If you had told me a year ago that Bucky O’Hare was going to be one of my favorite toys of 2017 I probably would have ignored you and gone back to playing with my most recent Marvel Legends or SH Figuarts purchase(s).
I don’t have any “real” attachment to Bucky O’Hare, at least not in the same way that I do to Star Wars, Spider-man, Transformers, Thundercats, He-Man or G.I. Joe. However, when Boss Fight released their first images of the Bucky prototype, I knew I had to preorder him as soon as he went up on their site.
Growing up, my mom used to occasionally take my brother and me from NY to visit her childhood hometown of Carbondale, PA. One of the highlights of these trips for me was occasionally stopping by the nearby Children’s Palace (AKA Child World) in Scranton on our way home. For the unfamiliar, Child World / Children’s Palace, which sadly went out of business in the early ’90s, was a national toy chain with as many locations as Toys R’ Us and had a cool castle-like design aesthetic.
Sometime in the early ’90s on one of those stops at Children’s Palace in Scranton was where I first met Bucky O’Hare. I had never read the comics, and I don’t believe the cartoon had started airing yet (that was so cool back when the toys used to hit first, I remember seeing the Tigersharks toys in a TRU once during a birthday visit and passing on them, only to see the cartoon on TV a few weeks later and being in dire need of them) but as my younger brother and I perused the aisles, there he was, a bright green space bunny dressed in red.
At this point, I was entering my early teens, “too old” to still be playing with toys, but still asking for them and purchasing them with whatever money I had on-hand from chores. Despite being “too old” for toys, my mom was kind enough to indulge my whimsy (along with the occasional good old catholic guilt trip). Unfortunately, I do not remember exactly which figures my brother and I ended up with that day, although I suspect it was likely Bucky and Deadeye, we did eventually end up with them, Willy DuWitt, Blinky and a few toads (bring ’em all on BFS)!
So a brief plastic love affair (early addiction to toys) is my only real link to Bucky O’Hare. I can vaguely remember the comics from the cardbacks and I’m hard pressed to recall the actual cartoon, but I remember having those toys, so when Boss Fight posted images of their Bucky action figure prototype I got that same tug of nostalgia that I did when I first saw the 4 Horsemen’s MOTUC He-Man in the Mattel case at SDCC.
What we got is a perfect update to the original. It looks exactly how you remember it, meaning WAY more perfect and on-model then if you were to actually google the original toy that your brain is kind enough to recollect more fondly then it probably deserves.
It has all the articulation that you wish the original had, with three different expressions and multiple hand swaps, his dual pistols can even be attached to his belt, this thing is pure hand candy to play with.
So it kinda came out of nowhere, pushed all the right nostalgia buttons, and was executed as a damn good action figure, that’s why Boss Fight Studio’s Bucky O’Hare is my pick for Best of 2017.
