Yeah, its been a while. Sorry. What can I say? In the last three weeks I’ve been horribly ill and dealing with a lot of shit at work. There’s been precious little time for me and toys. In fact, since my last entry I’ve only picked up two new figures and Sidney here is one of them. I’ll be back shortly with a look at MOTU Classics Optikk figure. The clouds are parting so hopefully I can get back on track.
Sidney’s head sculpt looks so much better in person than it does in the photos I’ve seen. I can’t explain why, but even in the official product images, she looks like a goblin. In hand, her head looks much closer to a 3D representation of her comic book self. Its pretty good, but ultimately I don’t think her design translates well to 3D. I still defend Dragon’s use of molded hair with these figures as I think it holds the intended style of an illustrated character better than rooted hair would. Unfortunately, Sidney’s long hair takes away a lot of useable neck articulation, which wasn’t the case with Abbey’s shorter hair.
The body type is supposed to be the same as Abbey’s, but Sidney’s arms seem longer and slightly out of proportion. Apart from that, I have no complaints. The articulation here is excellent, although as I’ve said before, I am not a diehard collector of figures in this scale, so I am probably a lot more forgiving of articulation than those of you who buy a lot of 1:6 scale figures. Still, its important to keep in mind the price point and age of the figure.
Sidney’s outfit is based off her Outback garb. She has brown “leather” pants with nice decorative stitching and a purple cloth blouse, brown boots and a belt. The blouse had a ton of stray threads coming off of it (some you’ll see in the photos), but were easily clipped off. The boots on my figure appear to be the same used on Abbey, which is a departure from the original product images that showed her with brown cowboy style boots. I don’t know if they changed this during production, or the dealer who sold me mine got up to some creative swapping. Either way, her pants cover most of her boots so it isn’t a big deal. Her belt, unfortunately doesn’t latch well to the buckle. Sidney also comes with a soft rubber cowboy hat that fits her really well.
Overall, the outfit is ok. It looks really good, but it is much simpler than Abbey’s. I sort of wish Dragon had gone with the black catsuit that McFarlane used for their smaller Sidney Savage figure, but then I think this one is considered more identifiable for the character and her background.
Sidney’s equipment and accessories are much better than the ones that came with Abbey, mainly because they’re pretty much all weapons and almost all useable. Abbey came with way too many pointless tiny trinkets that served no purpose. The only thing in Sidney’s gear that cannot really be used are her sunglasses. Sidney doesn’t use the same separate molded hair as Abbey, so there’s no way to get the arms of the glasses behind her ears and under her hair. The whip falls into the slightly unseable category too because its difficult to get her to hold it and the tiny little hook to hang it from her belt snapped apart the instant I touched it. If you have a 1:6 scale Indiana Jones, you may want to let Sidney borrow his whip instead.
The rest of Sidney’s gear, however, is excellent. She has a sniper rifle, a silenced automatic pistol and a magnum revolver. The two automatic weapons have removable clips and the magnum’s wheel actually flips out. The rifle has a folding front grip and the action is actually spring loaded, and the silencer The detailing on everything is great, too. Its a nice arsenal compared to Abbey’s paltry automatic pistol.
For a while Sidney Savage was harder to find than Abbey, probably because Dragon gave her a more limited distribution. Or perhaps dealers disappointed with the sales of Abbey Chase chose not to carry her. I grabbed mine off of Ebay for under $35 and while there are a lot of things that I would have done differently here, I’m not totally disappointed in her. She does make a nice companion figure for Abbey, so there’s no buyer’s remorse here.