This week’s installment of Figure Friday is going to be a bit of potpourri insomuch that my Mafex Knightfall Batman has yet to show up as I put digital pen to digital paper. Sort yourself out, FedEx!
I also can’t get it up to write about the couple of 3.75 inch Star Wars Vintage Collection figures I picked up. Both are fine, just fine, but it’s well-trod ground regarding my affinity for those tiny kings that harken back to my beloved toys of yesteryear.
Last time I wrote that my Wun-Dar was about to show up and indeed he did. My one sentence review? “Wun-Dar is wun-dar-ful and possible the best thing since sliced bread!” Nailed it. He’s staying in his (bread)box since the secondary market value of the guy absolutely exploded thanks to toy scalpers and there shall he remain until I need him the most.
SDCC Toys
Speaking of well-trod ground, there’s not much I can write about SDCC that hasn’t already been covered by the other half of FF and our Man on the Ground (™) at SDCC. Marvel Legends unveiled a bunch of stuff that I’m not really into at the moment and Figuarts seemed to show nothing but Dragon Ball Z figures instead of the Star Wars and Marvel stuff that I collect.
HOWEVER.
There’s always one toy reveal that ends up completely blowing my mind and NECA has done it again, dammit. While I was experiencing SDCC vicariously through social media (Henry Cavill is totally going to show up, guys…and he’s bringing back JFK Jr. with him so keep waiting), I absolutely sat up straight and threw my daiquiri across the room when I saw the first photos of NECA’s next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures.
It’s often the case that you don’t know you want something until it’s literally right in front of you. You see, NECA unveiled some TMNT figures I didn’t even know were possible until the curtain was pulled back and they were suddenly real. The best way to describe these figures is as perfect recreations of the Mirage Studios Turtles circa the 1989 “Return to New York” storyline.
Over the last couple of decades there have been a fair few figures depicting the Turtles as they appeared in 1984 but they never were what I considered to be essential enough for my collection. I previously wrote that NECA’s TMNT figures from the first live action movie were the mountaintop and that I couldn’t really see myself buying any more Turtles figures because it couldn’t POSSIBLY get any better than that.
Oh, how wrong I was.
Beyond the very fact that they exist I haven’t seen any word on the release date or possible price point but I’m ready and waiting for these things to become available.
McFarlane Munitions Pack
Every so often I’ll get bored and take a chance on a toy just to see what the big deal is about. Since DC/WB apparently forbade any of their toys from coming with gun accessories a lot of their figures have been given knives, pointy fingers, or worse yet, made to look like they were given crippling arthritis in their index fingers form Space Invaders in the 70’s.
Hindsight being what it is, it’s pretty clear that a lot of these figures were supposed to come with guns (Grifter, Deathstroke, Peacemaker, etc) but when the word came down from on high…they didn’t. I had a few DC figures from before the switch over and it was a decidedly mixed bag on whether guns from old figures would work with the new ones. The most obvious issue was scale since a lot of the earlier figures were all over the map and didn’t quite match with others from the same line.
Ever the businessman, ol’ Todd offered a “McFarlane Munitions Pack” filled with various weapons for McFarlane figures in the 7-inch scale and totally not the DC Multiverse figures (wink-wink). Priced somewhere around $15 USD I opted to place an order for one and see what all the fuss was about.
The guns showed up in the mail this week (possibly the most American sentence I will will ever write next to “I was eating Burger King on the toilet”) and a grabbed the nearest DC figure available to me to test it out. Did it work?
Kind of.
I selected the “Three Jokers” Red Hood since he came sculpted with trigger fingers at the ready and took the dual pistols from the munitions pack only to have one gun sort of fit and the other gun NOT AT ALL. I also tried my luck with the shotgun which didn’t even remotely fit.
Now, I’m not saying this is going to be the case for ALL the DC Multiverse figures. The Red Hood I used was a slightly scaled down and re-tooled version of the first Red Hood release so I expect that other figures from the DC line will fare better and as soon as I can dig some out of my figure bin I’ll test out that theory.
