Tag Archives: spider-man

Apr 2 2012

Marvel Legends Wave 2: Future Foundation Spider-Man by Hasbro

Here we go with Wave 2, folks. We’re kicking off Marvel Legends week with a looksy at Spider-Man. This is one of the many figures in this wave that shipped in two different versions. The main release, which I’m identifying as such by the artwork on the package, is the so-called “Big Time” Spider-Man sporting the new costume that appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #650. My case, however, contained the variant, which is Spider-Man in the Future Foundation outfit. What a coincidence, seeing as we just looked at the Marvel Universe Future Foundation variants of the Fantastic Four last week!

The packaging hasn’t changed since Wave 1. I still love the look here. The overall deco is nice, although the coloring on the character art is a little perplexing. I seem to recall the costume featured in Ish 650 to be black with a red deco, not green. Doesn’t matter, because its not the figure under the bubble, and I doubt I’ll spring for the version pictured. No, I was very happy to get the FF version instead, since I’m such a Fantastic Four whore and I liked Spidey’s appearances as well as the designs of the FF costumes. You’ll note that there’s no BAF piece under the bubble, Spidey is the one figure in the wave that doesn’t include a BAF piece, so if you want to build Arnim Zola and don’t want Spider-Man, you’re in luck,  you can skip him. The lack of accessories and a BAF piece really makes him seem kind of small and lonely in that big package.
Word has it, this figure is supposedly a repaint of last year’s SDCC Exclusive Spider-Man figure. I’ve only seen a few shots of the Exclusive and I don’t see a lot of similarities, but then I suppose the deco makes all the difference. Either way, Spider-Man is a very simple sculpt and apart from the head and the webslinging left hand, there’s not a lot of unique tooling at play here. I do think he’s scaled too big for other figures in the line, particularly when standing next to Iron Man from the last wave or Bucky Cap from this wave. Pete isn’t exactly a big guy. The paintwork on this figure is also extremely simple. He’s molded all in white with a black painted deco. It works ok, but it seems lacking when you compare it to the paintwork on the Future Foundation costumes for the 3 3/4″ Marvel Universe figures. It just seems like the larger and more expensive, 6-inch figure should have at least as good a paintjob as the far less expensive and far smaller figures. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, because I do actually like the way the deco on this figure turned out. It just could have been better.
As a rule, I expect good Spider-Man figures to feature above average articulation and this figure does a fairly good job of pulling it off. You get a ball jointed neck with an additional hinge to help the head look up and down with greater range. The arms feature ball jointed shoulders, double hinged elbows, swivels in the biceps, and swivels and hinges in the wrists. His legs feature ball joints in the hips, double hinged knees, hinged ankles, and swivels in the thighs. The torso features a swivel waist, a hinged ab crunch in the torso, and hinges in the sides of the upper torso that give him some additional lateral movement in the shoulders. The articulation is perfectly fine, but it is curiously missing some points that are present in some of the other figures in this wave.
How much will Spider-Man cost you? I’m not going to gas on a lot about price points throughout the week, so let’s get it on the table now and be done with it. The retail on these figures seems to average around $15.99 to $16.99. However, if you buy them at Toys R Us or specialty shop, you could wind up paying as much as $20 each. The breakdown of my case with shipping makes the figures average out $17.99 a pop. It’s a good deal considering the convenience of getting one of each of the BAF parts, but then you don’t get to pick and choose the variants. So there’s some give and take there.
Now having said all that even at the lower range of the spectrum, about fifteen bucks, its hard to justify Spidey’s price tag. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a cool figure and I love him, but he features very little original sculpting, a very simple paint job, he comes with no accessories, and you don’t even get a BAF piece with him. It seems like Hasbro would have been better off giving him a BAF piece and letting one of the bigger figures, say Thunderball/Piledriver ship without one. Spidey is a solid effort, but he’s definitely lacking. Where are the extra points of articulation that we’ll see later on in Daken? Where’s the paint shading we see on the white parts of Madam Masque? Where’s a hunk of web I can stick on his arm to make like he’s shooting?  At ten or twelve bucks I would have been perfectly happy with him, but at about eighteen? Still a solid figure, but a pretty bad value.
Dec 24 2011

Marvel Universe: Scarlet Spider by Hasbro

Stopping by with a quickie today thanks to a pile of Marvel Universe figures that I found on the pegs while doing some last minute Christmas shopping at a somewhat distant Super Target. I’m going to kick off a look at this quartet of new(ish) figures with Scarlet Spider. Now, don’t get me started on the Clone Saga. Love it, hate it… like a dead rat in the middle of your living room, its tough to ignore it. I’m firmly entrenched in the “not loving it” camp. And yet, I can’t seem to dislike the outfit in all its cheesy glory. Scarlet Spider may have his origins in the 70s, but this outfit is a jumbled cliche of everything that was wrong with comic character designs of the 90s. And yet somehow it always worked for me.

So, the thinking here was let’s take Spider-Man’s traditional outfit and make it all red. Fair enough. But wait, there’s more. Top it off with a blue sleeveless hoodie (!) with a spider emblazoned on the front and back (!!). Oh yeah. Wait, you can’t have a superhero without superfluous pouches, so let’s put a couple on Scarlet Spidey’s feet, thus inventing the Ankle Pouch(!!!). Toss in a utility belt and we’ll turn his webshooters into heavy silver bracelets. It’s a symphony of ridiculousness, and again for whatever reason I really dig it. It scratches that nostalgic itch in me from when I was going to college in the early 90s and desparately trying to hold onto my youth by reading the comics du jour.

Scarlet Spidey comes on a standard Marvel Universe card. He’s carded upside down similar to the way some previous Spider-Man variants have been packaged. Unfortunately, gone are the days of the Secret Documents envelope. You do at least get a figure stand. The character art is nothing special, but it gets the job done.
Say what you will about Scarlet Spider’s design, Hasbro executes it fairly well here in figure form. All the extras on the costume (the hoodie, the pouches, the webshooters, and the belt) are separate sculpted pieces. I’m guessing this is more about being able to reuse a standard buck, but the new tooling definitely makes the figure look more unique. The sculpted hoodie does lead to one other little problem, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Scarlet Spider features some crazy articulation for a 3 3/4″ figure, but a little less than we usually expect from the MU line. You get ball joints in the neck, shoulders, hips, and ankles. Hinges in the elbows and double-hinges in the knees, Swivels in the biceps and thighs. And the torso, well, that hoodie keeps the torso from having any articulation. He can’t even swivel at the waist. I’ll note here that coming out the package, SS’s leg popped off at the hip. Sure, it’s a ball joint and it pops right back on, but I haven’t had that problem with an MU figure before.
                   
When you come down to it, I think Scarlet Spider is going to be one of those love him or hate him figures. I wouldn’t say that MU figures are pegwarming anywhere around my parts, but based on the online prices for him, I’m thinking a lot of fans are choosing to leave him out of their collections, along with Namor. I can’t argue that there are plenty of Marvel characters who should have been included in the line way before SS here, but I’m still glad Hasbro made him, and I think they executed him really well.
Aug 7 2011

Marvel Universe: Iron Spider-Man by Hasbro

I still have a few more Marvel Universe figures to look at, but I like to do things in threes, so I’m going to just take a quick look today at one more, Iron Spider-Man, before moving on to some different things for the rest of the week. I wasn’t intentionally hunting this figure down, but at the time I was buying a couple that I was looking for, so I threw him in the cart.

Yuppers, standard Marvel Universe card. Wow, its the HAMMER logo. For some reason, I thought Iron Spider came out after Osborne stopped stamping his nefarious emblem on our MU packages, but I guess not. Either way, Spidey’s got some nice character art on the card. It’s not quite in the same style as the issue the armor first appeared in, but then again, I’m pretty sure he only sported the waldoes on the cover and didn’t use them in the actual issue, either. Of course, the figure isn’t intended as a first appearance, so I’m pretty much just talking out of my ass.

Once out of the package, we see that Iron Spider is comprised mostly of a standard MU male buck with a Tony Stark inspired paint scheme of red and gold. There isn’t a lot of unique sculpting at play on this figure, although he does have the socket box on his back to plug in his waldoes, which are not attached to him in the package. The arms plug into the back with simple ball joints, and while the sculpt looks like they are hinged in two places, they really aren’t. I think that’s probably for the best, though, as they’re quite spindley and would have been very fragile. The ball joints provide some decent articulation for the maniuplators, but they also pop out pretty easily. In fact, I’ve found it just easier to unplug them and plug them back in the way I want them. I guess that’s cool, since it gives you the option to display him with the arms retracted by just pulling them off. The gold paintwork on my figure is surprisingly well done, with no noticeable slop or bleeding.

Apart from the ball joints in his waldoes, you get standard MU style male articulation. The neck is ball jointed and the arms have ball joints in the shoulders, swivels in the biceps and wrists, and hinged elbows. The legs have universal movement in the hips, double hinges in the knees, and hinges and swivels in the ankles. There’s no waist swivel, but you do get that funky universal torso joint that Hasbro loves so much.

Besides the manipulator arms, Iron Spider-Man comes with his personalized display stand and his Top Secret documents.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this figure. I seem to recall that this version of Spidey wasn’t all that popular and the number of Iron Spider figures hanging on the pegs seems to support that. Still, I’ve become quite a fan of collecting Stark’s various suits since Hasbro’s Iron Man 2 line came out and if nothing else, this figure has a place in that collection. I like the deco and the paintwork is nice and clean.