I’m back from my brief sabbatical and ready to once again write about toys! What have I bought? What have I preordered? What preorders did I cancel?
Big thanks to Josh Wallen for filling in while I was away. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of him…
SH Figuarts: Spider-Man: No Way Home
Let’s start off with the “preordered…but will probably cancel” category.
I had recently preordered the John Walker Captain America figure from The Falcon and Winter Soldier line before I ultimately decided that I’ll wait for the official US Agent figure that’s going to be coming at some point. Preordering figurers, especially those of the import variety, is an unfortunate necessity of collecting.
Case in point, the SH Figuarts for Spider-Man: No Way Home went up for preorder this week and I elected to order the Upgraded Suit version of Spider-Man after I compared him to the previous version of the Upgraded Suit that I got after Far From Home came out. This figure is slightly, perhaps infinitesimally, different from the previous release and I’m hoping the design of the figure and its articulation have been updated enough to address the issues I had with the prior iteration.
Also part of the wave were the black and gold suit from the trailer and a version of the Iron Spider suit. I’m not wild about the former and I already have the Infinity War version of the latter so I’m comfortable taking a pass on those.
Now…let’s see how long it takes for me to cancel THIS preorder.
Masters of the Universe: Origins Scare Glow
A hill that I will die on is that adult collectors are, at their core, fulfilling childhood wishes by buying whatever toys they want whenever the opportunity presents itself. I don’t think it’s too controversial an opinion and it also pays to be upfront with one of my personal main drives for collecting.
With that, I bring you… Scare Glow.
The original Scare Glow toy was a late addition to the first Masters of the Universe toy line that was introduced around the same time everyone had migrated over to Transformers and were still somewhat unaware of the forthcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles juggernaut. In brief, a really cool toy came out when not a lot of people were paying attention and it ended up being one of the most rare toys from that line.
The card for the figure reads “Evil Ghost of Skeletor” which…was confusing. Was he Skeletor’s ghost or was he a ghost that just happened to work for him? None of that was really important because he was a somehow inexplicably jacked skeleton man that glowed in the dark.
Long time readers will know that I am a sucker for glow in the dark toys so this He-Man adjacent oddity was the stuff of legends and it remained frustratingly (and financially) to of reach for decades. Luckily in recent years Scare Glow has finally been getting the recognition he deserves and along with that came a wide release with the Masters of the Universe: Origins line. The Origins line is aesthetically similar to the original figures but they have better articulation so you get the retro charm or weirdly squat muscle men in furry briefs…but now you can pose them so they don’t fall over on your shelf.
I had preordered a Scare Glow from an online retailer and once he arrived I couldn’t stand to open the figure, opting to set the box on my shelf so I could bask in the glory of a mint-on-card glowing skeleton man. However, my local comic shop got an assortment of Origins figures in (which sold SURPRISINGLY fast) and I was able to snag one to open.
Scare Glow isn’t breaking the mold or reinventing the wheel when it comes to action figure design. BUT the mere existence of this ridiculous figure brings me immeasurable joy, it’s just so unyieldingly silly that I cannot help but be a little more happy whenever I see it on my shelf.
