Mar-vell is the perfect type of figure to drop into a random wave, and this wave definitely qualifies for “random.”
Based around the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers video game, the Abomination wave is partially an Avengers wave, partially a Gamerverse wave, and partially a…well, let’s stick in Leader and Mar-vell and make a wave. And I like that a lot. Themes are nice and all, but sometimes it’s good to just stick some filler into a random wave that gets us much needed characters, or updated versions of characters, or basically whoever the hell they feel like tossing in. It reminds me of the waves used to be, without unifying themes of Spider-Men, X-men or Avengers to tie things together.
Hasbro has been pulling double duty for years now, giving us newer characters while simultaneously updating a ton of old Toybiz figures. I know a lot of people—especially older collectors–might get tired of buying new versions of characters they already have, but there hasn’t been an instance yet where I feel like the older figure didn’t need an update. Plus not everyone has been there since the beginning. This might be somebody’s first Mar-vell figure. And if it is, then it’s a good one.
The old Toybiz Mar-vell was on the diminishing-returns Bullseye body. It was already beginning to show it’s age and lose some of it’s charm at the time with the jutting neck and the decreasing muscle-detail. Plus the combo of strangely articulated knuckle hand and unhelpful slap-hand made it overall (and hindsight helps a lot in this assessment) awkward.
This one is an improvement in every way. It’s on the mid-sized “wrinkled” body, meaning it’s the one with some cloth wrinkles on it. It’s the one used for Cosmic-Spider-man and…well, some others. I don’t have a mental Rolodex of everyone that has used this body. I used to be pretty good at this! Regardless, I like this body a lot. It has a good size to it and the proportions are all very nice. It doesn’t have butterfly shoulders, but I don’t really mind that as even without them the articulation is engineered in such a way that the arms get a good amount of crossover motion. He can kind of touch his Nega bands together, although it’s not quite convincing.
The elbows and knees perform very well on this body as well. It’s an excellent body for these types of simplistically-costumed yet powerful-looking characters. It’s got a heft without looking too brawny, and it’s lithe without looking skinny. It’s actually the body I’d love to see yet another attempt at Gladiator on. I know, I know, but third time would be the you know the rest.
The Nega bands are a separate piece and while they do wiggle a bit, they do a good job of staying where they’re supposed to be. I think I like them being separate as opposed to the sculpted on bands of the TB figure. They don’t quite seem so thick, but it’s been a while since I looked at the old figure so my memory might be playing tricks on me.
He has a newly sculpted head that does a great job of evoking Captain Marvel. It’s stoic and determined without having that slightly grumpy look that some heads can have. The well-shampooed ’70s hairsculpt looks great with a nice shading to make all the layers stand out.
I’ll admit it; there’s not really much to this figure outside of the base body and a new head. There’s no extra hands, there’s no alternate head, there’s not even any energy effects or anything, if that was something one would need. It’s pretty much the dictionary definition of a simple toy, but it does the job it’s supposed to do so damn well that all of that doesn’t matter, because the end result is extremely satisfying. Some might find that boring. I’m a sucker for all of that cosmic stuff, especially back when they were introducing Adam Warlock and Mar-vell and Thanos and the classic Drax (an ever-growing hole in my collection) and so forth, This figure pushes all the right buttons for me. It was no doubt put in to justify all the new tooling in the Gamerverse figures, and Mach-1, but that’s fine, because I dig it.
