Rock Python succeeds in doing almost exactly what a Rock Python figure needs to do. Your feelings on this will no doubt hinge upon exactly how much of a rat’s patootie you give about Rock Python, or the Serpent Society as a whole. For many, that amounts seems to be none. But for those rarified gems among us that actually care, I present you that most unlikeliest of unlikelies: Rock Python.
Rock Python is an easy base-body pump-out that requires only a head and a paintjob in order to exist, which is great for budgetary concerns. Rocky is based on the Reaper body, which is perfect for him. It suggests bulk while not being overly stocky like the Hyperion-sized body, and gives him a certain stature against other figures.
Rock’s shtick is that he’s got a certain level of invulnerability to most things, so he’s a tough guy. Shoot him, punch him, blow him up, he’ll shrug it off. He’s that guy on the team, the one that can absorb damage and keep coming when anybody else might be knocked on their keister. The Serpent Society is a fairly large group filled with oddballs and eccentricities. Rock Python gets a figure by virtue of being easier to make. So far we’ve got a set of three. SS members are kind of like Spaghetti. A noodle is not Spaghetti. A few noodles is not Spaghetti. But the more noodles you get, the more chances there are that Spaghetti is happening. As more and more noodles are added to the roster, eventually we’ll have a plate full of Serpent Society members, and that’s about as far as I’m going to stretch this metaphor.
Rock Python tosses little grenades that expand into steel coils. A few of those would have been a neat inclusion, but this is a low-budget figure so you’ll have to make due with your imagination on that front. I would have liked a set of fists to go with the grabby hands, but I can’t remember a set of appropriately-sized fists that go with the Reaper body. Has any Reaper-sized body come with fists? I know Wonder Man should have, and Namor, but I don’t think they had fists. Huh. Kind of a missing element, and an important one. Oh well.
For an overall simple costume design, I like the colors. The blue is a nice vibrant lighter shade, and it rubs up against the purple nicely. You can’t call the Serpent Society members “drab.”
Like I said, the head is the only new part, and it’s a nice one. Rock wears a stylized half-helmet dome thing that suggests a snake head. His mouth is the only place for expression, and he has a nice snarly half-cocked kind of thing going on that suggests attitude. It’s a nice touch instead of full on grimace or whatever.
This body has always been a decent one except for the shoulders, which run into some clearance issues. Aside from that, I’ve never outright disliked it. How you feel about this figure is pretty much determined by how much you like the Reaper body, how much you like deep-dives into villains, and how much you want to build a Serpent Society. I’m an advocate of all three, so I love the figure. I get that we’ve had newer bodies that are technically “better” than the Reaper body, but those are slighter bodies, and you need some variance in there so everybody doesn’t look exactly the same.
He is simple, I will give you that. As a figure he’s as basic as can be, and for a lot of people that translates to “boring.” I don’t give much of a crap about ranking villains in terms of A B C or whatever, but I recognize that he’s not going to have headlined anybody’s top ten lists. He wouldn’t even make my list of top five Serpent Society members. But something about the ML team’s dedication to putting out a snake dude every once in a while makes me happy. A lot of waves need a simpler figure in order to keep the budget in check, and there are a ton of guys like this wandering around the Marvel Universe. Rock Python is not somebody I ever saw coming, and that keep the line interesting. More Serpent Society members, please.
