It’s another hodgepodge edition of Figure Friday. I’ve returned from Toronto no different nor better than before I went there, barring my seeming inability to find a place that serves a decent buffalo wing in southeast Michigan.
As is the custom, I found Toronto to be as lovely and expensive as always. The vibe is slightly more relaxed than it is here…or as relaxed as it can be when your next-door neighbour is starting their fourth domestic dispute of the week. It was exceedingly easy for me to keep my mouth shut and remain anonymous as an American “abroad” after convincing the border guard in Windsor that I was not, in fact, an asylum seeker.
It’s not much of a surprise that I hardly did any toy hunting while in the city. I wasn’t about to go out of my way to find a Walmart (just…why?), but I did find myself in a couple of BMV stores. While cool, nothing toy-wise caught my attention.
Luckily, I came home to a couple of heavily discounted GI Joe figures I had ordered before I hit the road. It came as some surprise to me that I don’t really fuck with GI Joe figures; they just did not move the needle for me. At all.
It’s well documented and oft-discussed that I hardly had any Joes as a kid due to my mom’s objections to “war” toys (Star Wars? A-ok, oddly). I watched the cartoon like everyone else, but there was a GI Joe-shaped hole in my toy collection filled with superheroes and transforming robots, and that was enough.
I picked up Sci-Fi and Mainframe because they were some of the weirder Joes that I wanted but never got as a kid. What can I say? The neon green laser trooper just spoke to me. The figures from the Classified line are fine, but just not for me. They’ve already been deposited in one of my storage bin and I’ve breathed a sigh of relief that I dodged the bullet of another toy line to collect.
Deadpool & Wolverine Marvel Legends
As Marvel Jesus as my witness, I had only gone to the store to buy cat food.
I ended up walking out of the grocery store with the cat food I came for and two new Wolverine figures.
I am nothing if not a creature of habit. Whenever I go into a store, I always follow a set route that takes me directly through the toy department and then on to what I’m “really” there for. I was at Canadian Tire for the first time ever a couple of weeks back and, much like a homing pigeon, I found my way right to where they keep their (disappointing) selection of toys. I bought a hockey stick so as not to arouse suspicion before going back to my hotel, where I left the stick as a token of appreciation for the cleaning staff.
When I was supposed to be shopping for cat food, I was on my preplanned route and cutting through the video games department when out of the corner of my eye I spied a full wave of the newest Deadpool & Wolverine randomly placed on top of a case of PlayStation accessories. Some underpaid and underappreciated employee had unboxed the case and decided that right there was as good a place as any, and I do not blame them. Mostly because it benefited me.
Yes, I have gone on record as an OG Deadpool hater. I’ve never much cared for the character or the movies, and the most recent entry was a non-stop, pandering, money-hungry waste of my time. That being said, even I am not immune to the appeal of seeing Hugh Jackman suit up (properly) one more time, and a good action figure is a good action figure.
Now, my use of “good” in the above paragraph should come with a pretty big asterisk next to it. Marvel Legends has really upped its game in recent years, and by doing so, it takes some of the sting out of the nearly $30 USD per figure price tag. However, both the figures I snagged have some pretty confounding flaws.
First and most egregiously (I’m really playing it up here; it’s not that serious, given, you know, the world right now), the Brown Suit Wolverine does not come with an unmasked head, which, on its face, is fine until you recall he doesn’t wear a mask with that suit in the movie. Maybe they could’ve released this as a “concept art” figure, except that it comes packaged with a neck-nubbin, for lack of a better term. The nubbin is designed to accommodate the unmasked Hugh Jackman head… which the figure does not include.
This is not an error. To complete the look of the figure, you’ll have to first purchase the Wolverine figure that was released last year, which comes with the unmasked head. It’s just such a weirdly confounding choice, and, listen, I know that most folks buying this figure will have already purchased the prior figure (like me), but selling what’s essentially an incomplete figure just does not make sense to me.
Next up is the “Sleeveless” figure, which showcases Wolverine’s look from the final battle of the movie. It doesn’t come with an unmasked head, but it DOES come with an alternate masked head with a slightly different expression. There’s no neck nubbin, so this is largely a wash.
The figure is largely a retool/repaint of last year’s figure with no sleeves on the costume and a “dirty” paint wash to simulate “battle damage,” and that would be all well and good until you turn the figure around and see that the back of it is completely pristine and yellow. It kind of looks like he was leaning up against the wall and got splashed by a passing car while waiting for the bus.
There are both perfectly fine figures, and if you’re fortunate enough to have the spare head for the Brown Suit Wolverine, it catapults that into the neighbourhood of great.
And in the three-day gap between this paragraph and the last, they unveiled an ill-timed new Wolverine figure, the “topless” variant from the finale of the movie. With this release, the schedule was likely just one figure away from a fully nude Hugh Jackman figure.
