How about we do a nice Marvel Monday like the good old days, eh? At the beginning of the year I said I was pulling back on the Marvel Legends figures, and I’ve mostly been sticking to that. The Guardians Vol 3 Wave is the first complete wave I’ve picked up this year, and this is the first time I’m actually doing a Marvel Legends review since January! I am going to be covering this entire assortment and the Build-A-Figure Cosmo over the next month or so, and today I’m starting with the Deluxe Groot and Star-Lord himself. So lets fly away together into the forever and beautiful sky!

The figures come in Hasbro’s plastic free packaging, which means no windows, and yes word is we’re going back to window boxes at some point soon. Groot is not technically part of the Guardians 3 Wave and while Star-Lord is, he doesn’t come with a piece to build Cosmo. How did I like the movie? I liked it quite a bit, but I could have done with less of the animal misery porn peppered throughout. I appreciate that they were trying to give weight and tragedy to Rocket’s backstory, but it really messed with the tone of the movie. I particularly found the cybernetically grafted animals to be pretty ghoulish and upsetting and I wish they had confined it to the beginning of the movie so it could be easily skipped. As it is, I doubt I’ll re-watch it a lot. Let’s start with Groot!

OK, so this is without a doubt my least favorite version of Groot from a design standpoint. If I’m ranking the Groots they pretty much start at the top with the original and decline in my favorability until we get to this one. In a movie that was absolutely dazzling in its overall visual creativity, this Groot just looked like a guy in a rubber suit. He also didn’t sport a lot of personality either, but whatever. Hasbro’s take on this version is OK, considering what they had to work with, and they certainly invested some effort into the sculpt, but I don’t know. He kind of looks more like a chocolate sculpture than he does a tree-person. There’s plenty of detail to be had, and I appreciate the odd springs that jut out here and there and the patches of moss and greenery. They did a pretty cool job blending muscle and bark to make it look genuinely organic, but like the on screen version, this looks more to me like an animated Groot then one from an MCU film.

The portrait is a pretty good approximation of the movie, but there’s something about this design that I really don’t like. That having been said, they did a really nice job on the eyes. They’re well printed and actually look like they have a spark of life to them.

The articulation here is quite good, and despite his odd anatomy, he sports most of what we’re used to seeing in a standard Legends figure. The shoulder bark doesn’t inhibit the movement there too badly, and I was pretty pleased at the range of motion in those elbows. Most of the joints are fairly well mixed with the sculpt, although the ball-shaped hips stand out a bit. Groot comes with two sets of hands: Fists and relaxed.

Groot comes with a pair of wings, which we saw him flex in the third act of the film while escaping The Great Evolutionary. The wings come in two pieces, which plug together and then go into the hole in his back. There’s no articulation, and while the sculpt is decent, it follows the very cartoony aesthetic theme of this figure. They look decent, but I think most people would have wanted the extra arms with guns.

And finally, Groot comes with a baby version of Rocket, which is a cute accessory, but it also looks like it’s made of chocolate, and doesn’t look anything like baby Rocket in the movie.

Groot isn’t really a bad figure, but he ain’t great either. I think a lot of the blame goes to the movie design for just not being very interesting. As mentioned, I would have preferred extra arms to make his full-on berserker mode, especially since they made this a Deluxe release. Hell, it was originally listed at $50 before it settled down to $40, and either way that’s just too much. Let’s move on to Star-Lord.

Straightaway, it’s awesome to get a figure of Star-Lord in uniform, but as this movie giveth, it also taketh away. And as Quill finally dons an iconic Guardians uniform he also loses his helmet. It’s the MCU’s equivalent of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last minute. Now, with that having been said, I really dig this figure a lot. The sculpt features a bit of the panel lining we’ve come to expect from the MCU costumes, but the blue and red combo is simply gorgeous. His hands look a little chunky, but everything else is just top notch. The belt is actually a separate sculpt worn by the figure and the insignia on his chest is sculpted as well as painted gold.

The portrait is quite good, and I think it’s safe to say this is the best Chris Pratt likeness that Hasbro has given us. It’s crazy to think how far they’ve come since the figure from the original movie. The printing on the beard does break down a bit as you zoom in close, but it looks fine with the figure in hand.

And with standard male Legends articulation, Star-Lord is lots of fun to play around with. I probably would have preferred a ball joint under the chest to the ab-crunch hinge, but that’s just me coming off a bunch of DC Multiverse figures and going back to Marvel Legends. It’s fine. One thing that I felt was odd was how deep set the pins are in the knees. They’re set so deep it almost looks like they’re black.

Quill comes with his trusty pair of blasters, while they’re pretty simple they get the job done. Likewise, he only comes with one set of hands to hold the guns, and that’s fine because I’ll likely always display him with his weapons drawn.

Suffice it to say I dig Star-Lord a lot more than I do Groot. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have buyer’s remorse, because I still want to put him on display with the other figures, but I definitely should have waited for him to hit clearance. It’s possible he will grow on me… no pun intended! As for Star-Lord, he’s a great looking figure and I’ll have to dig out one of the other releases to see if I can swap the masked head on this body to create the look that the movie robbed from us. And speaking of robbing things, I gotta steal away Wednesday’s review, as I’ll be busy with other stuff for the next couple of days, but I will be back on Friday with something for sure.