Welcome back to another Marvel Monday! As promised, this week I’m pushing through with my look at the Crimson Dynamo Wave, which is comprised of about half comic-related figures and half dedicated to the yet to be released Black Widow movie. Let’s keep going with the MCU figures for now and have a look at Red Guardian!

From the trailers, it seems like poor Alexei may wind up being the comic relief of this movie. It looks like he comes out of retirement to team up with the titular Black Widow, but trailers can be deceiving, so who knows what we’ll get in the end. I really think Disney should have just put the movie on their streaming service by now, because unless there are drastic changes with The Coof, it seems like they’re going to probably wind up doing that in the end. Anyway, I dig the black, white, and red art they went with for the packaging. It’s very stylish. The front of the package features the movie logo and naturally, the window shows off the figure you’re getting as well as a look at that big juicy BAF part.

I do enjoy seeing the design transformation of comic characters into their MCU counterparts. The MCU usually pulls it off pretty well, and this is a case where I am yet again pleased with the results. Alexei’s suit is given a more realistic and tactical look, while still endowing it with a bit of a vintage flavor, as if this suit were a 50’s or 60’s design. It feels like this suit is the USSR’s rough equivalent to Captain America’s earlier costume. Every bit of the red suit is nicely textured, and there are gray straps sculpted on the inside of his thighs, and on his shoulders and chest, converging to the raised star in the center. He also has sculpted arm bracers and boots. The belt is a molded as a separate piece of plastic and fits snug on the figure’s waist. There are some pouches sculpted on the sides, and a painted belt buckle. Finally, you get some black paint hits throughout.

The head sculpt is solid, but I think it lacks a bit of the realism that we’ve seen in the better MCU portraits. David Harbour is playing the role in the film, an actor who I’m not terribly familiar with. I guess he was in Stranger Things, but I never made it through more than a few episodes of that. I can definitely see the likeness there, and they did an especially nice job sculpting his hair and beard. I am, however, disappointed that Hasbro didn’t include a second masked head. Hell, the dude is even masked in all of the box art! To be honest, if we were only going to get one head, I would have preferred a masked one.

Articulation is standard stuff. The arms have rotating hinges in the wrists and shoulders, double-hinges in the elbows, and swivels in the biceps. The legs are ball jointed at the hips, have double-hinges in the knees, swivels at the thighs and above the boots, and both hinges and lateral rockers in the ankles. There’s an ab-crunch hinge in the torso, a swivel in the waist, and the neck is ball jointed and hinged.

Red Guardian comes with his shield, which is a great looking piece. The gray and red deco looks quite striking and thanks to the peg/clip combo, Alexei can wear it on either of his wrists or peg it into his back for easy carry.

Lack of masked head notwithstanding, I dig this figure a lot. The MCU design looks fantastic, and the figure captures it quite splendidly. I’m excited to see how the character fares in the film, and I hope he at least gets a few moments of glory rather than be relegated totally toward comic relief. In the meantime, next week I’ll switch over and take a look at another of the comic based figures in the assortment.