that and getting one of those highly coveted tax write-offs. If it does come back then I’ll probably watch it, and if it doesn’t I probably won’t even notice.

Here’s more Batman content if you’re in search of such:

Batman – The Adventures Continue #50: Batman

If you’re a repeat visitor here at The Nostalgia Spot, then you’ve probably noticed that around here there is a high opinion of the television show Batman – The Animated Series. I did a re-watch of the series that spanned more than two years and also checked out the various films based on the property.…

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by Joe

Batman: The Animated Series Wrap-Up

One-hundred and nine episodes plus three features leading to one-hundred and twelve blog entries have been devoted to the subject of Batman: The Animated Series. It started as a celebration of the show turning 25 and then as a curiosity piece. Since its premiere in 1992, the show had become much celebrated and praised all…

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by Joe

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

August 6, 2024

NECA Mirage TMNT – The First Turtles SDCC 2024 40th Anniversary Edition

By Joe
Today belongs to the originals.

As the story goes, one night Kevin Eastman was drawing with his friend and partner-in-comics Peter Laird when the idea to doodle a ninja, anthropomorphized, turtle entered his brain. Laird was so amused by this drawing that he too drew his own take on it. What was done just to amuse each other eventually turned into something that would change both of their lives as well as the lives of many others.

Kevin Eastman was commissioned to do the packaging and it’s appropriately “special.”

In 1984, the first issue of Mirage Studios’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit shelves and became an indie darling. That comic would go on to inspire a toyline, which beget a cartoon series, and a phenom was born. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, once thought of as a fad, are still relevant today now more than 40 years from their inauspicious beginnings. To celebrate the milestone, NECA partnered with co-creator Kevin Eastman to create an action figure two-pack of those inaugural turtles. Sculpted by Paul Harding with paint by Geoff Trapp and Mike Puzzo, the set was sold as a two-pack at San Diego Comic Con as well as a presale on NECA’s own website. The First Turtles are just the latest in what are sure to be more celebratory figures to come. It’s on the heels of Playmates’ own Original Sketch Turtles which can currently be found at Target and on Amazon. Those turtles were the more refined, second pass, versions of the characters which bare a strong resemblance to what would be featured in that first comic, where as these originals are quite crude by comparison.

The original Eastman pose, as best as I can recreate it here.

The set sold by NECA comes in a rather large box adorned with new artwork by Eastman. It also features a lenticular slipcover depicting the drawings changing from black and white to color. The rear of the slipcover is almost bare white as the idea here was for convention goers to be able to have Eastman sign or even doodle on the box for them. I suppose that is still possible for other convention appearances to come. The interior box is a fairly typical NECA window box that displays both figures and their accessories quite well. The only thing missing is the actual original drawings which I’m surprised by, but maybe there were legal reasons. This really is a pretty nice display item, but I’m no in-box collector so let’s rip into this one.

And the original Laird pose.

First of all, the figures here are presented fully painted in color that’s basically a match for what NECA did with the Jim Lawson turtles released in 2023. The original drawings were never colored by Eastman and Laird, but since Eastman worked closely with NECA on this release it can be assumed that this is how he and Peter likely would color them today. We also don’t really know how tall they envisioned these guys to be or if any consideration was really given. Eastman probably had input there, but I don’t know if Laird had any involvement (he’s essentially retired after having sold the property to Viacom over a decade ago). Based on interviews Trevor Zammit of NECA has given, it sounds like NECA had some freedom to figure out how to present these two. Eastman’s turtle, which was really more tortoise-like in some respects, was made bigger and chunkier while the more lithe version Laird came up with is shorter and thinner.

These pair pretty well with the Playmates Original Sketch Turtles, which were like the second version of the property.

We might as well discuss the Eastman turtle first since it was the one said to be created first. The figure stands roughly 5.75″ to the top of its head. He may not be the tallest figure in the line, but he’s definitely a big boy. This turtle is quite chunky and there’s a nice heft to the figure. The shell is quite large and another area where NECA had to exercise some creative freedom since the drawing depicted the character from the front. Now, these turtles are not intended to be any, one, turtle from what followed. This isn’t Michelangelo or Raphael, it’s just a ninja turtle. Still, he has some recognizable traits from the turtles that followed. He’s sporting the red bandana along with brown elbow and knee pads and wrist wraps. There is no belt, but there is a tail. The original turtle also did not hold any weapons, but did have nunchaku affixed to both forearms which this figure does as well. The weapons are fused together, but do have real chain links affixed to them. They tab into a slot on the inner wrist band and are quite easy to work with.

A little too Raph.

What really stands out about the first turtle is the portrait and proportions. The head is more egg-shaped with barely any sort of beak. The eyes also feature pupils and areas of green around the eyes are visible through the eyeholes on the bandana. The hands and feet are large and more closely match that of an actual turtle. The hands look more like flippers for swimming through the water while the feet are quite tortoise-like. He has five digits on each limb as opposed to the three and two that would follow. The paint job is truly exquisite as there is tons of black hatch lines all over. The articulation cuts are not very prominent making this figure look almost like a statue. While subjectively many may find this turtle to be crude and even a bit ugly, objectively the figure is nothing short of a work of art when compared with the original sketch.

A lot of Michelangelo can be found in these original designs.

The same is true of the Laird turtle. This one clocks in at around 5.375″ and is far less substantial in mass when compared to the Eastman turtle. Laird’s turtle is similar to Eastman’s in style, but different. There’s a mask in place, but on this turtle it extends over a pronounced beak essentially wrapping around where the nose would be. It does feature the nunchaku on the forearms, but there are no chain links present this time and the straps holding them on are the only other garments on the turtle. There are no pads or belts, and the hands and feet feature four digits instead of five. He still is more turtle-like than the finished design, but the leaner proportions make him a bit more convincing as a ninja, even if still comically implausible. The paint job here is just as good as it is on the Eastman turtle, and despite the smaller size, this figure still has substantial weight to it.

The Lawson turtles were like the advancement of the original Mirage style.

Where the two figures also differ concerns the articulation. The more slender Laird turtle was likely easier to work with and articulates slightly better than the Eastman variety, though neither turtle is intended to be placed in poses many would consider “dynamic.” Both feature neck and head articulation with basic arm articulation. There are no double joints on either figure and the range at the hinge joints is probably going to be less than 90 degrees for most. The bandana knot and tail swivel while the hips are ball sockets with thigh swivels engineered into them. Neither turtle is going to be able to hit a split or kick forward all that far. The Laird turtle gets to have hinges at the knees and ankles with an ankle rocker. The Eastman turtle, who has big stumps for legs, just has one set of hinges below the kneepads. There is basically no ankle to be found on this guy so that’s it.

And, of course, it was the ’87 version of the property that launched a phenomenon.

Safe to say, if it’s articulation that you prioritize in your action figures then these are not for you. I think for most, they’ll pose them like the original drawing and call it a day. And that’s definitely a viable display option, but it would mean ignoring all of the goodies in the box. NECA decided to load this pair up with all of the weapons you would expect and more. That means we get a set of katana, nunchaku, sai, and a bo staff. There’s also a nunchaku with a whirling effect that even spins and looks really nice. There’s a tonfa as well if you prefer more of a Last Ronin vibe. All of the weapons are fully painted and look great. There’s a slight crudeness baked into some of them as well such as a chip in the blades of the katana and the wraps of the bo being off-center. They also appear to be based off of the original sketch of the four that followed which, if so, is a logical choice.

The tonfa has to nod to this guy, right?

In order to properly wield such weapons each turtle comes with an alternate set of gripping hands. The standard hands are an open style and the gripping are just that. They feature horizontal hinges, unfortunately, but at least they work with the clip-on nunchaku just fine. Both turtle can adequately wield any of the included, though aside from those clip-on ‘chuks there’s no weapon storage to be found. NECA also decided to give each figure one optional portrait. The default ones from the drawings are what I would deem stoic, while the alternate ones are angrier and feature exposed teeth, something we would be most accustomed to seeing out of the TMNT. It’s an appropriate alternate, for sure.

A fun set that feels like a real piece of TMNT history. Track it down if that’s something that appeals to you.

NECA’s send-up to the origin of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a worthy inclusion in the year-long 40th anniversary celebration. It’s cool to see both of the co-creator’s original vision celebrated here in action figure form. While they don’t exactly put the “action” in action figure, they make for a great display piece and it’s something that I think diehard TMNT collectors will want to add. Since this was a San Diego Comic Con exclusive, it’s now unfortunately sold out and only available on the after market. NECA sometimes sells remaining stock online and at future conventions, but the likely easiest path to owning this set for those that missed out is to keep an eye on retail. It’s expected that some stores are going to be home to an another version of this set where the figures will be painted in black and white, but with red bandanas and weapon handles. It looks like it’s going to contain everything from this set as well, though the slipcover will probably be dropped. The SDCC version was priced at $70 so expect something similar for the retail version. Listings for it have already been spotted at Walmart, but NECA’s own solicitation did not mention any store by name so I don’t think this will be exclusive to Walmart. Needless to say, I really dig this set for what it is and I think every TMNT collector should try to pick up the version they like best.

More from the world of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Playmates TMNT Original Sketch Turtles

Last week we took a Turtle Tuesday off which feels like a rarity for this blog. And that’s because there seems to be new stuff featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles branding coming out all of the time. And it’s only going to become more plentiful as the franchise celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.…

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by Joe

NECA Mirage Studios Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4-Pack

When it comes to the popularity of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot of the credit goes to Playmates Toys. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the characters born out of a joke. Credit them for having the vision to think this joke had appeal beyond their small circle as they self-published Teenage Mutant Ninja…

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by Joe

Super7 TMNT Ultimates! Classic Rocker Leonardo

When I was a kid, I had parents with divergent musical tastes. Dad likes oldies from the 50s and 60s while mom was more into modern rock (then 80s). One area where their tastes overlapped was Bruce Springsteen. We had several of his records in my house and I distinctly remember that cover to Born…

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by Joe

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

July 30, 2024

MOTU Turtles of Grayskull Krang

By Joe
Krang decided his body should be all naked and muscley too.

Two words that are much hated in the toy collecting community are “Store Exclusive.” Add a “Walmart” in front of that phrase and you get something akin to a worst nightmare. The world of “collectibles” has always relied on same degree of scarcity. The 90s saw a collector boom across various mediums which created a mindset in producers that scarcity was good. Scarcity is what the public wanted. Scarcity was fun! In reality, most collectors aren’t buying because they want to make an investment. Sure, some do, but most collect for the enjoyment of it. The idea of an exclusive is just a barrier of entry and it’s frustrating for those who just want to buy some toys.

If you want him to have normal proportions you will want to forego the Krang Kave.

With the rise of online sales and the decline of brick and mortar, stores are more desperate than ever to drive foot traffic. In the eyes of retailers, exclusives will bring in people that might not otherwise set foot in the store and the big toy producers like getting the big retailers to pay for exclusive merch. With Mattel and its Turtles of Grayskull subline of Masters of the Universe Origins, the company was able to strike a deal with both Target and Walmart. At Target, the deluxe figures that include a build-a-figure part have remained exclusive to that retailer. I have so far reviewed those two releases and I plan to review them all. I’ve been able to find them in-store with no issues, and failing that, online has worked fine. With Walmart, Mattel has released a different set of deluxe figures that seem to be a little more involved than what’s at Target, but doesn’t have a build-a-figure. And even calling them “more involved” might be a stretch so I don’t know where the extra money is going, but they’re $25 as well. Only with Walmart, tracking them down has been a problem, at least for me in the north east. Not only have I not seen a single store exclusive at various Walmart stores spread across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, I haven’t seen a single Masters of the Universe figure at all! It’s like they don’t even carry the brand any longer.

He’s so widdle and cute!

What’s a guy to do when he can’t find something at retail? Regrettably, I turned to a third party seller. It’s great that Walmart can’t sell its own product on its website to people that want it, so they let others use their website to sell their wares at inflated prices – awesome! In this case, I purchased today’s figure from someone charging $41. Whoever this person is presumably paid $25 for this thing and then had to cover shipping and whatever fees Walmart charges those who sell through their website to sell me this thing. What did they actually make on it? Ten bucks? Eight bucks? I guess from Walmart’s perspective it’s a win-win. They sold this person a toy, then got to take a piece of the resale as well – it’s like selling it twice! If you ever wondered why Walmart essentially condones the practice of scalping on their own website, well now you know.

“Mondo bizarro!”

Unfortunately, I felt like I had to have this figure of Krang so hopefully it’s worth the extra fifteen bucks or so. Krang has always been an absurd character design. As Vernon put it, it’s a guy with his brain in his stomach. If you’re a toy designer at Mattel and you just received word that the company acquired the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles license to mash-up with Masters of the Universe then Krang had to be at the top of the list of characters that would be the most fun to design. And for Krang, they settled on a mash-up with Megator, a big, green, ogre of sorts. He’s packaged in a window box with new artwork all over that looks great. And this Krang certainly takes up a lot of real estate in that box.

The “deluxe” villains.

Krang, like Sla’ker, utilized the oversized Origins body to add some considerable size. To the top of his head, he’s around 6.875″ and to the top of the tuft of hair he’s 7.5″. That’s not where it ends though, because Krang needs to occupy the center of this body as God intended. Since this toyline is modular by nature, the way to accomplish this is simply to create a little Krang prison that fits in between the waist and abdomen. Once that is in place he balloons to about 7.75″ to the top of the head and 8.25″ to the top of the hair. He’s a big boy and he looks pretty good. The figure is primarily green with light red, almost pinkish, accents. The head is shaped like the classic, Playmates, android body only the antenna has been replaced by a topknot of hair and he has a helmet and protruding sharp teeth. The helmet is red with spikes on the side and a metallic plate on the front which covers the eyes and nose. The red slits of the eyes look like they’re set too high on the sculpt. The artwork on the box has them angled so it works better, but the figure didn’t carry that over.

“Use this stuff if you want to be a true master of the universe!”

For the body, Krang is wearing this breastplate with a skull on it held to the body by two, bronze, chains. These go over the shoulders and match the color of the cavity for Krang. Below that he has a black loincloth and belt, but the only part painted is some more bronze chains. Krang himself, the little brain with a face, is quite tiny. He’s almost cute. It’s a soft rubbery plastic with painted eyes and teeth and the portrait here is very close to the 1987 TV series interpretation of the character. He locks into place in the body and there’s a little grate that closes over him. The tentacles are designed to stick out and I think it’s quite entertaining to look at. If you’re particularly concerned with scale then it might annoy you that Krang is way smaller here than he’s been in the past. They could have made him bigger, but that would have required a larger compartment. One drawback to this design is that Krang’s body has very short arms since they’re designed to scale with the body without the middle insert. If it were any larger it would look really goofy.

It’s a Krang comparison. I forgot how big the NECA one is.
Real chains are pretty cool, but they need some help to pose well.

Krang does come with a pair of accessories to add some value here. Both come in the form of weapon add-ons. Krang can remove his hands and swap them with either an axe or a ball and chain. The axe can function has a handheld weapon too and it’s cast in a grayish plastic with some decent sculpt work. The ball and chain is done in the same bronze plastic as the chains on the body of the figure with a gray, spiked, ball at the end. Like Michelangelo’s nunchaku, the chains are all plastic, but are actual links. It’s pretty damn long and looks cool, though I’m always a little remiss that accessories like this don’t have a fixed chain for posing, but this line gets away with it by being an homage line to actual toys that are meant to be played with. It’s an odd space where it’s a collector line done as-if it were a line made for children. The articulation is also exactly the same as Sla’ker, right down to the poor ankle rocker. The peg hole in the foot isn’t done at enough of an angle for the ankle rocker to be useful.

“It would appear that we are evenly matched.”

Is Krang worthy of your $25? If you can find him at that price, then definitely. Is it worth north of $40? No, probably not, but that’s what a potential hole in the collection will do to a collector. That’s not the figure’s fault though, it’s on Walmart. For the line, this is one of the best figures so far. Maybe even the best. I like the design quite a bit, it’s fun to behold, and it works as a combination of two famous properties. If you’re into this line and come upon this figure in your travels then I highly recommend you pick it up.

It takes a lot of turtles to topple a Krang.

Check out more from Masters of The Universe – Turtles of Grayskull:

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Deluxe Sla’ker

It’s a Tuesday, and I have a new Turtles product to talk about, so let’s make it another Turtle Tuesday! And today brings us the second in the line of deluxe Masters of the Universe Origins – Turtles of Grayskull line exclusive to Target – Sla’ker: The evil cybernetic snapping turtle! This is Slash, the…

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by Joe

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Deluxe Mouse-Jaw

Nothing can be simple in this day and age of retail toy sales which is why the new mash-up of Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toyline features ostensibly 3 SKUs: standard, deluxe, and deluxe with build-a-figure parts. The standard releases are, as you may have expected, released abroad and you can…

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by Joe

MOTU – Turtles of Grayskull Skeletor

When it’s come to the Turtles of Grayskull line by Mattel, I have mostly stayed in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side of the pool. I have all four turtle boys plus Sla’ker, who is more Slash than Faker if you ask me. The one exception has been Mouse-Jaw, but the classic Masters of the…

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by Joe

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

July 25, 2024

Marvel Legends Retro Card Scarlet Spider

By Joe
Look whose come (wall) crawling back.

It was in this space last year that I shared my fondness for the Scarlet Spider costume when I reviewed the Medicom MAFEX Scarlet Spider action figure. I don’t buy much from Medicom because their figures are really expensive for what they are, but I sometimes break my own rule when I think they’ve made something I might not get elsewhere. Silly me, because Scarlet Spider would be featured in the Across the Spider-Verse movie that summer which meant, of course, that the character was on Hasbro’s radar. And it made further sense we’d see him once again in the Marvel Legends line since Hasbro seems to be updating all of their Spider-Men with pin-less limbs and toe hinges. When this particular Scarlet Spider went up for preorder, I put in an order because, what the hell? – I can use another one. Now that I have it, what do I think and how does it compare to its much more expensive counterpart?

If only they could literally fight it out.

Since I do have that MAFEX edition, I figured we could do this review a little differently. It’s going to be more like a comparison because that sounds fun to me. Besides, this Scarlet Spider from Hasbro is pretty much par for the course when it comes to a Marvel Legends Spider-Man. And from just a quick glance, it doesn’t look like a piece of crap next to the figure that’s roughly 4x more expensive. I mean, we are comparing a $100+ action figure to a $25 one in the same scale so, really, the more expensive one should be the better figure without question. Rather, we’re asking the question of does the gap in price correlate 1:1 with a gap in quality between the two? And do the more subjective elements of the figures play much of a role as well?

This Scarlet Spider is new, but not.

Before we can dive into it, we should at least do a quick rundown on this new version of Scarlet Spider from Hasbro. It’s on the newer Spider-Man body which most refer to as the Renew Your Vows body since that’s the two-pack it first debuted in. It’s not that different from the previous retro card body as demonstrated by my symbiote Spider-Man in the image above (left). The articulation is essentially the same, but the figure has new arms which are pin-less and the knees have been made pin-less as well. And it has the added toe hinge. It’s the same body as the animated symbiote Spider-Man (above, right) which I reviewed awhile back, only this one has the overlay for the sweatshirt. It’s fine, though not without flaws. This Spider-Man still sucks at doing splits and Hasbro is so bad at implementing double-ball pegs in the neck that they had to hollow out a cavity on the back of the neck to give the figure more range. It gives the head a floaty quality, at times, and for some reason the head is rather hollow. From most angles, it will be fine, but there are others where it looks downright goofy. And Scarlet Spider is a character that can get into some odd positions so it may be more of a problem here than it would be on another character.

I really hate this dumb neck cut-out.

All that aside, I like the look of this one. The red is rather saturated and pretty close to an actual scarlet. The hoodie has a nice look to it as it’s a dark blue with the big spider logo. The hood isn’t functional, but are you really going to display him with it on even if it were? I like the texture to the hoodie and and Hasbro at least painted the drawstrings white. The rest of the figure is mostly bare plastic. The eyes are painted on, but not all that well. There’s some paint on the ankle pouches and belt and it’s fine, nothing worthy of praise, but also not worthy of scorn. The web shooters are floating pieces and can come off if you so desire while the ankle pouches appear to be glued into place. I very much enjoy that he has the classic hoodie, but I wish the eye shape was more in-line with the character’s earliest appearances.

It’s a thwip-off!

The figure looks fine and I think the hoodie helps hide the small shoulders that plague a lot of Marvel Legends. It also helps to make the head look more appropriately sized. And it’s in the visual component where this figure will compare as well as it can to the MAFEX version. If we bring in that figure, it’s easy to see that the Legends figure is a bit bulkier. The hoodie is darker and has the bigger logo and the belt is more of a first appearance Scarlet Spider than the one Medicom went with. Both figures don’t “wow” in the paint department. While Medicom did apply some red shading to their figure, it’s barely noticeable. Their Scarlet Spider is also a brighter red and the soft goods hoodie is a lighter blue that even has a bit of a pearl finish. The smaller logo is not my preferred look as well, though Medicom did include my preferred eyes. The other heads included with that figure feature a more generic Spider-Man eye shape with one looking a little angry. They’re kind of worthless.

Thinking about how cool of a figure we’d have if I could combine the elements of both figures into one.

Am I giving Hasbro the nod in the looks department? Yes and no. I much prefer the art direction of the Hasbro figure. The bigger body, classic shirt and belt, but it does still have that not-so-great head. And I’m not just talking about the style of the portrait, but the lollipop effect it has going on. And while it has less articulation, the cuts present are more of an eyesore. The thigh twist looks awful if you use it and the same can be said of the waist twist and boot cuts. Meanwhile, the Medicom figure does a good job of hiding the joints even if there are a bunch of them. I guess that level of engineering is what we’re paying for?

MAFEX Scarlet Spider likes to show off all of his stuff.

That and the accessories! This aspect isn’t even a contest, because the Legends release blows. The only items included in the box are a set of fists, wall-crawling hands, and thwip hands. That’s it. No unmasked head, no webbing, no nothing. The Medicom release also lacks an unmasked portrait, but that’s pretty much the only thing it’s missing. You get all of the hands you could want: fists, thwip, grip, open, and even magnetic hands and feet to adhere the figure to a metal surface. There’s also a ton of web lines to mess around with and a stand. In fact, I’d say a hidden piece of value to these Medicom Spider-Man figures is that buying one can outfit about a half dozen so your Legends figures can partake in the webs. The only hindrance there is Hasbro almost never includes gripping hands with their Spider-Man action figures so you’re limited to the thwip effects or the ones that fit over a forearm.

My attempt at the card art pose with both figures. Hasbro left, Medicom right.

Articulation is an area where the Medicom figure should be better, but also one where the Hasbro release should at least be able to compete. And for the most part, it’s true. Basically, anything the Legends figure can do the Medicom figure can as well and probably better. The joints are just smoother, possess more range, and are just all around engineered better. However, there’s not much the Medicom can do that the Hasbro one can’t as well. About the only thing I feel like the Medicom figure clearly does better is crouch and get into a low crawl. Both figures feature some annoying drop-down hips that really don’t enhance the range of the legs all that much. Both can’t do forward splits either, though the MAFEX can do the splits out to the side where as the Legends figure needs to rotate its legs forward a bit on the ball joint. The butterfly on the MAFEX figure also works better and it’s aided by the soft goods hoodie. I will say, I was surprised at how little the plastic hoodie of the Legends figure got in the way. You can still engage the diaphragm joint pretty easily and there’s enough room to take advantage of the butterfly joint. It’s just a butterfly joint that doesn’t offer a whole lot to begin with.

And this just seemed like a fun swinging pose. With effort, the Legends figure can do some cool things, but it’s definitely way easier with the MAFEX release.

All right, so I think it’s pretty clear that the MAFEX Scarlet Spider does a lot more than the Legends one. We knew that though. What is less clear is if it’s superior by 75 bucks or so. And I think the answer there is “probably not.” Sort of like comparing a conventional sedan to a luxury model, yeah you’ll like the luxury model more, but you might prefer to keep the money it costs to upgrade over the standard model and spend it elsewhere. That’s just on a much bigger scale, but even here 75 bucks is nothing to sneeze at. That’s about what it costs to take my family of four out to eat at a decent restaurant, maybe before tip. It also can get someone three more Legends figures or maybe some third party web effects, stands, and some more stuff. I got the Medicom one first and I’m happy with it. I like the Legends release too, and I might even prefer the aesthetics of it over the Medicom one, but not enough to toss the MAFEX one on eBay or something. If I had neither and was thinking of getting just one, I’d probably be okay with the cheaper Marvel Legends release. There would be some temptation to go with the Cadillac, but pragmatism would probably win out.

If you only have the Legends figure, you’ll probably be all right. Though you may want to hunt down some webs.

That’s just me though. You may place more of a premium on articulation and “stuff” to the point where it’s much easier to just get the Medicom figure and be all set. I definitely didn’t need to get the Legends Scarlet Spider, but I justified it to myself because I’ll probably never buy another Scarlet Spider. Unless a really bad ass cel-shaded one surfaces from either company. Then we’ll be talking about this 90s relic for a third time.

“Why can’t we be friends…?”

We have more spider men to talk about if that’s your thing:

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