World's Finest - Huntress & Power Girl

I recently picked up the World's Finest 2-Pack featuring Huntress & Power Girl. As usual the are highly detailed figures with nice paint jobs. Unfortunately many of these sets features quality control issues involving breakage at the joints. I know to make sexy and skinny female sculpts in causes joints to be very small on female figures, but other toy manufacturers seem to make it work. Check out the pictures below for a nice view and then watch the video for my review.

         Huntress in Black & Purple       Power Girl in White and Red

 The Huntress comes armed with her crossbow... vigilante or zombie hunter?

 Power Girl doesn't need weapons... she's got it where it counts  ;)

Battle Shell TMNT

The Nickelodeon based Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV show and toy line has been going strong for a while now. When these new figures came out I quickly began to collect the line. The one thing I told myself when I started this new collection, was that I was going to skip the endless Turtle variants if this line followed the path of the original toy line. For a while I was good. I skipped the turtles with spy gear and the ones who looked like Ghostbusters. Then the Battle Shell Turtles we announced and I felt my resolve weakening. The original Nick Turtles are great, but these are even more cartoon accurate. The shape of their faces better match the way the look in the show. Donatello even has the gap in his teeth.

In addition to being more show accurate, you can open up their shells to reveal a ton of extra weapons! I had a vintage storage shell Donatello as a kid. I really like the cartoon style head sculpts these figure have. From a design and engineering stand point I enjoy seeing what kind of weapons they chose to give the turtles and how they packed them into their shells.

Unfortunately, while taking photographs for this post Leonardo's shell broke. This is the first time I've had an issue with a modern Playmates Turtle toy breaking. I tugged on his shell to open it up and the catch piece that holds his shell closed snapped right off.

Voltron - Black Lion & Keith

Wow, the Black Lion has finally arrived! The Black Lion was always my favorite as a kid. Its the biggest, has wings, and forms Voltron's head. This lion is massive and very cool. Like all the other lions in this set his awesomeness is slightly hindered by his spring-loaded features that limit the ability to pose the figure.

 

Unlike the other lions, Black's mouth is spring-loaded so it snaps shut. This is because of the auto-transformation feature.  So I couldn't take pictures of the lion with its mouth open. The lion's tail has several articulation joints.

 

 The sculpt and paint details on the Black Lion's head are very nice. The head is black while the muzzle is light gray. There are some nicely painted red and yellow details included as well.

Like all the other lions, Black Lion comes with its pilot Keith. Sharing the same body as Lance, Keith is exactly as one would expect. Nicely paints and featuring just okay articulation. I'm still a little disappointed with these figures. Their knees and elbows just don't have the range of motion I want. He comes with both a helmeted head and his classic anime mullet head. Like all the pilots Keith comes with a key / figure stand and a piece to the Blazing Sword. Also pictures is the mouth blade that is included with the Black Lion

Once again, the key can open the cockpit in the back of the Lion. Keith fits nicely inside the lion. Make sure you carefully move the wings out of the way when you open the cockpit.

After I opened  up the lion and checked out his articulation a little bit I had to form Voltron. There are a dozen or so joints that must be manually manipulated and then one touch button performs the head transformation. As I was making all the adjustments to shoulders, knees, and paws I discovered there is something wrong with my Black Lion.

His one front leg, which folds up and rests on his back as Voltron will not lock into place. Many of the spring-loaded lion legs pop out of place easily, but this leg just never locks in place.

So I started compairing the two different legs and at the base of the gray leg where it connects to the black shoulder, the leg that will not lock has a strange piece of black plastic. I can't tell if it's broken or miss formed, but the feature doesn't work correctly. From the front of Voltron it is hard to tell that it isn't folded up right, but it does get in the way of his wings a little.

For a $65 toy it should work correctly.. Mattel Customer Service told me they were emailing me a return label. I haven't received the email yet. Pictures of the full Voltron coming soon. I'm a little nervous that I mail this lion back and somehow never get a corrected one.

Mr. Sinister - Toy Biz X-Men

Mr. Sinister was a pretty cool action figure in the 90's. He features a removable hard plastic cape and light-up eyes and chest. I also really liked that his one hand was sculpted open. Many 90's figures features closed hands with a hole throught them to hold weapons. The open hand works well with many X-Men characters for spell casting/mutant power using.

As a kid I never had an issue of the comic that featured him. I mostly based all my play action off his trading card  and an appearance on the X-Men cartoon from FOX. It was nice to have another big bad guy to work into stories. I had been beating up Magneto, Apocalypse, and Juggernaut from Wave 1 over and over again. Mr. Sinister and Ice-Man where the only two figures I was able to pick up from the 2nd wave.

There is a switch on the back of the figure that activates his light-up features. It sticks through a small hole in his cape. For the time period, I think Toy Biz did a great job on his cape. In the comic it is a series of individual pieces, which would be impossible for a toy. 

Mr. Sinister is the only X-Men figure I ever owned with a quality control issue. There is a red finger print on his groin. Someone at the factory must have gotten paint on their hand from his belt.

Bow in Skeletor Disguise?

How rare are packaging errors? Once in a while I hear about them, but never really see them. In fact the only one I had seen in the MOTUC (Masters of the Universe Classics) line before this was a Grizzlor I ordered from ebay. The MOTUC logo was placed in the bubble of the packaging upside down. I didn't take a picture of it, because it wasn't really all that interesting. I actually got Grizzlor pretty early on in my collecting. The packaging error was the least of my concerns I just wanted to open him up when I got him.

Anyway, flash forward... I ordered a Battle Armor Skeletor from Matty Collector recently when we has being reissued and he came with a much larger packaging error.

The paper at the bottom of the bubble that identifies the character is incorrect. Instead of saying Battle Armor Skeletor this figure is labeled as Bow (a She-Ra character also in the line). Is this a new Quarterly Variant Figure? Bow in Bad Guy Disguise?

The other interesting thing about the Bow label is that it does not have an “original” burst on the packaging which means the paper, or possibly the entire figure is from the first run of figures and not actually a reissue figure.

I did some research on Matty Collector to see when the figures were originally released. I mostly wanted to find out if they came out on the same month. Both figure came out before I started actively collecting the line. Bow is from Feb 2011 and BA Skeletor is from March 2011. They were only a month apart on release, perhaps there were a few extra Bow bubbles laying around the factory or production overlapped.

I placed my order for BA Skeletor in January of 2012. It's strange that the stock laid around long enough for me to get his this much later. Matty hold back a few figures from every production run to replace anything that is received with errors. I guess they hung on to this one a while, and never really looked at him. Oh well. I keep very few of my toys sealed on card. I like to open them up and pose them and display them with weapons in their hands. This one stopped me cold. He's still sealed and I can't decide if I should open him up or not. If you have an opinion leave it in the comments. Is it stupid and who cares, or is it too rare to open?

Not so Interchangeable Parts

Well in my previous post I talked about DC Universe Figures. I mentioned that I bought several figures I didn't really care for to get pieces to a “collect and connect” figure. While checking out these figures, I tried to swap out Mercury's scissor hand for his normal hand, I found out they were not so interchangeable. As I pulled on the scissor hand the small peg that connects it to his wrist broke. This was kind of disappointing since it is clearly supposed to be removable. This is the first time I've ever had a recent Mattel product break on me. I don't know if there was paint in the joint, accidentally gluing it in place. Perhaps it was a fluke or maybe others are having the same problem. The peg is very thin.

Even though I don't particularly care about owning a Mercury figure I was annoyed that he broke so easily after paying for him. So I decided to see what Mattel would do about it for me. I called up their hotline and talked to a lady. She informed me that they didn't have any stock left of that figure, so they could not replace him for me. She offered to send me my money back after collecting a bunch of information about where I purchased the toy. This worked out well for me, since I felt like I wasted my money with the broken toy, but didn't really want Mercury.

A few days later I got an envelope in the mail containing a voucher I could use to purchase another Mattel product. So I ran down to TRU and picked up a DC Universe vs. Masters of the Universe Classics 2 pack. Mattel wins anyway because the two pack costs more than a DCU figure. So, they got me to spend more money.

Quality Control Issue

I ordered the Big Bad Toy Store (BBTS) Exclusive Dreadnok and Marauder sets. These two 7-Packs contain 80's and 90's GIJoe and Cobra figures updated to today's toy standards. One of the figures in my Dreadnok set came with two of the same hand. I noticed it after opening the package and removing all the figures. I posted a question on the Toy News International (TNI) Forums about if I should contact the retailer, BBTS, or the manufacture, Hasbro. Everyone seemed to think I should contact BBTS. So I emailed them and the sent me a new figure. I was impressed with how quickly and easily they resolved my issue.

Weird figure isn't he? It was the 80's when the original version was released, and he was pretty cool back then. His ripped up shirt (or scarf as many call it) is much larger on this version and his hair is longer. The modern figure has better articulation and a more appropriately sized head. The original figure featured color change skin... one more thing that added to his coolness and bizarreness.