Funko’s ReAction line is a time-warp back to an age of five points of articulation and simplistic sculpts where nostalgia is the biggest selling point. It’s not a line that will be for everybody; you know if you’re the target audience just at a glance.
Funko came storming out of the gate with tons of licenses from all types of properties from Pulp Fiction to Universal Monsters to Back to the Future. I can’t say that I’ll be buying everything that Funko puts out in this specific aesthetic, but there are a handful of figures that I’m buying almost as a gift to a version of myself that existed a long time ago. That kid’s world was blown inside out by the debut of Star Wars action figures, and as a result, he has a secret soft spot in his heart for limited sculpts, sketchy likenesses, and the most basic articulation. That kid has been spoiled by the future, but he never truly dies.
The Terminator Endoskeleton was on my short list of must-haves from this line. Even if the aesthetic represented by this toy line was quickly dying out by 1984 when this movie came out, and I didn’t see the Terminator movie itself until several years later; this odd anachronism seems like it would have been a must-have for me at the time. I was, and still am, fond of the robot types. The Endoskeleton would absolutely have found a way into my Imperial army, facing down lightsabers and blasters.
The packaging is very flat with a single bubble, and the toy rattles around without an extra plastic couch, which is exactly how it was. It looks like it could be found hanging in a department store by the score, single file and heavily slipped through, right between a nest of Star Wars and G.I. Joe.
As for what this toy is supposed to do, it does it and it does it admirably. I think that’s actually the highest compliment that you can pay a toy: you conveyed the specific message you’re trying to get across successfully. It looks like the source material as run through a gauzy haze of — to modern standards — prehistoric sculpting techniques. These toys are essentially like sign language as applied to toys: you get the words, you get the basic structure, but you don’t get the inflections and subtle nuances of spoken word — you get pure information that your brain fills in the blanks to parse. And that’s just fine. That’s how it was back then, dagnabberit, when we walked ten miles to school uphill with shoes made out of old tires.
So that’s the extent of it. The figure has five points of articulation, and he’s got pretty bad balance depending on how you try to stand him, and you can’t pose him at all with his arms out without supporting him or he’ll topple over — but those toys back then weren’t made for the very adult method of “posing” were they? Hell no, they were for playing. They didn’t stand stiffly on a shelf, they carpeted the floor in catatonic heaps waiting for their time in the sun. They weren’t perfect, they weren’t exact, but they were childhood, and Funko has captured that with this figure. And that, my friends, is a win.
