Tag Archives: loki

Aug 15 2022

Marvel Legends (The Watcher Wave): Sylvie by Hasbro

I’ve got just two more figures left to open in this What If? inspired assortment before I can finally build The Watcher BAF. I would have been happy to pair them up, but Sylvie doesn’t really have much connection to the What If? Doctor Strange, so I guess I’ll take them each in turn. I’m going with Sylvie first, because I have little to no interest in this figure, and I didn’t want to end the wave on a downer.

Which one of these is not like the other? It’s Sylvie! She hails from the LOKI Disney+ series and not from What If? like the rest of these figures. Now, in fairness, I didn’t particularly enjoy What If? but at least I was able to sit through most of it. I bailed on the LOKI series somewhere into the second or third episode, I honestly can’t remember which. Even though I absolutely adored Hiddleston as Loki in the MCU flicks, giving him his own series seemed like a really strange idea, and from what I watched of it, it seemed to undo a lot about what made him a cool character in the first place. Yeah, Disney has been all about deconstructing a number of their MCU heroes lately, and it’s a big part of why so little about it all interests me any more.

You can sure tell that Sylvie isn’t part of this wave’s running theme, since all the pretty bright colors are gone and we just get dark colors with a bit of two-tone green on the cloak to spruce things up. Still, given the source material, I think this is a pretty solid representation. The detail in the body suit sculpt is somewhat soft, with the laces on the boots looking a lot sharper, and there isn’t much else going on with the costume sculpt. I really like the look of the cloak’s fit, but as expected it completely hinders the articulation of the upper body, and even a bit in the legs, so I’m going to cast it off. The problem is once it’s gone, so goes what is the best looking thing about the figure to me.

Well, you still have the head, which I think is an excellent sculpt with a decent likeness to the actress playing Sylvie in the series. I’m not familiar with her from anything else, but I like what they did here. The hair piece has lots of different sculpted strands, which offers plenty of dynamic depth to the portrait, and her horned tiara has one broken horn. I think the man-bun is a little weird, but I’ll blame that on the show’s character design and not the figure. The halftone printing for facial features looks great. Hasbro generally has a lot of success with these MCU portraits lately, and Sylvie here is certainly no exception.

Of course, we’re back to the standard female Legends articulation with rotating hinges in the elbows and no bicep swivels. Everything else is standard stuff. Unfortunately, my figure has a terrible pull to the swivel joint at the top of her right boot, leaving a bad gap. I get these joint gaps from time to time, but they are usually in one of the bicep swivels. Either way, it’s a real bummer, but I guess if it had to happen in this wave, I’m lucky it was on the figure I care the least about. Sylvie comes with two sets of hands: One pair for holding her accessory, and the other pair includes a right fist and a left hand with splayed fingers.

The accessory is a really cool short sword. I don’t remember this from the series, but like I said, I only watched a couple of episodes. It has a falchion-like design with an ornate golden hilt and a green blade that absolutely pops as if it’s being illuminated. It’s just an all around awesome looking piece.

It really irks me that Hasbro included Sylvie in this assortment, especially now that they have revealed another Disney+ assortment with a mix of characters from What If? and other Disney+ shows with a BAF that I don’t care about. They should have kept the two separate, or at least given Sylvie’s slot to Zombie Iron Man or Zombie Scarlet Witch. Sure, she is actually a very nice figure, but there are a lot of very nice licensed figures out there that I don’t buy because I have no love for the character or property they represent. And truth be told, I would have easily skipped Sylvie if it weren’t for her BAF part, but then that’s the whole strategy behind BAFs in the first place, so bravo Hasbro… you win this round! But I’ll get the last laugh because I’ve gone from a completist in this line to now cherry picking figures and buying a lot less. I suppose I could just toss her on the MCU shelf and just call her MCU Enchantress. Whatever!

Jun 29 2020

Marvel Legends (Banner Hulk Wave): Loki by Hasbro

After a brief detour to check out Klaue from Black Panther, I’m back to working my way through the Banner Hulk Wave. And with four figures under my belt, I’m more than halfway done! And here’s where the character selection in this wave really starts to descend into a free-for-all. There’s no theme or anything, just a semi-random assortment of characters here. Today we are having a look at The God of Mischief… Loki… And it’s a very classic comic version!

Even if you take into account how far behind I am in my reviews of this line, it still took a long time for Hasbro to get a comic-based Loki figure out of Modern Legends. I mean, I’ve got at least two MCU versions of him (only one of which I’ve reviewed) as well as the female Loki from the A-Force set on my shelf at this point. Nonetheless, he’s finally here and about as classic a version of Loki as anyone could ask for. Even the packaging window cannot contain the magnificence of those horns! And just a reminder, that Hulk leg went to my nephew, so I won’t likely be reviewing the BAF in this wave. I guess that makes me a good uncle, and a bad toy blog host.

Yup! For all the fans who discovered Marvel through the movies, and you’re just into Marvel Legends for the MCU stuff, Loki here is going to be like a bucket of cold water. He’s pure comic cheese from the early days but if you’re looking for some Jack Kirby goodness, there’s a lot to love here. On the other side, Hasbro played it pretty of lazy with this figure. There’s absolutely no character-specific sculpting to be found on the body, instead his costume is achieved nearly entirely by paint and colored plastic. His boots and gauntlets are yellow, his body suit is green, and the gold scales that make up his undies and run up through the center of his torso, are all painted on. Now with that having been said, the coloring on this figure is absolutely gorgeous. The green and yellow go so well together and the gold gives it that extra little pop.

You do get two separate pieces of fresh sculpting: His plain band of a belt and his starburst-like gorget, as final accent to the body. So, clearly this is one of the wave’s budget figures, and I’ll be the first to admit that the paintwork looks fine, but this is Loki, dammit! He really deserved more original sculpting. We’ve seen Hasbro’s sculpted scale mail on figures like Green Goblin, and I think that sort of thing would have looked great if applied here. I must be misremembering him wearing a cape with this costume, but to be fair this one is even way before my time, but it was still a design that I can remember seeing now and then in my childhood. Since this is a basic buck, there are no surprises in the articulation, so I won’t run down all the points, but I will point out that this body features the swivels in both the thighs and tops of the boots.

The head sculpt gets major props from me for Loki’s maniacal grimace and overall devilish expression. Hasbro does enjoy injecting their comic villains with tons of character and Loki is another great example of that. He looks absolutely deranged! His form-fitting cowl features his trademark horns, protruding proudly from his forehead and curling upwards. Meanwhile, his golden locks spill out the back in a long ponytail. The only downside here is I worry about those horns getting all warped. With over 300 Marvel Legends figures, I wind up having to rotate a lot of them in and out of display, which means Loki here will spend part of his life in bagged in a storage tote. Needless to say I have to make sure he resides at the top of the heap to keep those horns from going all wonky while in storage.

The God of Mischief comes with one accessory and that’s his sword. Yup, while the modern Loki favors daggers and throwing knives, old school Loki wielded a more conventional blade. It’s a great looking weapon with a yellow hilt, an extended grip, and a cross-guard that kind of resembles a bird stretching out it’s wings. The guard reaches up the blade just a bit and has a green gem or stone painted on it. The broad blade is painted silver. I thought this looked familiar, and a little searching reminded me that it’s a repaint of the sword that was included with Angela as part of the Titus Wave.

After all this waiting for a classic Loki, I find myself a little underwhelmed with this figure. He’s not a bad figure, quite the contrary, I think he looks great. But a figure as important as Loki should have had more attention. It’s doubtful that Hasbro will take a second crack at this version of him any time soon, and I think that they should shy away from using A-Lister characters as the budget figures in a wave. But with that having been said, I still dig him a lot and he looks fantastic displayed alongside the 80th Anniversary Thor.