I’ll just start off this review on a bummer note and say that the Hood could have come out much better if the main attraction of the figure—his Hood—had been different.
The Hood as a character debuted in a Marvel MAX series written by Brian K. Vaughn in 2002. The story detailed a common thief running across a cloak and a pair of boots that granted him some magical powers which he then attempted to use to turn his life around.
Then Bendis happened to him, and, well…yeah.
The Hood is a pretty basically dressed guy, so the pretty basic Stan Lee/Peter Parker body does work well for him. The Hood has usually been just a street clothes guy wearing a magic cloak, while not terrible exciting it gets the job done.
The headsculpt, while appropriately angry, is a little too “caught in a moment” for me since I tend to dislike heads that are constantly in a state of intestinal turmoil. Sure, it works well to show off a fit of rage or whatever, but I tend to like more subdued/stoic heads. I think this would have been a great opportunity to have an alternate head.
The biggest issue with the entire figure ends up being the thing that the figure’s entire identity is hanging on: the Hood. Having the hood section be connected to the cape section in one giant plastic shell means that everything kind of suffers because of it. Yes, you can get him to stand there with it placed juuust right and make him look like it’s not ill-fitting, but raising his arms, altering his stance, shifting his head, pretty much anything will alter the balance of the entire thing. It will ride up, shoot forward, shift, twitch, jostle and pretty much everything else, because it’s all one solid chunk of plastic.
Now I’ve said many times that I’m not a fan of plastic capes anyway, so the ideal solution to me would be fabric, but this being Marvel Legends and Marvel Legends being a plastic cape toyline, that was never going to be an option. What is an option is something that has actually been done on other figures, which is to have the cape and hood section both be separate pieces. That would allow the head to move freely while not having the lower, heavier chunk of plastic making up the remaining cape ruin any type of mobility.
That one simple alteration would have made much more sense for a character that has an entire identity built around the very thing that should have been the most well-done part of the figure: the Hood.
For accessories, the Hood comes with a pair of guns and a pair of dildoburst effects that slide onto the end of the guns and actually look quite nice, especially when hit with light. I was actually surprised that he got guns that look authentic and aren’t some kind of lasered up technothing, since it seems like real weapons are becoming less and less common.
This is feeling like a very negative review, but what it boils down to is that the Hood is a decent enough figure if you can get the cloak to sit just right on his frame and not skew too high or too low. But that’s the issue; there’s pretty much a very finite sweet spot of him looking good. There’s too much off about it to really make it a truly fun figure. The bad guy wave has been an exceptional wave all around, so one figure that is less than appealing is acceptable, but it does seem like a shame because just the one tweak of having the two pieces separate could have moved him further up the tolerable scale. Since the body itself is fine, if some third party fabric cape-maker manages to get a good looking fabric cloak for him, I think it would help make the figure far more dynamic than he currently is.
