Channeling the combined Power of the Universe and the Wisdom of the Elders of Eternia, Adora transforms into She-Ra, the most powerful woman in the Universe. My subscription She-Ra arrived on Monday evening. I have to say I love the early shipping on those subscriptions. I feel like my orders from the 15th ship even faster now that they ship out the subs earlier. Check out pics and thoughts on this monthly MOTUC figure after the jump!
Capsule review: Great looking figure, not without it’s problems. There are some poseability and headswapping issues. If you missed her due to the fast sell out(and you have an insane amount of patience), it might be worth waiting for a re-release to see if they can fix some of her issues.
ACCESSORIES
She-Ra comes with an alternate headsculpt, removeable cape, sword, shield and axe/comb.
I appreciate the effort the Horsemen went through to try and include a nod to the comb accessories of the original She-Ra figures while making the comb look more like an axe. However, it’s not really something I’m going to use much. It’s a cool idea that just doesn’t work for me personally. My daughter was thrilled to see it, though and immediately set about combing She-Ra’s well sculpted coif.
I really love the shield with it’s nice sharp detail and shiny blue gem. The plastic they chose has a great metallic look to it. I even like the two tone gold sword a lot more than I thought I would. I was thinking of swapping it with Adora’s sword for a bit more cartoon accuracy, but I don’t feel the need to do so any more.
The headsculpt she came packaged with is based on her original toy look:
I despise that mask design. It’s just a horrendous eyesore as far as I’m concerned. The gold, the glitter…I’m glad they included it for fans of the look and I’m not even complaining about it. I get why it’s here, it’s just really not for me. This is the only picture of it I took because it was so difficult putting the superior alternate head sculpt on, it was not worth the effort to me to swap them back for pictures. The alternate headsculpt, is thankfully very nice.
Articulation
I noticed that the boot swivel and the ankle joints were a little loose on my She-Ra. I’m not sure if that’s a line wide issue or I just was unlucky.
She-Ra has the standard points of articulation of female figures from the MOTUC line with one exception, she has a slightly different ankle tilt than the rest of the females. It’s more similar to the male MOTUC figures. It does have more range of motion than most of the male MOTUC ankle tilts, but not quite the range of the tilts on Teela or Evil-Lyn. That’s kind of a shame, because I really liked that Teela ankle tilt engineering. It allowed for some solid dynamic posing, even if the plastic of the skirt was restrictive.
That brings me to the skirt. The skirt hinders poseability. It seems to be made of a fairly flexible plastic, but I think the shape of the skirt is very restrictive. If there had been a slight more flare or an angled cut to the skirt, I think you would have had a great deal more leg movement. As it is, her best poses are really vanilla. No kicks or deep lunges here. It’s a little disappointing since April’s Evil-Lynn had a perfectly flexible skirt.
She-Ra also suffers from a bit of a bobble head syndrome and the poseability is affected by the length of her hair. You basically have side to side movement, though the head doesn’t always want to stay where you pose it due to the bobble factor.
Sculpt
The body looks to me to be mostly re-used Adora and Teela parts, so it has the appropriate beefiness to stand toe to toe with the Masters of the Universe. The skirt and headress have some nice little detail in them. Nothing flashy, but a solid representation of the character.
Paint
I had some slight issues with paint chipping off the jewel in the center of She-Ra’s headress, but other than that, the paint looks clean and free of slop. Even the chip is a little tough to see because it often reads to the eye as a highlight. I love the bit of purple eyeshadow she has. It’s a tiny little detail, but nice to see.
I didn’t really like the bare plastic used for She-Ra’s body on most of the pictures I saw pre-release, but in hand it looks a lot nicer to me. There is a subtle bit of shading that adds some depth and cuts down on the shine. While it seems a little odd to me that She-Ra and Adora have different skin tones, She-Ra looks fine.
Despite the problems with articulation and headswapping, She-Ra still makes a great addition to the shelf. Mattel needs to nail down the skirt flexibility issue. It seems to vary wildly from figure to figure and should be consistently flexible.
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