I probably spent my entire childhood not knowing what the hell Gatchaman was, but it’s hard to overestimate just how freaking cool the Battle of the Planets cartoon was to little 9yo me. Like Robotech, BotP was a reworked anime with lots of changes for the US market, partly to make it more kid friendly and partly to make it more appealing to Western sensibilities. From its cool spaceships to its blatant R2-D2 ripoff narrator, 7-Zark-7, this shit was practically custom made for me. Not to mention the first episode had our superhero-like team fighting a giant robot monster. It was great! Naturally, I really wanted toys from the show when I was a kid, but it wasn’t to be. The best I got was a lunchbox, and boy do I wish I still had that! In the 40 years or so since, we’ve had some figures of varying quality produced, mostly in the early 2000’s, and now Storm Collectibles is testing the waters with a release of Ken the Eagle. Of course, I knew him as Mark, the leader of G-Force!

Like Storm’s other figure series, Ken is 1:12 scale and comes in a big window box. Storm’s presentation tends to range from decent to utilitarian, but they really upped their game here. The colors are so vibrant and the character art is fantastic. The window shows off the contents very well and the back panel has some gorgeous shots of the figure in action. As imports, most of Storm’s figure boxes are bilingual, but this one emphasizes the Japanese over the English quite a bit.

You get a total of three wing-capes for the figure, and Ken comes out of the box wearing the closed configuration. Each of the Gatchaman Team wore a different bird-themed suit, hence his moniker, Ken the Eagle. Similar to many plastic capes in this scale, the wing-capes are cast in softer plastic and simply hang off the figure with a neck hole. The closed wing piece looks great for displaying the figure in a neutral stance, but it also renders the arm articulation useless and covers up a lot of the figure’s body. If they ever get around to doing the whole team, I could see myself displaying them like this in the interest of shelf-space economy, but with just Ken so far, I won’t be using this wing configuration all that much. Still, it’s pretty damn iconic looking and still manages to show off the beautiful colors of the costume. The whites are super white, and the added blue, red, and yellow make for an electrifying deco.

You get two heads, both of which are helmeted with removable visors. The visor reflects and distorts quite a bit, so it’s really hard for me to capture the detail of the face through it in most of these pictures. Removing the visor is easy as it just tabs in securely between the helmet and the head sculpt. Both head sculpts look great, but the differences are kind of negligible when the visor is on. The first has a somewhat determined expression, while the second has him gritting his teeth like he means business. The paintwork on the helmet is pretty crisp and the only thing to watch out for here would be the antenna jutting out the top of the back. It doesn’t seem that fragile, but I’m not sure it would survive a shelf dive.

The second cape has the wings spread and billowed out and here’s where you really get to see the underlying figure. I expected the body to be a generic buck, but you do get sculpted lines at the tops of the boots and the ends of the gauntlets. The belt is a separate piece with a holster for his boomerang on his right hip, a sculpted G-for-Gatchaman belt buckle, and a little pouch on his left hip. His left wrist is fitted with his communicator band, and he has the Gatchaman logo printed on his chest. I really can’t say enough about how great the coloring on this figure turned out. In all the memories I have of watching Battle of the Planets, I recall the show being pretty washed out, so this figure really pops for me like I’m seeing the character for the first time in high-definition.

The third wing configuration is full spread with the edges angling upward and I think this is the one best used for flight and gliding poses. I’m pretty impressed at how these heavier and wider capes hang on the figure with just the neck hole. They can even be angled pretty well for different display options.

Articulation here sticks closely to what Storm has been offering in this scale across their other lines. I’ve reviewed enough of Storm’s figures that I’m not going to run through all the articulation here, but I’ll say that I continue to really love their system of jointing as it makes for a great compromise between aesthetic and poseability. Now, with that having been said, I would have liked to see a little better range of motion in the elbows and knees, as the sculpt prevents them from bending as tight as I would like, but it’s certainly not a deal breaker for me.

You get a heaping helping of hands, six pairs in total. These include fists, relaxed, grasping, loose grasping, pointing, and a set for holding his boomerang.

The boomerang comes in two styles: One closed and one open. The closed one fits into the holster on his hip, and both can be held securely in the hands dedicated for it.

I have been super excited for this guy since the pre-order dropped and now that he’s in hand, I have to say he does not disappoint. The figure by itself is iconic enough to me as a stand alone piece, but I think Storm would be crazy not to do more of the team. They have showed off Jun the Swan (aka Princess) but no pre-order yet and it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything new on that front. Storm tends to be a little erratic when it comes to fleshing these lines out. For example Golden Axe has been going full guns, but we’ve been teased at more Streets of Rage for ages now. It seems like Joe the Condor could be an easy release with a lot of parts borrowed from Ken. I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, Ken is still available at most retailers that sell this sort of stuff and retailed for $119.