toy fair 2005 — toy biz

toy biz has a ton of cool stuff coming from lord of the rings and marvel comics. the pertinent details follow. you can see pictures of some of it right now at action-figure.com, who go to the trouble of including information like release dates and suggested retail price, or srp. they also have better pictures, but consequently take longer to get coverage online.

you can see all of it right now at figures.com, who have no information of any kind to go with their copious but crappy pictures, which you can’t even save to your hard drive anymore, because god knows THEY have always been the last bastion of giving proper credit to image sources. i don’t like websites that proclaim themselves superior to the other sites they stole all their goddamn content from, but if you can’t wait for a-f to post all their stuff, well, figures isn’t going anywhere. as much as we wish they would.

the guys who run action-figure.com are genuinely nice people. they deserve your traffic, even if their server is never quite up to the burden of toy fair coverage.

LORD OF THE RINGS
12″ rotocast — the line isn’t dead after all! wave 5 will be boromir and gandalf the grey, both fully articulated, but very nicely sculpted, both cheap. i can’t wait.
6″ basic figures — tons of good stuff. gothmog the swollen orc captain. the eye of sauron(and the tip of barad-dur). leisure aragorn with broken narsil. balrog battle gandalf, to fight the crazy 20″ balrog neca made to make up for toy biz not making one because walmart wouldn’t sell it.
the crazy oliphaunt driver in a boxed set. several new striders, hopefully one with a better coat, and maybe a head that looks like viggo. something about his stubble is impossible to get right, just like qui-gon’s beard from the episode one toys. there was ever exactly ONE quiggy with good beard paint.
the orc with a severed head on its helmet spike. crazy freakout galadriel, who looks cool when she’s not color negative. a new eowyn. still no sign of a super posable legolas, though. hell, even gimli got a superposable figure in his coronation outfit… i think legolas is the only holdout at this point. god knows why.
one of my favorites is gandalf the white in his grey cloak. it’s not removable, i don’t know why i like it so much. i don’t even think i like the possessed theoden they’re making. probably because he’s standing upright. he should be in his throne. but gandalf looks good.

MARVEL LEGENDS
wave 9 — buy all seven figures and collect the parts to a great looking, fully posable 16″ galactus.
wave 10 — buy all seven figures and collect the parts to a great looking, fully posable, 16″ sentinel robot.
i don’t want all 14 of those figures. in fact, i only want one, dr strange from ml 9. i could live with classic cyclops, mystique, and prof. x, but i don’t really want the other ten. the question will be, how badly do i want that galactus and sentinel? if they were sold seperately, i’d happily fork over $30 each for them. toy biz wants me to pay between $50-100, depending on whether i can find those waves at retail for srp, or have to get sets on ebay.
ml10 is back to normal, which means i can get the two i want and skip the rest. hulkbuster iron man looks pretty sweet, as does the scarlet witch.

SPIDERMAN CLASSICS
a whole ton of spiderman figures i don’t need, and a couple new villians. beetle isn’t so exciting, and mysterio i never liked that much. i like that they’re reissuing all the villains now. they just did a wave that was ONLY the shortpacked villians from wave 1-6, and it looks like each wave from now on will also include one of the previous villians as well as a new one. good for finding stuff.
but again, i don’t really like any of them much. ah well. they’re making a fully posable spidey in his silver web-armour, i might get that. one of the weird all-blue variants looks kinda nice, and i could be wrong but i think one of the variants is the scarlet spider. kudos to toy biz if it is.

SUPERHERO SHOWDOWN
an action figure line incorporating a card game from fleer. i could give a crap except instead of making four inch figures with no articulation to speak of, they’re making four inch figures with nearly marvel-legends-level articulation. superposable superheroes the size of little gijoes. ml mini. i am SO there.

FANTASTIC FOUR
to support the new movie, toy biz has a full range of junk. a bunch of silly vehicles that i can only hope to god aren’t in the movie, some thing role play items(thing hands aren’t as cool as hulk hands…), and some weird larger figures like a stretchy mr fantastic and a big punching/talking thing. there’s also some nice basic figures in small form and 12″ rotocast form, which just like the lotr rotos are the same scupts larger, which gives them more room for detail, and consequently look a thousand times better. just as articulated too.
mr fantastic — the little figures range from the first basic one with plug-in bendy extensions for his limbs, torso, and neck, to a couple of silly variants; one with a slinky for a stomach and one with, i kid you not, his hand stretched into a circular saw. that’s so impossible, even for the fantastic four, i want to slap the designer. the rotocast figure just has long arms, which is fairly disappointing compared to the extending 6″ one.
invisible girl — the little figure is half-invisible, fading to clear plastic at her hands and feet. nice effect. the larger figure looks much better, but is only available in fully visible/all clear plastic versions. there’s also a second small figure that’s trying very hard to be sexy without succeeding.
the human torch — one sculpt, two paint decos in both sizes. johnny in uniform with some protruding flames. paint app 1 is normal colors with the flames painted orange. paint-app 2 is fully on fire, the entire figure cast in clear orange plastic. looks cool.
the thing — nice sculpt, good articulation. i think i’ll get the big one, it’ll look good on display with the others. i’ll wait on the little one until the second version, with a trenchcoat, hat, and sunglasses.
doom — he looks terribly unexciting. green cloak/coat thing. mechanical mask. one figure doesn’t do anything, one figure has a streetlight for a club. i should be excited but i’m not. doom is not a raving madman who tears up city streets and hits the fantastic four with things. he’s a scheming mad dictator with his own country who wants to rule the world because he genuinely believes that he’s the best man for the job. he hates the fantastic four because they keep kicking his ass, not out of some wierd beatles jealousy thing.

that movie is going to suck so hard i can’t even think about it. if the snowboarding human torch figure is actually based off the movie, i don’t think i need to explain why that’s a bad sign.