Tag Archives: bellfine

Dec 13 2024

Pac-Man: SoftB Sonic Figure by Bellfine

Some quick behind-the-scenes talk before today’s review! As you’ve probably noticed the midweek reviews haven’t been happening. As much as I’m trying, the demands on my time right now are too great to keep them as part of the regular rotation. It was even tough for me to get back to do this review today, and the only reason I could is because it’s a quickie. And as I move forward, it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. In addition to fighting for free time, I am also contending with having more and more of my collection getting packed away not not accessible. So, please bear with me and I’ll keep doing my best to continue to get something new here each week, even if it’s just me stopping by to talk about how things are going. At some point in February FFZ will have to go on hiatus, but hopefully it will only be for a few weeks while I get moved and settled.

OK, so a while back I checked out a pretty amazing giant vinyl Sonic The Hedgehog figure by Bellfine and commented how their Pac-Man figure was undoubtedly going to wind up in my collection eventually. Well, it did indeed just a short while later and he’s been chomping at the bit to get his time in the spotlight here. Honestly, the reason it’s taken so long as that there’s only so many ways you can photograph this guy, making for a pretty short review. But, since I’ve been crazy busy this week without a lot of time for taking pictures, he seemed like a quick and easy way to end the week!

Here he is in his massive window box and it is indeed a sight to behold. I’ll definitely be displaying him in the box, as the interior tray creates a really nice environment with the maze pattern and artwork. I’m sure I’ve talked about the early 80’s Pac-Man Phenomenon here before, but it’s worth repeating just how ridiculously invasive Pac-Man merchandising became. Even if you never set foot in an arcade, Pac-Man was everywhere! There were books and stickers and trading cards, novelty candy, ballcaps and shirts, gumball machines and board games and puzzles, plushies and keychains, there were ice cream treats and canned pasta and breakfast cereals. Everywhere you looked, Pac-Man was there, heck he even had a hit record and a Saturday Morning cartoon. I can still remember my Dad taking me to a giant flea market in NJ and one of the sellers having a whole table of bootleg Pac-Merchandise. I walked away with a massive poster-sized die-cut sticker sheet reproducing a lot of the stickers found in the wax packs. Sadly there weren’t any decent toys and that always made me sad. I can even remember making figures based on the cartoon out of Play-Doh as a substitute. Since then we’ve had some companies step up with some toy-like collectibles, particularly SH Figuarts, but I wouldn’t really call today’s figure a toy.

Like their Sonic, this is just a giant vinyl statue and he looks great. He stands with one hand on his non-existent hip and the other outstretched with a big dot-eating grin on his face. The Pacster has been depicted a whole bunch of different ways over the years (look it up, because some artistic interpretations are quite surreal!), but this is based on what is easily my favorite official artwork. Apart from the big toony boots and mittens, the detail is all in his giant face. The eyes and eyebrows are sculpted as well as painted and you get a big red tongue inside his wide black void of a mouth. I dig how his eyebrows actually form peaks almost like cat ears and his long Pinocchio-style nose. Considering all the artists had to go on was a yellow pizza missing a slice, this is a delightfully creative and endearing rendition of the famous Dot Gobbler, and tends to be the official style NAMCO tended to use for marketing.

The vinyl holds the colors really well as he is a super bright yellow with orange mittens and red boots. The black facial features offer a nice contrast to the yellow and there’s really nothing to nitpick here when it comes to quality of paint or execution. He does have a large round seam on his back, which I’m sure is necessary for the molding process. I do think it would have been cool to have them put a power pellet or something in his outstretched hand, although I could probably just make something work with a yellow Ping-Pong ball.

And if you want an idea of scale, here’s this big boi holding the SH Figuarts figure!

Pac-Man merch will always tickle my nostalgia bone something fierce and I’m always happy to see companies putting it out there. And I have to say, this Big Daddy Pac is easily the showpiece of my modest collection of yellow chompers. This particular guy has been off the market for a little while, and I really couldn’t find any examples of what he’s selling for these days. I recall paying around $100 for him on Amazon back around June. But, Bellfine is releasing a half-sized version early next year to go a little easier on the wallet and on the space he takes up and who knows, maybe I’ll end up with that one as well!

Jun 14 2024

Sonic The Hedgehog: SoftB Sonic Figure by Bellfine

It’s been a little while since I checked out any Sonic the Hedgehog collectibles here. I’ve enjoyed the JAKKS Pacific line, but that has kind of dried up, or at least I haven’t seen any new sets turning up at Target. Nonetheless, The Blue Hog’s 33rd Anniversary is coming up FAST and I’ve been playing some Sonic on the SEGA Genesis this week, so… let’s dig into my backlog to look at something plastic, blue, and hedgehog shaped. And that brings us to the SoftB Sonic Vinyl figure by Bellfine, and I don’t know what most of that means. I thought Bellfine was some kind of trashy E-girl who sells her bathwater to simps, but apparently it’s a company that seems to produce mostly anime-related scaled figures. And SoftB appears to be their line of large vinyl video game figures. Sonic is the only one of these I knew about, but when I was researching it, I found out they did a Pac-Man SoftB vinyl, and I really wish I didn’t know that, because I can’t not buy it, so expect to see that show up here sometime soon.

This is a large figure, measuring in at about 12-inches tall, so it’s only natural that he that comes in an appropriately large box! And what a beautiful box it is! The front has a large window showing off the figure inside with a smaller window on top to let some light in. There’s a piece of diecut character art on the bottom right corner and some beautiful photos of the figure on the back and side panels. It’s an import, so a lot of the lettering is in Japanese, but you do get some smatterings of English here and there. There’s a thin cardboard insert behind the figure with some illustrations of the Green Hills Zone and blue checkering, which makes for an excellent backdrop if you want to display the figure with it on the shelf.

Wow, this figure feels great in hand, with a decent amount of heft for what is largely a hollow vinyl. I also can’t help but appreciate how amazing this character design works as a vinyl sculpt. I’m not always the biggest fan of this type of figure, but pairing it with retro game character designs is clearly a match made in heaven. In a pose ripped directly from the title screen of the first game, Sonic stands triumphantly, a vinyl god among hedgehogs, with his right hand on his non-existent hip, and his other scolding you with his pointy finger. It was an age of ‘Tude, and Sonic had it in spades. He chastised you just for loading up his cartridge and thinking you had the blue balls to challenge his game. This figure captures everything about Sonic perfectly, right down to the bizarre spiky back which still gives me a laugh to this day. It’s like an angle of the character that was never meant to be seen, but eventually the onset of 3D graphics and merchandising demanded it and the artists did their best. As a vinyl figure, this is decidedly a statue, with the only real points of articulation being swivels in his ankles so you can angle his feet. I’m not sure if that was intentional to help him stand, but he does that just fine without any tweaking.

The coloring here is excellent, from the royal blue of his smooth plastic fur to the pop of his giant red sneakers and yellow side buckles. His mouth, arms, and tummy are all flesh toned and you get plenty of clean white on his giant gloved hands, sock cuffs, and the bands on his shoes. The paint lines are overall pretty clean, but there are a few that could have been a bit sharper considering the price of the figure and the rather large canvas they had to work with, but it’s all still pretty good.

The portrait is a total slam dunk of ‘tudy spunk. His green eyes are perfectly printed on those vast fields of white, his black nose juts out between them, and his shallow line of a mouth forms a cocky smirk against his left cheek. The only blemish on the head is the seam that runs across behind the ears separating his face from the spikey back hemisphere. It doesn’t really detract from the figure much and I’m guessing it’s a necessary evil of working with such a big vinyl hedgehog noggin.

And if you’re looking for scale, here is SoftB Sonic towering over one of JAKKS’ 2.5-inch Sonic figures. SoftB Sonic could literally crush him under his foot like a hedgehog kaiju.

He also displays really well with the JAKKS posable Mario plush if you don’t mind putting rivals on the shelf together! Why can’t we all just get along and enjoy great games?

It feels like Sonic’s 10th Anniversary was just a short while ago, which means I’m getting old and the years are just flying by. I’ll likely pose this figure alongside the coin and soundtrack portfolio that I got way back when. These SoftB figures seem to sell at around $100 a pop. Honestly, the only reason I bought this one was because it went up for half-price around Christmas time, and I was in full-on retail-therapy mode to get me through the crushing Holiday depression. And let’s face it, $50 for a full 12-inches of vinyl hedgehog is a lot cheaper than an hour at the therapist. It probably made me a lot happier too. So, yeah, this one has been sitting around here for a while, and I decided it was well past his time in the spotlight. A very nice figure indeed, and even nicer at half the price! Even with a fair bit of plastic Sonic representation on my shelves, this one is the stand out piece in every way.