I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this wave as four out of seven of the figures were of characters I don’t have a lot of love for. While I enjoyed the Superfriends cartoon as a child, I barely remember it and didn’t really think I had any deep nostalgia for the ‘Superfriends only’ characters. Yet when I saw some packaged pics on ebayI got really excited for this wave and was fortunately able to get a set through fwoosher TRS’s connection at ethanstoys.com.
Accessories
Samurai comes with a semi-clear yellow ‘lightning’ sword and the Collect and Connect piece for Apache Chief (his right arm). The sword is a little more flexible plastic than I like to see for my action figure weapons, but I’ve seen worse. I think he looks pretty cool holding the sword.
He’s a little light in the accessories department and could have used a repaint of DCUC wave 1’s Red Tornado’s tornado effect to reference his wind powers. I think RT’s effect looks pretty nice on him.
Articulation
Samurai has the standard DCUC articulation with a ball jointed neck; swivel hinged shoulders and thighs; bicep and wrist swivel; and single elbow, ab, ankle and knee hinges. The nice thing about this figure is that none of the shoulder or ab articulation is hindered by his crazy big shoulder pads on his outfit.
Sculpt
It looks to me like Samurai uses the medium build body (seen on figures like Black Manta and Hal Jordan) with Green Arrow’s boots and new head, forearm and costume overlay piece. The head sculpt seems very much based on the Alex Toth Superfriends design work, but made cooler through the 4H process. He actually looks kinda tough in that ridiculous outfit, which is quite an achievment for a guy in shortpants.
The shoulderpad part of his costume is one ultra-thin plastic piece and is glued at his neck and belt which allows for a great range of motion. I pulled the piece loose at the belt whilst poseing the figure and that allows for even more motion. The plastic is the thinnest and most pliable I’ve seen in the DCUC line. It seems to hold the sculpt detail well, but is very flexible. I’m so glad to see this change and hopes it continues for future wave as the flexibility of the add-on parts has long been an issue with this line.
Paint
The paint is simple and clean with no slop or mess, but without any sort of shading work for depth except on the wrist bands. I think they did a dark wash to bring out the detail on his wrist bands. I like that the bands, his tunic and his boots are all green but made to look like different materials through different paint techniques. The bands have the wash, the boots have a bit of a gloss finish and the tunic is flat green. 
The face is a different plastic than the rest of the skin of the body, is painted to match and is almost completely successful depending on the lighting in your room. The soft lights in my house make it look a better match, but the daylight bulbs I shoot pics with show the difference a bit more.
Overall Samurai came out great. I’m not really a fan of the character and I think the costume design is fairly ridiculous even in the world of ludicrous super-hero costumes( Alex Toth was on a real shortpants kick that design day), but this figure came out pretty cool. I’m happy to add him to the collection.
Turnarounds
