“Like his people, the king of dead men beyond Dunharrow is a cursed soul. In ages past, he and his army had renounced their pledge of allegiance to the King of Gondor and fled to their mountain homes. Since that time, they lay bound by a curse to the shadowy depths beyond Dunharrow as bodiless spectres, awaiting the chance to honor their broken oath. Only a true King of Gondor can wield the power to release the dead King and his ghostly multitudes from this curse. Thus for many an age they have haunted the Paths of the Dead, awaiting the one that can set them free.”

Packaging: It’s minimal, it holds the figure in, keeps it relatively safe from damage, and tells you what it is. It does it’s job, even if it’s not the most eye-catching package out there. *Snicker* For those that just rip them open anyway, like me, who really cares?

Sculpt: Wonderful! Great details, and most of the figure is a kind of rubber, which makes it easy to move things around if needed. His withered face has every little detail, his armour is perfect down to the chain links of his “skirt”. I’m very impressed. The only thing that looks funny is if you remove his cloak, his ball joint shoulders look a bit odd.

Articulation: Way more than I expected, but up to par with most Toy Biz figures.
ball jointed head
ball jointed shoulders x2
bicep swivels x2
double elbow joints x2
wrist swivels x2
ball jointed legs x2
thigh swivels x2
double jointed knees x2
hinged ankles x2
side to side ankles x2
—————————–
23 total POA

Paint: this is the one place I was dissapointed. There are really no paint apps here. There is a crappy wash put on there to help bring out the detail, but I think it would have been better to actually paint the details in. I probably will sometime, but I shouldn’t have to.

Accessories: He comes with a helmet, which not only fits on his head, but looks good and in proportion at the same time. He also has his sword with scabbard, his cloak, and a sculpted cloth type thing that I think is supposed to be part of his robes. With all his robes and cloak on, it hinders his posability a bit, but it’s not that big of a deal. If you leave his robes off and cloak on, it works pretty well.

Action Feature: This dude glows in the dark. I haven’t tried him in pitch dark yet, being he’s on my desk at work right now, but I stuck him in a darker corner of my work area, and he glew quite well. I’m sure in the pitch dark he looks quite awesome.

Disaster (or minor annoyance) strikes! This figure also marks the first time I have had a Toy Biz figure break on me right out of the package. As I was trying out his wrist swivels, the left hand twisted right off. I jammed part of a paperclip in the stump and into his hand connecting the two and Viola! It’s good as new! I have heard many QC concerns with LOTR and Marvel Legends in this regards, so I guess it was bound to happen to me sooner or later.

My opinion: All in all, I am very happy with this figure. Toy Biz is my absolute favorite toy company right now, due to the properties they have, the prices they charge, and the level of care they put in to their figures bridging the gap between kids and collectors.

Tony Stark lives 3 lives.

1. Scientific genius, able to create “Transistors” that can do nearly anything and can be any size.
2. Suave ladies man with women vying for his attention all over the world.
3. Most importantly, the armored hero known as Iron Man.

I’ll admit right here and now that I’m not the hugest Iron Man fan. In fact, this is the first IM figure I have bought, besides War Machine. But ever since I was a kid I liked the character and his design. Even if I really had no idea what he did. As I am thinking back, my first “real” comic that my brother bought for me many, many years ago was a Spider-Man/Iron Man team up book. They fought a villian called Magma or something, underground. That’s probably the only IM comic I ever had. But anyways, on to the review!

Packaging: The same Marvel Legends packaging we have seen for 14 or whatever series. It’s a clamshell. It has a carboard back and a sticker on the front. You nedd scissors to get it open and It had 3 twist-ties holding the figure in.

Articulation: The Standard ML artic. That is to say, a buttload. Everything you would expect this version of Ol Shellhead to have, except side to side ankles, which is the only thing I missed.

Accessories: The back “tentacle” of Mojo. It feels cheap. I didn’t take a pic of it.
I don’t think I am going to try and collect all of Mojo pieces anyway. I liked him in Jr. High, but he’s kind of lame now.

Paint: Ooh. Here is where the hits come. It’s not that good. You would think that a solid grey paintjob wouldn’t be that hard. You might be dissapointed if you think that.

The figure is cast in grey with silver paint sprayed on. But it’s not sprayed well. As you can see they fully assembled the figure and then half-assedly sprayed the thing silver. Move a joint and you can see the paint lines. The paint in general is also not even. It’s really not a huge deal, but it bugs me. The rest of the paint details are just fine.

Quality: The plastic feels cheap. The arms feel like they are going to snap everytime you move them. They have that “ratchet” clicky thing going on and it feels like they are hollow or something. I don’t like it. Also, the mask bugs me. For one, it keeps falling off. and it looks dumb underneath.

I’m not sure why they even went with a faceplate with this version. It’s not true to this version, and seems more complicated than needed. They should have just given him a full helmet. It’s not like the helmet had to be small like a regular IM figure. What a bunch of gimboids.

Overall: I like the figure. I figured we will never see another First appearence IM figure, unless the movie really does well and Hasbro digs deep into the well to make as many IM’s as they can. There are a few minor quibbles, but I can overlook them. It’s the old adage “The sum is greater than the parts”. I like the design, mostly because he looks like an old 50’s robot from a bad Sci-Fi movie.

DESTROY!

“Hey sister, where do you get your hair done? It looks fabulous!”

Boy howdy it’s been a good few weeks for us comic nerds hasn’t it? McDonald’s is RIGHT NOW having a Marvel Superheroes happy meal promotion and the pic above it from a store’s promotional kit for the next toys. These should be hitting in the next week or so. Guess that means we’ll have to…..go to McDonalds. Ugh.

So this is the Captain America Movie Figure that will be hitting store shelves in time for the film, as revealed by Hasbro last week at SDCC.

Looks cool to me! It will join my shelf of Cap stuff. I still miss the wings on the side of head. I hope that they will decide to paint some on during the filming.

I. AM. CAPTAIN AMERICA! Hmm. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it...

If video isn’t working try this: TRON legacy merchandise video

Or this: TRON Product Images – Disney Consumer Products2

Warner Bros. Animation (owner of Cartoon Network) is producing the show which will feature a hyper anime-style thanks to a deal between Cartoon Network and  Japanese animation production house Studio 4C with whom past collaborations include Direct-to-DVD features Gotham Knights, The Animatrix and Halo.

The original 1985 series was a Rankin/Bass production (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Year without a Santa Claus and The Hobbit) and featured anthropomorphic cat-people from the distant planet of Thundera who flee shortly before their homeworld self-destructs. They arrive on a planet known as Third Earth and struggle to rebuild their civilization while fending off mutants who pursued them, lead by the reptile-like Sliiithe, and Third Earth’s resident demon-lord, Mumm-Ra, an ancient warrior sorcerer who was a cross between Boris Karloff and Hulk Hogan.

***

Personally I’m excited about this as I loved the cartoon as a kid. However when I revisited it in my early adult life in the late 90’s (rerun on CN’s Toonami block), I was somewhat disappointed as the storylines were often non-sensical in their random-plotting (yes – I know it was a cartoon) and I found the original animation rather stiff. I did find the series contained very good morals that were smoothly integrated into the plots and touched on at the end of every episode, usually through Lion-O, a literal boy in a man’s body (due to a cryo-stasis malfunction his body aged while in space).

I’d love to see this blow me away after all the currently failed 80’s revamps.

Even more Iron Man 2 crap! What can I say? The damn movie isn’t even out yet but it’s EVERYWHERE, and since it’s so close that means the toy line has just kicked in. Like last summer’s Wolverine movie toy line this one will be split up into both a comic based line and film based line, only difference here is that IM2 will have a third line devoted to ‘concept’ armors. Meaning weird made up crap to sell to kids.

Believe it or not the concept armors they’ve released so far are actually cool. Helps that a guy like Stark would more than likely have 3 billion different armors about, unlike say Spidey who by all accounts should barely be able to afford the ONE suit.

The line is in the 4 inch scale, which seems to be the trend at Hasbro these days, eh to each their own- bonus being that you can display them alongside the Joes of the last few years if you collected them (I did ). So now, less procrastinating and more reviewing!

As you can see above this is the comic’s version of Tony Stark’s first suit of armor, built while he was a prisoner of the evil Vietnamese (it was the 60’s remember that) and dying from shrapnel….Hell you know the origin dammit (and if not, why would HERE be your first exposure?). Anyways the armor looks like something you’d build with spare scraps of metal. The paint is fantastic and I’d say this is by far the best version of this armor ever produced! See prior releases tended to focus more on the clunkiness of the armor, and generally making it look brand new with a bright shiny silver paint job. At best you’d get a ding in the armor, and that’s just one I mean, this being the first version (which technically can’t count since it was the similar gold skirted version) that was released with the old late 90’s Avengers boxed set.

The only other (which had a gold Variant as well) still maintained a slightly clunky if polished up look

What places the new figure above those is most definitely the paint. Unlike before, where it looked almost store bought new, now we have an armor that seriously looks like you need your shots before and after wearing. Dull grey instead of shiny silver covers the body now, with the addition of silver scratches and a rust colored….I guess you could say wash over it. Unfortunately the paint is great except for one problem. They skipped the rust on the back! Yup, just grey and silver (was too lazy to snap a pic…sorry)

Being that this is the earlier armor, movement is a little limited. Not saying he’s lacking articulation. That’s hardly the case, it’s more to do with the stiffness of his joint (hmm just had Wizard of Oz pop into my head for some reason…) as it is he appears to have the same amount as the average Marvel figure- a great deal, not old school Toy Biz, but a good medium. I don’t like the stiffness as it makes posing difficult. Only other gripe is the ankle joints being poorly done- really he looks like a damn robot with joints like that!

After all that you get two accessories: The stand with armor cards (three cards that overlay to show the armor- they fit into the stand as a display) but I can’t find them to show you. The other thing is really not necessary, since I remember no instance of this with this armor, but old clunky here comes with a snap on energy blast for his hand. Nothing really to say, it’s solid enough that it won’t wilt…but I don’t plan on displaying it that way.

And that’s about it. Only other thing I can think to mention is, like other Marvel figures I’ve seen, he appears to be a little larger in scale than the Joe line. Which works in this case since a guy in armor would be a bit larger. Overall it’s a solid figure and I’d happily recommend it.

One caveat (if you haven’t heard) is that these are all 3 3/4 scale now.

Just like the X-Men Origins: Wolverine line of last year, there is both a comic series and a movie series. Reports are that the first wave of both the comic and movie series are being found at Wal-Marts across the nation.

But today we have a preview of some future wave! Here are what looks to be Unmasked War Machine (Jim Rhodes), Black Widow, Unmasked Iron Man (Tony Stark), Whiplash, and Nick Fury. For me personally, Nick Fury is a must have, and he will probably go in with the G.I. Joes. I hope they make a suited Tony Stark sometime as well.

War Machine, Black Widow, Iron Man, Whiplash, Nick Fury

If you missed part one, you can read it here first.

***

Gregg: Well you kinda’ beat me to it here! You’re probably sick of hearing about Transformers and GI Joe. I’ve noticed on the internet I’m one of a handful people that are really rabid fans of the Inhumanoids!

Flint: Inhumanoids is amazing! I wouldn’t say its obscure, but yeah – not a lot of people know about it, but you go to ComiCon and Inhumanoids has probably the most fanatical fans.

Gregg: Yeah! The show was definitely unique! Especially against other animated fare at that time. Can you recall how the project came about?

Flint: Oh yeah! Really easily! As I said, I was working on Transformers and Tom Griffin called and said “I’ve got this new show we’re working on, it’s called Inhumanoids. It’s a new toy line coming out, about these guys that go in and investigate the center of the Earth.” Y’know kinda’ like Journey to the Center of the Earth? “Here’s the stuff; go write the show!” They had the stuff a little-bit developed; they might’ve eliminated some characters, but it was pretty raw.

Gregg: Cool! How much input did you have the concepts?

Flint: What was weird about Inhumanoids is that both Tom Griffin and Joe Becall were creative kinds-of-guys, but Joe was usually the guy you’d run into earlier in creation and somehow Tom seemed to have this one; maybe Joe was out of town at the time but it seemed, to me anyways, like it was Tom’s baby. I remember sitting with Tom Griffin in his office with a blank piece of a paper and he drew a circle and said “This is the Earth and our bad guys are in here!”

So I said “Okay let’s see…Metlar! He’ll be in the core! Tendril…he’ll be closer to the surface because he’s all plant-matter and D’Compose he’s down in there deep! And the Redwoods are good guys, y’know? They’ll be on top of the Earth trying to warn people!”

Yeah it was kinda’ built like that.

Gregg: Neat.

Flint: And we said this wasn’t GI Joe. Earth Corps. Y’know, okay they have a government grant but it gets cut and they don’t have much money with a lot of budget cuts – this was the 80’s – and you were always hearing about budget cuts.

Gregg: Reaganomics!

Flint: Right! Frivolous government spending! So of course we needed the evil Senator who was out to cut them – Masterson – who was Ted Kennedy…

Gregg: *laughs*

Flint: …because he made a deal with Metlar. Yeah it was set in a real, Cold War-world.

Gregg: I noticed the show had a distinct style as well: decrepit backgrounds, everything was – not bleak – but not so much happy. All the characters y’know had these heavy deep black shadows.

Flint: Oh yeah! Well this was a horror show! More than anything. The one thing that changed in GI Joe and I think this was largely Gerber, was that during the production it went more from being a military, counter-terrorist unit to being more a spy/espionage show in actually making it.

Gregg: Right.

Flint: It went from being The Dirty Dozen to James Bond. You know shows do that; things change when you’re actually making them, and Inhumanoids was our Horror property, and we wanted it to look like a horror movie.

Gregg: You guys succeeded in spades! Everything about it was just, to me, pitch-perfect in its execution. The one thing I noticed that was used during the mini-series and is missing from the later episodes was the 24-style of editing – where the screen splits and shows multiple views of the same action, or simultaneous events happening.

Flint: Oh yeah! What was cool about that was it was something we wanted to do, and the mini-series was perfect. Animators, you know, didn’t want to do it and, I could be wrong, but I think Larry Houston story-boarded a lot of that stuff and he lived inside my brain, and he could like take what I was talking about in a script and make it look even better in the storyboard than it was done in my brain.

Gregg: Yeah…

Flint: But we wanted to do a lot of that , especially in the mini-series, because we wanted to compress the stories into those seven minutes and we thought it would look cool because it’s above the Earth and Below it and you could split the screen with the good guys and bad guys above and below.

Gregg: With GI Joe’s “Skeleton’s In The Closet” I noticed some reoccurring elements that appeared in Inhumanoids; the tentacle-beast in the lava, then you have the Inhumanoids – these ancient monsters trapped beneath the crust, ancient tomes speaking of hideous monsters and weird artifacts…

Flint: The grandfather of all properties like this is H. P. Lovecraft.

Gregg: I knew it! That’s just what I was going to ask you! Whether any of this was Lovecraft-influenced…

Flint: Oh yeah…I mean, remember I was doing D&D stuff at the same time and D&D and Lovecraft and the newspapers and politics and the cold war: throw that all together and you get Inhumanoids.

Gregg: That was one of my biggest questions! I’ll be honest – my parents never let me watch the show later on because D’Compose gave me nightmares…

Flint: *laughs*

Gregg: I’m sure you probably hear that quite often.

Flint: It’s really funny to me. It never occurred to us! You gotta’ remember I was in my twenties and it never occurred to us that the cartoon could scare somebody to the point they would have nightmares – the same way it never occurred to us the way kids would cry when Optimus Prime died.

Gregg: So was D’Compose your idea? With the whole touching people and turning them into zombies?

Flint: Y’know…honestly I don’t know. We were working with a group of people on hundreds of episodes and what was anybody’s particular idea, I can’t remember. I don’t know if that came with the toy line or if we made that up. What we knew about the toys was that the big figures, the Inhumanoids, were supposed to be a combination of an action figure and a play set – like Transformers are an Action Figure and a vehicle. These were an action-figure and a play set when you bought one of the villains. It was kind of a misbegotten idea. With D’Compose, the whole idea was you could put one of the figures in his chest.

Gregg: Right, which I can distinctly remember seeing as a kid with his pulsating red organs all slimy…and thinking that’s gross and awesome! Just bewildered and thinking “Whoa! This isn’t the Smurfs!”

Flint: Yeah it was a whole other universe!

Gregg: So did you guys try to purposely push the envelope with the animated horror? To see what you could get away with in a cartoon?

Flint: Absolutely! All of this came out of… when I got into animation that was…1983; the height of network-dominated shows. There were three networks and they all had these practices about violence in shows; it had all just gone wild. And when Steve Gerber got offered GI Joe, somebody had told him “Yeah! You can show some guy punching another guy with a real fist!”

*both of us laugh*

Flint: It was a big deal, and we laughed because you couldn’t do that! Some wiener, before we did the toy shows, had a violence count. It went like “Well if you have someone at a beach and a wave hits, that’s three points!” I remember being in meetings where there were 65 people in the room and only five were connected with creating and producing the show. Then about six were all network execs and their assistants and the rest was all violence and racial watchdogs.

Gregg: Right.

Flint: I remember when we were doing Mr. T – it was a multi-ethnic show; I remember we even had Aleutian Islanders on it, and so you had three people read the script from every racial point-of-view to make sure we weren’t slurring anybody. So anyways that’s the environment that existed before our shows, and Hasbro just did not care. I mean, you couldn’t kill people unwontedly, but inside that little concern, they didn’t care. And that was what drew people to working on these shows. A lot them in animation were just sick of the tyranny.

Gregg: Exactly.

Flint: We went as far as we could, respecting the fact that if we got a little too ridiculous, some censor would step in and keep us in some reasonable boundary.

Gregg: I remember that Marvel Animation in the 80’s had a ridiculous problem with NBC when they were making The Incredible Hulk. The network was uptight that Banner would be shirtless post-Hulk, but yet they had no problems with him bursting his seams when he became the Hulk; so his clothes would just “magically” reappear. The Hulk couldn’t punch anything or anyone with a closed fist…

Flint: You’re doing the Hulk…but he can’t punch anything?

Gregg: Exactly! If he, say, smashed through a wall, it had to be done with hands-splayed flat. He couldn’t punch it. Then there was a mandate handed down to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends that they had to include a cute animal character for companionship. It just seemed so stifling!

Flint: Well…what was interesting is that it was so repressive that it forced a certain amount of creativity, that we didn’t default every timeout to violence. So there was something kind of good about it in a weird way, which is what was funny about it! Yeah it produced some skills that actually paid off in the end. Inhumanoids was the result of what was a repressive era.

Gregg: At the end of the day was it poor toy sales or poor ratings that caused Inhumanoids to fail?

Flint: Inhumanoids was cancelled BEFORE the toy line was released. The toy line was an utter bomb.

Gregg: Right.

Flint: I remember asking Joe Becall “Hey, uh, Joe, why do you think the toys bombed?” and Joe said “They can’t get past the reality of the product.” He pulled up a toy of Tendril and he tried walking him across the table and he was large and clunky and falling over. At the end of the day? It was a bad toy. That was his theory.

Gregg: I’ve heard that supposedly it was Parents Rights groups also. Was there any backlash from parents or activists?

Flint: Oh yes. There was this one, Thomas Redecki, for one reason he was… Google him when we get off the phone, but yeah. This one guy was up there squealing about everything we were doing! Gary Gygax & I were doing an AM talk radio show and he called in and told us how horrible the things were we were doing to kids and the Saturday morning kids show. He and Peggy Charon; She was actually more interesting – she had this Action For Children’s TV or something. But Redecki always had a problem something we were doing, or this or that and he was getting a lot of publicity.

Gregg: Anyone else come to mind?

Flint: Joe Lieberman has waived some games I’ve worked on around, but y’know, it’s an easy way for politicians to make a certain amount of booking and…

Gregg: Yeah..

Flint: On a slow week you can always go squeal about video games or cartoons and nobody will really fight you; there isn’t a whole lot of “Pro-Violence in Video Games and Cartoon” lobbyists around.

Gregg: Another question for ya’ – Sabre-Jet, aka Brad J. Armbruster – was that Ace from GI Joe?

Flint: Yes. It’s all interconnected. I’m sure you remember Marissa Faireborn in Transformers? That character was Flint & Lady Jaye’s daughter. As for Ace, I’m not sure what happened, if the character was discontinued in GI Joe or what but we always tried to recycle.

Gregg: Interesting. So I have to ask, but there are a handful of us on a website called Deviant Art, have you heard of it? It’s a place where you can post your own artwork…

Flint: No! I haven’t! Have a link?

Gregg: Yep. Just before talking with you, I set-up an account that is all specifically Inhumanoids-related artwork. I have one of my scripts up there and I have some people contributing work.

Flint: Yeah send me the link. I’d love to see it.

Gregg: Cool! Sure! How would one, if it were possible…do you think with this wave of nostalgia sweeping entertainment and comics, someone could acquire the rights to Inhumanoids to try and breathe life into it?

Flint: I’m sure. What would Hasbro have to lose, really? I heard they were thinking of bringing back Inhumanoids, probably under another name, but to my knowledge nothing has happened. You know, I really need to re-watch these all again!

Gregg: You can! On YouTube; someone downloaded all the episodes!

Flint: Are you serious?

Gregg: Yep! The whole series!

Flint: I’m there now…you’re right!

Gregg: *laughs*

Flint: Yep. Here we are! *laughs* the Evil Eye!

Gregg: That was my favorite episode.

Flint: Yep. Dr. Merrel Andersen. Berkeley University. That was my girlfriend’s address at the time.

Gregg: I have these all, but I had to order the DVD set from London. It’s Region 2, but they play on my DVD-Rom.

Flint: No kidding? That’s great.

Gregg: Yep. It has PDF’s of your scripts too.

Flint: Wait – it does?

Gregg: Yes.

Flint: On which disc?

Gregg: Both! The mini-series is on Disc one; the rest are on Disc two!

Flint: Really? Oh wait – England? Yep. I remember that now. That was a couple of years ago.

Gregg: I will send you the PDF’s if you want.

Flint: That would be, thanks. Yeah I think I have some unused scripts that if you want, I’ll send you. It’s all on Macintosh …

Gregg: That would be…awesome! Thank-you!

Flint: Take care! It was great talking to you! Call again sometime and keep in touch. I’m here all the time.

Gregg: Thanks! I will!

Flint: Take care now.