2014 is slated to be a pretty slim year for Classic Who action figures, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at January, because this month two new sets have landed at my door. Technically released at the tail end of 2013, “The Daemons” and “The Claws of Axos” boxed sets didn’t make it to me until last week and it took me a few days to get the time to open the first of them up. This week we’ll take a look at “The Daemons” and I’ll save the Axos set for next week.

“The Daemons” set comes in the now familiar Classic Who window box with a timeline on the bottom pointing out that this is based on a Third Doctor story originally broadcast in 1971, the year before I was born. There are plenty of production stills of the characters and a little blurb about the story on the back. Inside the box you get the animated gargoyle Bok, as well as brand new versions of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and The Master. I make it no secret that Jon Pertwee’s portrayal as The Doctor is one of my favorites so naturally I’m going to be partial to this story. Nonetheless, it’s one that I usually only watch once a year, and always in October. Since 2005 we Whovians have become used to the idea of Christmas Specials, but if you’re ever hankering for a Doctor Who Halloween Special, “The Daemons” is most definitely the story you’re looking for. Let’s start things off with The Brigadier.

Character Options first gave us a figure of The Brig last year fully kitted out in his UNIT dress uniform. This time around we’re getting him in his tactical sweater and I’m thrilled because this is The Brig in action! He’s out in the field, and trying to blow the piss out of alien scum. The most surprising thing about this release is just how few reused parts that are here. The legs are the same, the hands appear to be repainted, but the rest of the figure is brand new. The green sculpted pullover features pads on the elbows and shoulders and a new web-gear style belt with a (sadly non-functional) holster.

You’ll note that I didn’t include the head sculpt as one of the recycled parts and that surprised me more than anything, particularly since both Brigs are wearing their officer’s caps. Now, I had no issues at all with the original figure’s head sculpt, but after putting these guys side-by-side I have to go with this new one as being considerably better. The uniformed Brig looks a bit more like a mannequin to me. The sculpt is not all that drastically different, but when you combine it with what is a generally better paint job, this new Brig just looks more lifelike.

Alistair features the same articulation as the last release. The arms are ball jointed at the shoulders with hinged elbows and swivels in the biceps and wrists. The legs have universal movement in the hips, hinges in the knees, and swivels in the thighs. There’s no torso articulation, but The Brig can rotate his head. Anytime CO works ball joints into their Classic Who figures I am a very happy camper.

Accessories! The Brig comes with three accessories. First off you get the same pistol that came with the original Brig; you get a swagger stick; and last up you get a set of binoculars, which can hang around The Brig’s neck. The binoculars are a tad oversized, but still appreciated because he can use them to observe just how little damage the air strikes do to whatever alien UNIT happens to be fighting. I’m also thrilled that we got a swagger stick for him to tuck into the crook of his elbow or to point menacingly at poor Seargeant Benton.

Next up is Mr. Magister… aka The Master. As much as The Brigadier figure is an example of a thoroughly fleshed out new version of his character, The Master feels more like a quick-and-dirty cash grab. He appears to be the same Delgado Master figure we’ve already seen twice only with soft plastic robes permanently attached over him. CO’s likeness of Roger Delgado is among their best so naturally the head sculpt is as good as ever, but the robes don’t look quite right. What’s more, because of the robes the figure features almost no useful articulation. His head can turn and his arms can move just a wee bit up and down but any other articulation is rendered moot by his plastic costume. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, because I’ll gladly buy any version of The Master that CO deems worthy of production, but there were other versions I would have preferred to see over this one.

Finally we get Bok, who is the only figure in this set that is one hundred percent new and he looks truly fantastic. As an animated stone gargoyle, CO combined a great sculpt with some cool paintwork to give this guy a really convincing stone finish. The head sculpt is quite accurate to the costume used in the show, right down to the tongue sticking out. For all you people who think the Weeping Angels are frightening, I don’t mind telling you that this little f’cker creeped me the hell out when I first saw “The Daemons” as a kid. It moved around like a demented monkey and the atmospheric lighting combined with the B&W picture just made him all the freakier. Oh yeah, and don’t bother not blinking because he’ll still freaking kill you even if you happen to be looking at him.

Naturally everyone wants their little stone gargoyles to be super-articulated and Bok delivers with some pretty damn good poseability. He has ball joints in his shoulders and hips. His arms feature hinged elbows and swivels in the biceps and wrists. His legs have hinged knees and swivels in the ankles. The tail and wings aren’t articulated but are made out of softer plastic.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this set since the day it was announced and now that I have it in hand I’m not at all disappointed. Sure, I think The Master’s robes could have been executed a little better but I’m not going to complain about getting another Delgado Master. Plus, The Brigadier and Bok are both such great figures that they alone easily justify the purchase of the set. It’s crazy to think how overjoyed I was last year to finally have a figure of The Brigadier and now I have two fantastic variants. And next week when I open “The Claws of Axos” set, I’ll have three! Of course, I’ll have to keep them on separate shelves to avoid setting off the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. And to anyone who got that joke… Cheers!

Oh boy… we’re exactly ten days away from the 50^th Anniversary of Doctor Who and I’m trying to pay some respects to the Character Options line as we head into the home stretch. Today we’re checking out a set of two figures from the 4^th Doctor story “City of Death,” which originally aired back in 1979. It’s a fantastic episode and probably one of the most universally loved stories from the era. And why not? Because besides the great story that spans millennia, there really is a lot to love in this production. It’s got location filming (in Paris), which was a very rare thing for the show, a superb musical score by Dudley Simpson. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward bring their A-game and are joined by the delightful antics of Tom Chadbon as the punchy Duggan. This story also manages to tie Doctor Who into so many other nerd properties that it’s almost ridiculous. You’ve got the always delicious Catherine Schell (Space 1999) as The Countess, but more importantly… JULIAN F’CKING GLOVER in a mind bending bit of casting that ties Doctor Who, James Bond, Blakes 7, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones all together in a neat package of nerdgasmic glory. Not enough? Well let’s not forget that it was co-written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently fame!

The compact little window box should be familiar to most collectors of this line, but the deco is a blast from the past. This set is from before the turnover to the 70’s style logo, so we get the Nu-Who logo that was used throughout the Eccelsten and Tennant periods. It may seem strange to see the modern logo on a Classic Who figure set, but back then all the toys and figures that CO turned out for Doctor Who were branded under the format of the new series and it makes sense to me that they would want to keep the brand recognition going for the modern incarnation of the property. The window shows off the two figures nicely, and as we can see it contains yet another version of Tom Baker as the 4^th Doctor and Julian Glover as The Count Scarlioni… or is he Scaroth the last survivor of an alien race called the Jagaroth?? Stay tuned!

Oh bugger, the back of the package kind of spoils it. Yes, you get some stills of the characters and a nice blurb about the story. The box is totally collector friendly and features an illustrated backdrop that you can use to display the figures if that kind of thing floats your boat. If Doctor Who was all I collected, I’d still have all of these boxes. But space is a rare commodity and so I’ve got to pitch them. It pains me to do so, because the backdrop features the awesome Jagaroth spaceship resting on the desolate landscape of the Earth long before humankind developed. I love the design of that ship!

Let’s start with The Doctor, because I don’t have a lot to say about him. I’ve been a die-hard fan of this show for about 30 years and I grew up with Tom Baker in the role, but even I have trouble telling apart the little variations in his wardrobe. Ask me to describe his iconic costume and it’s no brainer that you’ll get: Well, he has a long coat, a really long scarf, and sometimes a fedora. But there have been a lot of subtle, and some not so subtle, variations in that formula over his long tenure on the show. Suffice it to say, this version of The Doctor doesn’t represent the stand-out variant that we saw last time with “The Seeds of Doom” set. In fact, he’s extremely similar to the version we got in the “Destiny of the Daleks” set, and that makes sense because the two stories were broadcast fairly closely to one another.

The DotD Doctor is wearing his buccaneer boots, whereas this one has just regular shoes, otherwise the two bodies are virtually identical. The only other difference I can see is the CoD Doctor has his little artisan pin painted onto his lapel, but even that is totally concealed by his scarf. And speaking of the scarf, it hangs loose around his shoulders, rather than being wrapped tightly around his neck. At first, I thought it was a repaint of the scarf used for the Warrior’s Gate Doctor, and while they are very similar, this one does seem to be a unique sculpt. But don’t let the subtleties of this figure fool you into thinking I don’t love it. It’s a another fantastic rendition of The Doctor. He may not be a “must have” for the casual collectors of the line, but then I have to ask myself, are there really any casual collectors of a Classic Doctor Who action figure line? Probably not.

And then there’s Scarlioni. He was a great character in that he was somewhat sympathetic in his goals to undo his critical mistake and save his race, but he was also quite clearly a suave bastard that was willing to prevent the human race from ever existing to succeed. He remains one of my favorite of all the one-off Doctor Who villains, so it’s very cool to have a figure of him, even if it really just a guy in a white leisure suit. The portrait is a good likeness to Glover and while there have been plenty of reports of the paint being a mess on this figure, I’m happy to report that mine, while not precise, is still pretty good. Scarlioni comes with a very tiny gun, which he can hold in one hand.

Of course, Scarlioni was also Scaroth and under that dapper Julian Glover countenance existed his true form… an improbably large green squiggly head with one big eye. CO gives us the ability to do the same by popping off the Glover head and popping on the Scaroth head. Even in a show where rubber monsters were the order of the day, Scaroth still strikes me as one of the weaker aliens of the era, but the story is so brilliant it manages to pull it off with aplomb. Unfortunately, I’m not all that impressed with the Scaroth head. It’s definitely not some of CO’s best work, and I haven’t decided yet which head I’ll use for regular display.

But wait, that’s not all. You also get a 5-inch scale Mona Lisa, which is an amazingly cool little accessory. The frame is sculpted and if you flip it over, even the wood grain on the backing boards is detailed in the sculpt. Plus, if you hold it to the light just right you can just make out the words, “This is a Fake” under the picture. Why? [Deep breath] You see, in the story Scaroth was splintered into a bunch of different aspects of himself and scattered through time, and in order to finance his time experiments so that he could eventually reunite all his splintered selves each Scaroth was both advancing the technology of the planet so he can create a machine that would eventually be used to age a chicken to death, while also raising capital to pay for the experiments and one of the ways he did this was to have his 16^th Century self commission Leonardo DaVinci to paint a whole bunch of Mona Lisas so that back in the 20^th Century he could sell them on the black market and make the money he needed, but when The Doctor traveled back in time to DaVinci’s workshop he wrote “This is a Fake” on all the blank canvases and left a note for DaVinci to just paint over them. [EXHALES!] Phew! Savy? So that’s why you get a Mona Lisa in the set.

The biggest knock I have on this set is the same rather tired old song. It was a missed opportunity to give us Romana. Granted, the decision to instead hit us with another 4^th Doctor variant probably goes beyond the ability to reuse parts. Securing the rights to actors and actresses can be at best expensive and sometimes literally impossible. I have no insider information about whether or not CO has gone after Lalla Ward’s likeness and failed, or if they didn’t bother. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, since a Romana figure would sell like crazy and assume that they tried and just weren’t able to do it. It’s a shame, but that’s one of the annoying legal snafus that sometimes hurt us most as action figure collectors. The truth is that with CO slowing way down on this line, it’s very likely we’ve already seen most of the companions that we’re going to get. Yes, that can be depressing, but I prefer to be thankful for what we did get, rather than sorry for what we didn’t.

We’re just a few weeks away from the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. Sadly, Character Options hasn’t surprised us with the Classic Console Room Playset that I was secretly hoping for, but that’s Ok because I’m making my own fun by picking up some figures and sets that I passed on the first time around. Which brings us to today’s “Seeds of Doom” set. “Seeds of Doom” is a fantastic story that I don’t watch nearly as much as I should. Seriously, if I go through Tom Baker’s catalog of stories, I tend to pop this one in fairly infrequently, and I couldn’t tell you why because it’s an absolutely cracking adventure. From the beginning scene set at a remote arctic base, reminiscent of Carpenter’s “The Thing,” to a giant plant monster wreaking havoc in the English Countryside, it’s a regular rollercoaster ride of James Bond villains, horrific people-to-plant transformations, and general thuggery. It’s brilliant! When Character Options came out with their two-pack dedicated to this episode, I dismissed it as a mere repaint set and put it pretty far down on my “To Buy” list. Now that I have it, I can see that the assessment was only partially correct. Let’s check it out…

The set comes in a compact little window box that displays the figures nicely against an illustrated backdrop of the Arctic Base seen in the episode. I love these inserts because you can use them as a little display diorama for the figures. Granted, some are better than others, and his one isn’t all that exciting, but points to CO for carrying on this practice anyway. The box deco follows what we saw in the last couple releases using a “Doctor Who” logo that is somewhat reminiscent of the Jon Pertwee years and some of the diamond motifs usually associated with Tom Baker’s title logo.

The back of the package shows some stills from the episodes and a little blurb about the story. We also get to see a little of the late, great Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah-Jane Smith. While we got some figures of her from her own show, “The Sarah-Jane Adventures,” I think i’s a shame we never got a figure of her from her days as a companion, especially when CO has done so many sets based on stories hat she starred in. You obviously secured her likeness, CO… What’s the deal? Why no “Pyramids of Mars” Sarah? Why no “Seeds of Doom” Sarah? And most importantly why no Sarah-Jane and Eldrad three-pack with both male and female versions of Eldrad and a little tupperware container with Eldrad’s hand? WHY??? Ok, moving on… let’s start with the Krynoid.

Hey, that looks familiar! Well it should, because it is a repaint and slight re-sculpt of the Axon figure that was released with The Master over three years ago. Three years??? Holy crap how time flies! Anyway, before you cry foul about the repaint, it’s worth noting that the Krynoid seen in “The Seeds of Doom” was in fact a repainted Axon costume from “The Claws of Axos,” so it’s hard to gripe about CO reusing the mold for the figure when they reused the costume in the show. I seem to recall reading that The Axon figure was originally planned as a Build-A-Figure for a wave that was never released. I believe it because he’s a pretty substantial figure comprising a heck of a lot of plastic.

I loved this sculpt back then and I love it even more now. There is so much detail baked into this mold that I dare say it looks a lot better than the actual costume, which was more akin to a green bin liner with vines glued to it. While I think the sculpt itself looks more like vegetation than whatever the Axon was supposed to be, the superb paint jobs really set these two figures apart. I’m also particularly fond of the head sculpt on this thing, which is just vaguely humanoid enough to make it creepy. There is supposed to be a human at the core of that shambling mess (people turning into plants freaks me the hell out. It did in Creepshow and Swamp Thing and it does here too). It’s also worth noting that CO also equipped the figure with some new tendrils, so it isn’t the straight repaint that it could have been. That’s class, CO. Plus, for a giant, overstuffed bag of salad, the Krynoid has a fair amount of articulation. The shoulders and hips are ball jointed, and there are swivels in the wrists and ankles. The Krynoid can also swivel his head and again at the waist. Not bad.

And then there’s The Doctor as portrayed by Tom Baker. One of the reasons I was slow to pick up this set was because I already have almost a half-dozen 4^th Doctor figures in my collection (and god help me, I have another in the mail to me as we speak). Yes, I wish I could send this feature back in time to my ten-year old self so he can hear me complain about having too many 4^th Doctor figures.  His little head would explode with jealousy and rage. Nonetheless, this figure does feature Baker in one of his more distinctive ensembles, so in the end, I was willing to break down and add him to my collection. Little did I realize that this one would be one of my favorites. That’s an odd notion for me to wrap my head around because for me the iconic 4^th Doctor will always be him in his brownish-burgundy coat, not this light grey one. And yet, this figure is so wonderfully executed, it’s impossible not to set it up there among my top Tom Bakers.

Sure, there’s some parts recycling here, and to be honest, with six of these guys on my shelf now, I have no idea which one came out when or how or with what. I am pretty sure this is the same hatted head that was released as an extra with the first single carded release of Baker as The Doctor way back when. As such, it’s easily popped off, so if you want to make a version of this Doctor without his hat, it’s just a quick head-swap away. The portrait isn’t superb, but it’s Ok and to be honest it’s one that always looks slightly better in person mainly because of the eyes. Baker’s distinctive likeness must be hard to sculpt. CO has had some absolute spot-on likeness in this line, but Baker has never quite been one of them. The scarf is also a repaint of the same scarf that’s been recycled a bunch of times and the legs appear to be the same too. But here’s where we get into new territory.

The sculpted tie is new to me and the cross-thatch texture on the coat is remarkably striking. It could have been a quick and dirty repaint, but instead it really makes the figure look fresh and stand out among the other versions of this incarnation. And speaking of repaints, nothing on this figure is quick and dirty, well… except maybe the sloppy hat band. The shoes are beautifully painted, as is the plaid on his vest. Even the elbow patches and individual buttons on the coat show some superb work.

In addition to The Doctor’s ubiquitous sonic screwdriver, this set also comes with some accessories. You get a seed pod, which looks like a brussel sprout, as well as a hatching one with the vine coming out of it. You also get what the set refers to as a cutlass. I know my swords and I’m pretty sure a cutlass has to have a curved blade. Nonetheless, who doesn’t want a sword to go with their figures? I bought one of CO’s terrible Robin Hood figures just to get some of the weapons, and now I have two swords so The Doctor and The Master can dual.

And that, folks, is “The Seeds of Doom” set. This is a set that we all knew would be coming sooner or later when we first saw The Axon figure, but I’m sure I wasn’t alone in hoping that it would be packaged with a Sarah-Jane and not another 4th Doctor. That having been said, I think this turned out to be one of the best versions of him I have, and as you can see, I have plenty. I was able to nab these figures for $25, and I’m mighty happy about it. Other, less insane Doctor Who fans would be happy to add their sixth Tom Baker figure to the shelf and call it a day, but not me. Next week, we’ll revisit CO’s Classic Doctor Who line with yet another set containing yet another version of The 4th Doctor! Please have your jelly babies ready.