After years…decades…possibly even centuries of fondling plastic, I am constantly shifting what I’m looking for in a super-articulated action figure. Sometimes that’s due to my own natural biases, and sometimes it’s in spite of them.
I am as guilty of anyone of thinking I like something that is a certain way because it’s the way it’s been done, and then without even realizing it finding that the way that I liked something is not, in fact, the optimal way of it being done, and this other, better method over here that I might have once thought of as sub-par is now the thing I pine after the most.
Anybody still reading?
Don’t worry, I checked out midway through that sentence too.
For instance, at one point I thought ball-jointed hips were the only way to go when talking about how you want your figures to karate kick someone in the face. But that was because of years of Toybiz figures with their seductive balls all up in my face. I was blinded by balls. But now? Now balls just seem so 2004. A toy with balls feels wrong in every possible way. Now I like those cross-cut joint dealies that Hasbro does, but I’m sure that even that method can be improved upon. Probably something involving a socket, but with loosey-goosey engineering that allows full rotation. Maybe with fries on the side.
The ab-crunch, once the pinnacle of action figure benddownafication, is slowly falling out of favor with me. Now, that’s not to say that it’s not well done when appropriate. If proper clearance is given, or if the design of the particular figure is more cosmically attuned to the use of an ab-crunch, then the ab-crunch is more than adequate.
But lately, with so many toys from the foreign markets and with more domestic action figures adopting it, I find that I get much more of a satisfying thrill out of a decently implemented Wobble Joint.
The Wobble Joint is what I’m calling that ball-jointed thoracic joint that allows you to bend the figure forward and backward but also side to side and twist him all the way around. Basically you can wobble the torso in any direction. I’m also capitalizing it so it sounds official, kind of like when you were a kid and you did something stupid like throw a giant rock at the aluminum shed that was beside the baseball field and it was the loudest damn sound every recorded and everybody on both teams stopped mid-game and looked over at where you were standing and your mom used your FULL NAME and you just know every damn letter was capitalized and your only option was to just run the f%$k out of town right now as fast as your little legs could carry you, because she yelled louder than the sound of rock against aluminum.
Where an ab-crunch needs the addition of a silhouette-shattering waist-swivel to allow the perpetrator to turn to the side to get groceries off the shelf, the Wobble Joint allows him to not only push his cart, but to also reach for the peas, get the chips off the bottom shelf and reach up top to pick up the jar of pickles. The Wobble Joint is the delight of every action figure that has to go on a quick grocery run because guests are coming and he only had a couple cans of Beefaroni in his cupboard.
A lot…and I mean a lot…of my favorite toys of recent years, have eschewed the ab crunch and have gone for the Wobble Joint. Figuarts and Mafex figures have leaned on Wobble Joints almost exclusively which is why they make (almost all) the best versions of figures with multiple variations. The Wobble Joint aids in microposing, where ab-crunches end up demanding a pose to conform to what it wants to do.
The Jazwares Fortnite figures and the Hasbro Power Rangers figures are both from properties that I don’t play or watch, but both properties utilize the Wobble Joint, and while the designs themselves are keeno enough on their own, the fluidity of that joint gives me even more incentive to pick them up.
Lady figures have utilized the Wobble Joint more often than men, but it has often not been used expressively enough. Sometimes the womenfolk have only been able to achieve a half-hearted swivel despite what should have been a decent range. Recently this has been changing, as the clearance levels of the Wobble Joint in the female torsos has been improving. The ML White Rabbit figure, for one, has a very nice range, making it one of my favorite enbooberated figures of recent memory.
I think a natural inclination of toy-collecting is to want updated versions of certain figures any time some toynological leap has been made. I just bought a brand new and excellent Nightcrawler just last year—just last frickin’ year—and yet if he were released again in 2020 revised with a Wobble Joint for extra-athletic posimification ability (like Beast had) I would absolutely buy the little bastard again. And I really like the figure as he is now. But that sweet sweet Wobble…it’s got a hold over me.
Wobblewobble.
(It’ll never catch on.)