The Rocket Raccoon wave of Marvel Legends is here! It feels like a long time since we’ve had new MLs in our hands, but if you count Iron Man Legends along with the Hit Monkey wave, then we’re back up to the number of Marvel Legends waves we had in 2012. The real question is whether the market can bear more than this. We’ve still got the Wolverine Legends wave incoming, but even with a Wolverine movie performing well in theaters (the cumulative box office is already estimated to exceed the $120MM production costs), what would be the 4th wave this year is at present a Previews Exclusive.
But back to this wave. I’ll have a closer look at some of the figures in the coming days, but here’s some quick thoughts.
First off, there’s no surprises here. I mean that in a good way – we’re seeing Hasbro leverage the reuse of known bodies, and those bodies are good. Hawkeye and Black Panther are built on Bucky Cap, which is an excellent base. Both figures are going to make for some great customizing fodder, too.
Jean Grey is on what is now the smaller of the medium build females (the new Moonstone being the bigger one) which goes way back to 2-pack Elektra with heavy reuse through the years, including Mystique most recently. But because the figure required tooling on her gauntlets and thigh pouches (thank you Jim Lee), they also re-did the lower legs. So now Jean Grey comes with the rocker ankles that make the Bucky Cap body so awesome. Also, this may be a Hasbro first – her head sculpt turned out really nicely. I mean, she’s pretty!
You can argue that the Wrecker is too big, but since he’s the same size as teammates Thunderball and Piledriver, who’s to argue? And Scarlet Spider – well, as you can see, I haven’t opened him. It’s not because I dislike the figure, which is repaint of earlier Spidey’s in the line – it’s just that I have no affinity for this version of Spidey. Rocket Raccoon is a bigger clone of the Marvel Universe version, and although he has no leg articulation he’s got a surprising amount in his upper half, and he looks great.
Terry Dodson pulled the art duty on this wave of figures, presumably so he could doll up Jean Grey like he’s done with the rest of the X-babes on his ongoing Uncanny X-Men run. However, I’m finding it a little flat on the packaging. Maybe Hasbro should commission two versions of the artwork – one that can make better use of the space on the back of the packaging, and one which can manage the confines of the upper corner on the front.
One other oddity with the packaging – we knew from the earlier plans that we were to see running change variants for Wrecker (to Bulldozer), Jean Grey (to other versions of herself) and Hawkeye (to the classic version). Only the Wrecker shows both himself and Bulldozer on the packaging, and even shows Bulldozer’s portrait instead of Wrecker’s on the Build-A-Figure guide on the card. Jean only shows the two variants (White Phoenix and Age of Apocalypse) in the Phoenix Force on the card back. And there’s no hint of the classic Hawkeye’s card art, either on the front or the back.
We know now that the running change variants won’t make it out as planned, and that Hasbro is coming up with alternative ways to get them to us. But this makes me wonder if the packaging team found this out as they were progressing through the packaging design for this wave.
Stay tuned – even though my closer look at this wave will come over the next few days, my camera phone might have some Instapics coming your way.