I think I’ve got all the frothing bile and anger toward Mattel out of my system, so let’s see if we can give the next figure in the 4-inch Young Justice line a fair shake. He is, afterall, the last only truly new figure in this wave, and the only one that I was excited about picking up.
We just saw the packaging for the 4-inch line a couple of days ago and I don’t have a lot more to add to that. I’m still really digging on it as it feels like the spiritual successor of the JLU line and something about those figures and packaging really scratch my nostalgic itch. Once again, I’ll also point out how much I love the way Mattel uses the printed card behind the figure to hide the C&C piece so that it looks like part of the cardback. It’s just neat.
Out of the package and in hand, Sportsmaster is instantly my favorite figure of all the 4-inch single carded figures in this wave and possibly the whole line. He’s a great recreation of his animated counterpart with what seems to be all new tooling. He’s really well proportioned, the plastic feels a lot more solid and less bendy in the limbs, and there’s a ton of little details on the sculpt and paintwork for this animated-style line. He’s still got that annoying upturned wrist on his left hand, but the fact that it shows off the nice detail of the straps on his armor, it doesn’t look so bad on him.
Sportsmaster came with the rightmost wall of the Hall of Justice C&C set. That means that I can finally connect that rightmost floor piece to something, but I still can’t connect that piece to the rest of it until I buy the two remaining repaints. Truth is, I would have had them already if it weren’t for the fact that noone online seems to have them instock yet.
Of course, you still only get the basic five points of articulation, so there isn’t a lot you can do with him in terms of posing or even play. The lack of articulation is a little more annoying here because there’s not much you can do with his staff. Plus, this is such a great looking figure, I really want to put him in some cool action poses, and that’s just not going to happen.
So, in a wave of repaints Sportsmaster didn’t have to be anything special to stand out, and yet he turned out to be among the best executed figures in this line. Mattel went above and beyond with his detail and paintwork to the point where he almost looks out of place among some of the others. Its possible they saved so much money on the rest of the figures being repaints that they were able to cost out more attention to him, but whatever the reason, I’m glad to have him in my collection.
[And that’s going to wrap up all I have of the Young Justice line right now. I’m still trying to hunt down those last two pieces of the Hall of Justice, I mean, last two figures from Wave 3, but no such luck yet. I’m going to take a couple of days to dig into some other stuff and then we’ll get back to the world of Mattel and DC by finishing up revisiting the remaining figures from Green Lantern Classics Wave 2. -FF]
FigureFan Zero 