a companion to the lego thread, post pictures of cool action figures, and their vehicles and playsets and such. i guess stuff like mighty max/polly pocket, sylvanian families, playmobil and so on could go in here too
i mainly started this thread to post killer bee, the guy on the left in this picture. he’s one of two “mega mutant” figure/vehicle hybrids from the original tmnt toyline. i saw a picture of him yesterday, and i love his design! the crazed face, the lurid colours, the fact that he weilds a chainsaw…
the other one, needlenose is nowhere near as cool.
It folded up for easier storage. The field in front pushed in underneath while the wings folded up on the sides. That plate in the middle had a spring in the back and when it got hit by a stray missile it caused the platform on top to fall forward and dump any unwary Joes to their doom.
See that Joe manning the missile launcher thing in the very front? I still to this day have that guy. He’s one of my favorites so I’ve managed to hang on to him over the years. He’s sitting on top of my 3DS on my dresser.
Why, I had to make my own sewer tube for my turtles by taping together three floaty foam keychains from a local marina! Though I did get a proper one eventually. I did have that leech patrol boat/jetski thing too, but that’s a big as I ever got for TMNT stuff.
Biggest thing I had otherwise was MASK’s Boulder Hill base.
Which was kind of weird, since I didn’t have much MASK stuff really. Pretty sure I got it as MASK was waning too, so it might have been gotten cheap at Big Lots or something.
And the Ghostbusters thing just gets me wondering on where exactly the whole slime+action figures thing got started. I know it was big in TMNT too, but there was also that Master of the Universe set that used it. Especially amusing considering that was a line featuring some fuzzy figures. Wonder how many Grizzlors got their fur irrevocably gunked up.
by the time power rangers zeo came out, i thought of myself as “too old” for both power rangers and action figures, but i remember seeing this guy in shops at the time and thinking it was a really cool design, at least
it starts as this thing that looks like a kind of sci-fi moai thing, and it comes with a shiny, magical girl-looking key. press the key to that red forehead jewel and turn it, and…
it opens up, simultaneously revealing this robot guy and becoming his cape! i never got one of these or even watched the show, even to this day, but i still love the whole concept of it
I used to be way into X-Men toys, but then I saw my first Spawn figure, and I was like, “I will totally pay double for this level of crafstmanship and awesomeness.”
Sometimes I wonder if my SB-style media aesthetic/media elitism is affected, and then I remember that as a child I would only buy prestige action figures. I think I got $2 a week for allowance and eventually $5, so that’s where that went.
My favorite collection was definitely Manga Spawn, because of how it was the awesomest thing ever.
That mecha Violator had 22 points of articulation! I learned what “articulation” was from its box!
Spawn toys were really cool and well made, but tended to have bendy and movey bits that would break during play, because they probably weren’t intended to actually be played with.
i had a bunch of series one spawn figures as a kid, but that was because a discount supermarket in town was inexplicably selling them for £2 each.
that’s an offer no kid can refuse for a badass-looking figure with a free edgy comic
they were a lot simpler and more like actual toys than those later figures. i’ll find some pictures when i’m not posting from my kindle
That series in particular was really bad about breaking because the company they were using at the time mistakenly used a softer, and therefore weaker, plastic when casting those figures. So the swords and stuff ended up being all droopy and shitty looking once you took them out of the box and started posing them. McFarlane Toys switched to a different manufacturer after that line and all the figures after that went back to being made out of the good, hard plastic action figures should be.
I didn’t mention this earlier but I also went through a Spawn phase from the ages of about 11-16 and amassed a shameful amount of Spawn toys. I had almost-complete sets of series 1-12. The one you’re talking about was I think series 11 and was the only one really afflicted by the poor quality materials.
I think my first Spawn figure might have been the Knights of the Round Table (or whatever) Spawn figure that came with a comic book about Spawn inexplicably being around in Arthurian legend. It was a pretty lousy comic book and only an okay figure. Spawn as a knight didn’t really capture my imagination, but I think that one was only $5 (same as an X-Man figure), because it had been on the shelf for, like, two years.
It was a lot more solid and like a regular toy. Its cape was plastic and detachable, and I think over the years the shoulder armor which pegged into the shoulders was lost.
My other two favorites were the MGS ninja figure and some kind of red, white, and blue guy with a mechanical arm. No idea who he was, but he had a pretty cool design.
And yeah: they were more solid, though I think Ninja’s sword might have also been a bit soft. Hard to remember.
That’s Super Patriot. He’s an Erik Larson creation from his Savage Dragon comics. I had a lot of those comics too but not as many as I had of Spawn. Even though I don’t read them anymore I still absolutely love that Erik Larson is still putting out Savage Dragon books each month and has been since 1992.
He was the middle ages Hell spawn killed by the angelic spawn hunter Angela in issue 9 of the regular Spawn series. Did you know that issue was written by Neil Gaiman and he came up with the characters Angela and Medieval Spawn and years later it led to a big lawsuit between Gaiman and McFarlane over who had the exclusive rights to those characters?
