Ghost Rider made his first appearance in Toy Biz Marvel Legends Series 3, and depending on the collector, you were either really excited about this figure or hating it.
Technically there is nothing wrong with the figure, the sculpt, articulation or accessories, all that is great; it’s the character selection. This is the Dan Ketch Ghost Rider, not the Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider, and that is a serious conversation.
Ghost Rider, as the comic character, we all know and love got his first appearance in Marvel Comics back in 1972. I wasn’t born then, I suspect that the majority of Fwooshers were not born then. Since his inception he’s been a good solid lower alphabet character never really finding an extended footing in his own series, or on a team. Sure he’s been on teams but not for long. In the ’90s Ghost Rider is reborn in a new host with a new look and new bike. It was a modern look and very popular at the time, there was bit of a horror revitalization in the ’90s, more than likely thanks to Spawn.
And that is where it all goes downhill. For a while. When Ghost Rider came back in the ’90s he came back to a new host, not the original one from the ’70s. No Johnny Blaze this time, rather some punk no one every heard of, Dan Ketch. If you were able to get past your comic characters should always be the same rage, then you were treated to some really good comic story telling in the beginning. It was good stuff to read. Eventually things got weird with Ketch and Blaze being long lost brothers and demons popping up on motorbikes all over the place. I admit I lost interest. Until Blaze showed up recently in Thunderbolts, good times.
This is a great figure. Yeah he’s not perfect, and truth is none of the early Toy Biz figures are perfect, they didn’t have the benefit of zbrush mirroring techniques, rather these bad boys tended to be sculpted in 2-ups and then rotoscoped down at the factory. There was a world of off proportioning that could go wrong. Like one leg being shorter than the other (I had to go back yesterday and double check Namor’s legs cause I saw he was lopsided in all the pictures). Or arms being long or legs too short. Some of the work done in hand sculpting wax could show a sculptors tendencies, a dominate eye showing one side to be a bit sharper than the other, etc. Then there is casting, and sending off to a factory that “shrinks” rotoscopes the figure to desired production scale, tooling and eventually the production where things can be further skewed.
The reason that I point this out is that Ghost Rider is far from perfect, he’s a little bent at the knees, can’t stand straight up, his arms are really long, and his legs are kinda short and skinny. How much of this is thought out and how much is just the engineering and production I’ll never know, but it makes for an apish looking figure. For some collectors, they will make a long drawn out points about this and I know that in the past I was one of those guys. These days, it’s not an issue, I want the character and I want it look like the character.
And Ghost Rider looks like the Dan Ketch version. It’s a visually stimulating look and one that really pops on the shelf. The head sculpt is sharp, crisp, gruesome and scary as hell; exactly what you want to see in demon possessed super hero. The other aspect that pops on this figure is the use of textures, you don’t see this as much in Marvel Legends anymore but Toy Biz was good at using textures to make a figure pop.
The articulation was a great extension of what was introduced in Series 1 and Series 2. Ghost Rider is superposable and perform just about every position known to man. Pulling the figure out the other day and getting him ready for review made me remember how much I love this figure. And I love, real hand candy! Here’s the breakdown:
Hinged toes
Rocker ankles
Hinged ankles
Swivel calves
Double hinged knees
Swivel thighs
Ball hips
Swivel waist
Ball abs
Rocker shoulders
Ball shoulders
Swivel biceps
Double hinged elbows
Swivel forearms
Hinged fingers
Ball head
Accessories were great back in the day, you could pack a giant build a figure piece or a whole motorcycle into the package and that’s exactly what Toy Biz did. They packed Ghost Rider’s motorcycle into the package. And it’s pretty much a 1/12 scale motorcycle, and it is truly a great piece! Display pieces and accessories can suck sometimes. Really suck. But this one is beautifully sculpted and Ghost Rider looks great on it. And for an added piece of bad-ass, Toy Biz made the bike wall mountable to replicate the bikes ability to scale walls in the comic.
You can still pick up Ghost Rider today at:
