Action Figures / Toys

She looks good and I was thinking about her too; I just dislike how these used to be under $100 and have gone up so much. Here are some face closeups I found on twitter:

 

The recent G.I. Joe Scarlett looks good as does last year's Supergirl which I have.

I've got a few Eaglemoss starships, the Enterprise-D, All Good Things, D, mirror universe Defiant, glow-in-the-dark TOS Defiant, and a bunch of other oddball variants of other Starfleet ships.  Oh, the big Enterprise-E, too.  They're fun, but I'd like a series of to-scale ships more.  

Dark Phoenix is cool.  I'm waiting for the Bishoujo Baroness.  If she turns out well, it'll be the first one I buy.  Maybe.  I'd be down for GI Joe's Jinx, Dawn and Helix, too.  And Storm Shadow, male female, whichever, just make a cool Storm Shadow.  I guess there is a female Storm Shadow in the old IDW Hasbroverse, so not too out of left field.  

I couldn't pass up this deal: https://www.entertainmentearth.com/product/wolverine-logan-one12-collective-action-figure-not-mint/nmmz76534

I've picked up Iron Man and Thor (Ragnorok movie version) from this series so far, easily the best 1/12 scale figures on the market, surpassing even Figuarts.  I'm hoping Mezco does an MCU MkVII Iron Man, though.  

1 minute ago, Galvatim said:

They're fun, but I'd like a series of to-scale ships more.

Yeah. I saw some kind of limited production, larger, extra expensive Reliant a few years ago that looked great. I don't remember the site anymore though, and this was mega-expensive, like over $1000 or something.

Baroness looks good in the prototype. I want to see Lady Jaye just because it will be nice to have an actual military-looking character, especially because that's one of the things Shunya Yamashita often draws anyway. I never had any G.I. Joe stuff, but when I was a kid G.I. Joes were 12" toys, in actual military style so I tend to still think of them that way, and while I'm aware of it, I never saw the cartoon or comics that these characters are based on.

Another one that I think looks really nice is Poison Ivy:

 

On 9/18/2019 at 12:17 PM, cfx said:

Yeah. I saw some kind of limited production, larger, extra expensive Reliant a few years ago that looked great. I don't remember the site anymore though, and this was mega-expensive, like over $1000 or something.

I think I recall the one you're talking about.  There was a company doing studio scale ships.  They were doing the Reliant and one other...  Maybe the Enterprise D?  I was waiting to see word about those, and also if they were going to do the Constitution Refit.  But maybe it's something different, because when I looked I couldn't find anything online about what I was thinking of.

I still kick myself for not getting the Master Replicas Enterprise over a decade ago.  There was also a company doing custom builds of the Refit Enterprise years back.  They wanted something like $5K to build up a Polar Lights 1/350 kit.

Anyway, I got the Mego Star Trek II Kirk, Spock, and Khan.  I've been waiting for these guys since I was 12.  Lots of movie quoting has been done the past week while waving figures around.

Today I got my payment request for Myethos's Iron Saga Judith.  I imagine I'll have that in hand by next weekend.

Oh, and Figma Snow Princess Miku 2019 has been here for a couple of weeks.  Detail is really good.  Joints are... not great.  She has pretty loose neck and torso joints which is a recipe for disaster when combined with her heavy twintails.  Seriously, she has the heaviest twintails of any Miku I own.  I dunno.  I can't say I'm disappointed in the figure, but it also didn't rekindle any Figma love for me.  I didn't actually handle her much or even use any of her accessories.  I just packed her back up in the box.  Hopefully the Figma of Racing Miku 2019 will be better.

I'll bring up the 6" Marvel Legends Cyclops and Phoenix for a moment, because I want to rant about a detail.  Why in hell give Cyclops, a character that doesn't fly, a back peg for a flying stand, but not give Dark Phoenix, a character who is flying nearly every moment she's on panel, no stand peg whatsoever?  Great figures otherwise.  I wish I could have found them at Toys R Us at retail, though.

Things are a mess at my place right now.  My play area (my boring table in front of the bookshelves) got designated as the place to put things which had no place.  So, for a while I've been chipping away and trying to reclaim my spot from the invaders. 

 

28 minutes ago, Gabriel said:

I still kick myself for not getting the Master Replicas Enterprise over a decade ago.

I wasn't familiar with this, but doing a search I also turned up a Reliant that is probably what I'm thinking of:

https://qmxonline.com/products/creating-the-u-s-s-reliant-artisan-replica

...assuming that was ever actually sold. That looks like the quality of what I remember, and I remember it was hand built.

On 9/27/2019 at 11:00 AM, cfx said:

I wasn't familiar with this, but doing a search I also turned up a Reliant that is probably what I'm thinking of:

https://qmxonline.com/products/creating-the-u-s-s-reliant-artisan-replica

...assuming that was ever actually sold. That looks like the quality of what I remember, and I remember it was hand built.

That may be it, but I don't remember a Constitution Refit pre-order at the same time.  But that was back 2013/2014?  I don't think my mindset would have allowed me to bite.  Plus, I'm pretty sure I hadn't ever heard of QMX back then, so dumping $5K on an unknown wasn't going to happen.

Odd that I can't find any indication of anyone having received one of these.  I couldn't find any pictures, and it's relatively easy to find owner pics of the Master Replicas Ent.  Crap, if I had one of those there would be all kinds of starship porn pictures of it in front of my natty Walmart bookshelves.

Maybe they never got enough pre-orders?

1 hour ago, Gabriel said:

Maybe they never got enough pre-orders?

That might be it. It's a lot of money, and as you say an unknown company. While I'm sure there are fans with deep pockets, there may not be enough of them.

2013/2014 sounds about right for the timeframe I saw it in.

There may be another model as well, but this is probably the one I saw. It's hard to remember, and I know the website I saw back then was different than this one, but this many years later that's true for most websites.

This is kind of a response to @baldylox question about 3rd party Transformers.  

3rd party Star Wars figures: https://www.thefansstrikeback.com/featured/13swfigures-loose

This site does sell reproduction Kenner figures, Yak-Face and Stormtrooper Luke, as well.  I'm surprised Disney hasn't done anything in regards to this.  Also that Y-Wing pilot is from Return of the Jedi.  Where's the Rebel trooper?

I got my Myethos Iron Saga Judith figure a while back.  I also got myself a Kitzconcept Robotech/Macross Dark Red VF-1 as well as a Super Pack to go with it.  They're both on the left middle shelf.  I have an idea for a picture with those two, but I seem to be far too lazy to try and make it happen.

That left middle shelf is supposed to be the Robotech shelf, but it's just sort of the random shelf right now, because Ignis, Celestia, and Judith don't really have any real assigned spot yet.

Since these shelves have become my default background, I was thinking maybe I could have a toy display there and that might be more interesting than a bunch of RPG books.  Plus, it puts all this stuff ready at hand if I want to take it down and play.

Sometimes your pictures remind me of things I had in the past that I've forgotten about. I had a Matchbox Robotech version of the Mospaeda mech there on your left middle shelf. We talked about some of those toys before like your Bob the Invid. Back when Matchbox had them, they were either overproduced or just didn't sell that well, because I bought the ones I had all on clearance, mostly from K-B Toys stores if I recall. I suspect what happened is they came out a bit late, and by the time perhaps the initial buzz over Robotech was dying down.

I recognize Real Action Heroes Honey Whip Miku, but who made the 1/6 Anna Williams?

Kinda OT: I used to have some shelves that looked about like that, except gray instead of the wood finish. I think mine were O'Sullivan. They were pretty nice but I hated how the shelves sag so easily as I see a couple of yours are doing. I did a sort of complicated modification to mine that minimized that somewhat but also made them non-adjustable. After a move I had to junk mine because they don't tolerate being moved very well in my experience.

19 hours ago, cfx said:

Sometimes your pictures remind me of things I had in the past that I've forgotten about. I had a Matchbox Robotech version of the Mospaeda mech there on your left middle shelf. We talked about some of those toys before like your Bob the Invid. Back when Matchbox had them, they were either overproduced or just didn't sell that well, because I bought the ones I had all on clearance, mostly from K-B Toys stores if I recall. I suspect what happened is they came out a bit late, and by the time perhaps the initial buzz over Robotech was dying down.

I recognize Real Action Heroes Honey Whip Miku, but who made the 1/6 Anna Williams?

Kinda OT: I used to have some shelves that looked about like that, except gray instead of the wood finish. I think mine were O'Sullivan. They were pretty nice but I hated how the shelves sag so easily as I see a couple of yours are doing. I did a sort of complicated modification to mine that minimized that somewhat but also made them non-adjustable. After a move I had to junk mine because they don't tolerate being moved very well in my experience.

I didn't know Matchbox ever sold that Alpha in their branding.  The toy itself is originally a Gakken 1/35 Legioss Alpha.  I'd only ever seen it in the Excite/Gakken/Robotech branded packaging.

The Alpha is yet another replacement for me.  I had one in the 80s, which I had purchased from a local store.  Looking back, that little store had a great person managing their toy department, they always had cool stuff always out of scale with the type of store the place was.  Anyway, in my late teens a friend of mine wanted to borrow the Alpha.  I said he could borrow it if he let me borrow his Teenagers From Outer Space RPG book.  So he did, and then he never gave the Alpha back to me.  I saw it some time later in the trunk of his car.  I told him that I wanted it back, and he said he had traded it to me for the book.  At the time I liked the book and was sort of disinterested in the Alpha, so I let it go.  And decades later I hunted down the one in the photograph for a couple of hundred bucks.

Anna Williams is a Phicen seamless body combined with a head/outfit combo produced by Flirty Girl Collectibles called the "Anna" set.  I had wanted a nice Anna figure for a long time.  Decades ago I had seen this figure https://myfigurecollection.net/item/19005 in a videogame magazine and had never been able to find it.  That was one of the sparks that eventually got me buying all the scale figures I've picked up over the years.

As for the shelves, they're Walmart specials.  Having solid rows of hardcover RPG books on them for years hasn't done them any favors.

 

2 hours ago, Gabriel said:

I didn't know Matchbox ever sold that Alpha in their branding.  The toy itself is originally a Gakken 1/35 Legioss Alpha.  I'd only ever seen it in the Excite/Gakken/Robotech branded packaging.

This got me questioning it myself, because my memory on some of these things is so vague. I dug around and found this:

https://www.figurerealm.com/actionfigure?action=actionfigure&id=12997&figure=alphafighterred

I am sure I had the blue one so they must have released both. Perhaps these were more rare than other Matchbox Robotech items, because most lists I found online do not list them at all and that site I linked only shows the red one.

Thinking a little more about it, I first bought the destroids...I think I had all but the Monster which I didn't think looked good, and I was pissed it wasn't the same scale as the rest. After that I looked for other ones to buy that I mostly ended up not liking as much, and this Alpha Fighter was one of those, which I'm sure is why my memory of it is so vague.

What else I remember I had is that same Invid you do, those destroids and the larger SDF-1 (former Takatoku toy). I also had the Takatoku VE-1 Elintseeker, the VT-1 trainer, the add-on valkyrie armored parts, and I had the Bandai-packaged VF-1 Super (or Strike?) that erroneously came with the red parts that were presumably made for the Transformers version. I no longer have any of these.

I'm sure your Walmart shelves are no worse than what I had. Those shelves warp sooner or later with even fairly trivial weight on them. I can explain what I did to mine but it's way OT here.

 

Nice.

I'm waiting until a paint scheme I like before bothering with 1/48 Valkyrie pre-order madness.  If they do a DYRL Hikaru 1A or 1S, then I'll probably bite.

What I'm about to post here is a plastic model kit but it's not Transformers, it's not Gundam, and I didn't want to start a new topic with a title something to the effect of non-Gundam plastic model kits. Since what I build ends up becoming an action figure anyway, I'll post here.

I'll hide most of the remaining images behind a spoiler tag.

Spoiler

 

Included with the 1/20 scale kit was pilot Sumire. Considering how my hands are so steady I would have killed many patients had I become a surgeon, painting pilot Sumire was not going to be an easy task. While I wasn't required to paint her, I wanted to. I had the feeling this was going to be a lot more difficult than me doing a faceup, and I was right. I knew I wouldn't get everything perfect but I wanted to make the attempt anyway.

The "flesh" color paint I had on hand made her look like she has jaundice.

Included were decals for her eyes. If they weren't included, I wouldn't have bothered with her face.

Done!

Size comparison with a soda can and the Gundam I built recently.

The smaller, chrome covered one is the Wave brand 1/24 scale Kobu. It's a kit from 1998 and it really shows.

Because my previous point of reference for a Kobu kit was the really crappy Wave kit from 1998, the 2020 Bandai kit is above and beyond superior to what I was used to. The Bandai kit's engineering is excellent. This engineering then led to excellent parts color separation, excellent parts fit, and just how fun the kit is to build. While I painted this kit and the pilot inside it, I didn't paint everything. The molded plastic was actually rather pretty out of the box so I tried to paint in ways to make the main colors pop out instead of painting it from head to toe.

The Kobu is a steam powered mech from a fictitious 1920s Japan. As much as I praised the engineering in the above paragraph, it's best to not expect the articulation ranges of current Gundam kits. Gundams are machines meant to be centuries ahead of the Kobu in terms of technology. The Bandai kit is the best representation of the Kobu in physical form with its limited technological performance. If you try to move the Kobu kit's arms and legs like you might do with a current Gundam kit, the limbs are likely to fall off.

The biggest gripe I have is with how the hand swapping works. The kit includes two sets - open hands (or fingers) and gripping hands. The "gauntlets" are attached to the hands so swapping them out requires removal of the gauntlets, removal of the hands, insertion of the alternate hands, and then reattaching the gauntlets to the alternate hands. Since that's my biggest gripe, the kit is just excellent overall.

If you never played any of the games in the series, this kit might be a hard sell.

Having said all that, I can recommend this kit from beginners to experts. It's not a difficult kit to build for beginners and there are plenty of things for experts to sink their teeth into.

Edited April 10, 2020 by growcian

Another model kit post but she'll be treated like an action figure. Again, most photos will be hidden behind the spoiler tag.

Box art.

 

Spoiler

This kit is notorious for how builder-unfriendly it is. Building her was easy. The hard part is applying the decals. For builders who don't want to deal with water slide decals, stickers are also included. The stickers will make her look like 💩. My plan with her was to use paint in places I could and water slide decals where I couldn't.

I didn't like the light brown plastic her hair was molded in so I decided to paint that with mixed colors. I wanted an orange color with hints of brown. The experiment of mixing paint ended in failure. My first attempt ended with an ugly and cloudy version of a light brown. My second attempt resulted in a better color but its ability to cover over the grey color primer was next to nonexistent. I ended up repainting her hair with several coats of unmixed bright orange just to cover the hideous color of the original coat of paint. The orange in the photos look brighter than it actually is. As bright as the orange appears to be, I prefer this color over the awful light brown the plastic was molded in so I don't regret painting her hair.

What? You ate all the ice cream?

 

For crying out loud! Unforgivable!

 

My paint mixing color debacles aside, this kit presented a slew of challenges.

There are too many curves which require the use of stickers or water slide decals. I remained adamantly against using the stickers so I tried to use decals as much as I could. Her faces with the decal eyes turned out great. I couldn't paint the stripe on her red skirt very well so I used decals there too. As for the other curvy parts... The decals were useless. I used both Mr. Mark Setter and Mr. Mark Softer. Neither worked well enough to make the decals adhere to the extreme contours of where the decals were supposed to be applied. I either made the decal not sit well in places they were supposed to go or I destroyed the decal itself. I ended up painting the areas where decals were supposed to be applied as best I could. Considering how small the details are and how much my hands shake, I knew I wouldn't be able to paint everything the way they were supposed to look.

Another issue I ran into was when I messed up a bit with the painting, 91% isopropyl alcohol didn't affect some of the paint I used at all. I then used lacquer thinner to try to strip the paint. Lacquer thinner is in lacquer paints and in the primer used to cover the plastic parts. I figured using lacquer thinner wouldn't cause the plastic any harm. After I applied lacquer thinner to an area of the kit where I messed up the painting, the paint was removed along with melting the area of the plastic where the paint was stripped. I concluded the concentration of thinner in lacquer paints and primers are low enough to not destroy the plastic but pure lacquer thinner can and will turn a kit into a water-splashed Wicked Witch of the West. While this SNAFU is my fault for not testing the pure lacquer thinner with the runners of where the pieces came from, I wouldn't have gone this route if I weren't trying to paint the areas where the impossible to apply decals were suggested. I learned something from this and the cost of the lesson wasn't too high. The paint job was going to be messy whether I melted a part (or not).

This kit gets a lot of hatred because of the impossible to apply well decals. The reputation of this kit is well deserved.

I think how she would need to get colored was an afterthought in the design process. By the time the designer figured out the kit would be stupidly builder-unfriendly, my guess is the production and design process reached a point where it was financially unfeasible to redesign the kit with proper color separation. I believe that's why we ended up with a kit with a very poor (but a deserved) reputation.

I bought this kit because I wanted to build a kit of an attractive young lady which isn't made by Kotobukiya. (I have tons of gripes with Koto kits in general.) The engineering of the kit itself is excellent with great molding. The problem is with the lack of color separation design.

I can't recommend this kit to anyone. I can't even say this kit is only for seasoned professionals either. Seasoned pros can find thousands of other kits which would be much more fun to paint. This kit is an excellent example of what not to do when designing a kit. Someone with steadier hands than mine, as well as someone with more skills and patience may be able to make this kit look like Bandai's product shots. For everyone else, I would say stay away from it.

If you want an action figure of her, I can recommend the figma version of Asuna instead.

Edited May 23, 2020 by growcian

Got a few new figures recently.  

Jurassic World Amber Collection Blue.  

Figma FGO Jeanne swimsuit version, Figma Emily swimsuit version 2, and SH Figuarts The Mandalorian. Figuarts Mando is good, but fiddly.  Lots of small parts, and bad fit on some. 

Black Series Hoth Rebel Trooper.  This guy will probably make a number of figure of the year lists.  

Snowspeeder Luke.  Pretty nice, more of an accessory for the upcoming Snowspeeder.  

I haven't picked up the JW Owen Grady figure, so Jeanne can be the Raptor Lord for now.  

Anyone else collecting GI Joe Classified?

I'm not messing around trying to find the figures at brick & mortar, I ordered a case of wave 1 from Entertainment Earth.

Destro is taking idol lessons from Nico.  

Forget Sgt. Slaughter, I'll team up the Joes and the Avengers.  

A toyline called Fwoosh Articulated Icons happens to make ninja figures that fit in well.  

Target exclusive Roadblock.  Actually a very cool figure, too bad the distribution of these Target exclusives seems awful.  

Both versions of Roadblock are pretty cool.

I bought these Uzis on eBay.  Snake-Eyes needs his signature gun, after all.  

Sure, the Articulated Icons ninja is a pretty decent v1 Storm Shadow, but this v3 based Stormy is my favorite figure in the line.  Stormy spent more time as a Joe than as a Cobra, at least in the Marvel comic book.

There's a bare arms kit for the Articulated Icons figure, which I did preorder...

I found a lone Cobra Trooper at a local Target.  Why the most popular army-builder in the line is an exclusive I'll never understand.  

Still searching for Beachhead and the Baroness.  I'm pretty confident the Baroness will get a repaint in a future wave, but Beachhead was my first 3.75" Joe figure, so I need one.  

 

My small action figure collection is currently focused on Mythic Legions, the Star Wars Movie Realisation series, and anything Star Trek or LOTR that I like.

On 5/22/2020 at 8:28 PM, growcian said:

Another model kit post but she'll be treated like an action figure. Again, most photos will be hidden behind the spoiler tag.

Box art.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

This kit is notorious for how builder-unfriendly it is. Building her was easy. The hard part is applying the decals. For builders who don't want to deal with water slide decals, stickers are also included. The stickers will make her look like 💩. My plan with her was to use paint in places I could and water slide decals where I couldn't.

I didn't like the light brown plastic her hair was molded in so I decided to paint that with mixed colors. I wanted an orange color with hints of brown. The experiment of mixing paint ended in failure. My first attempt ended with an ugly and cloudy version of a light brown. My second attempt resulted in a better color but its ability to cover over the grey color primer was next to nonexistent. I ended up repainting her hair with several coats of unmixed bright orange just to cover the hideous color of the original coat of paint. The orange in the photos look brighter than it actually is. As bright as the orange appears to be, I prefer this color over the awful light brown the plastic was molded in so I don't regret painting her hair.

What? You ate all the ice cream?

 

For crying out loud! Unforgivable!

 

My paint mixing color debacles aside, this kit presented a slew of challenges.

There are too many curves which require the use of stickers or water slide decals. I remained adamantly against using the stickers so I tried to use decals as much as I could. Her faces with the decal eyes turned out great. I couldn't paint the stripe on her red skirt very well so I used decals there too. As for the other curvy parts... The decals were useless. I used both Mr. Mark Setter and Mr. Mark Softer. Neither worked well enough to make the decals adhere to the extreme contours of where the decals were supposed to be applied. I either made the decal not sit well in places they were supposed to go or I destroyed the decal itself. I ended up painting the areas where decals were supposed to be applied as best I could. Considering how small the details are and how much my hands shake, I knew I wouldn't be able to paint everything the way they were supposed to look.

Another issue I ran into was when I messed up a bit with the painting, 91% isopropyl alcohol didn't affect some of the paint I used at all. I then used lacquer thinner to try to strip the paint. Lacquer thinner is in lacquer paints and in the primer used to cover the plastic parts. I figured using lacquer thinner wouldn't cause the plastic any harm. After I applied lacquer thinner to an area of the kit where I messed up the painting, the paint was removed along with melting the area of the plastic where the paint was stripped. I concluded the concentration of thinner in lacquer paints and primers are low enough to not destroy the plastic but pure lacquer thinner can and will turn a kit into a water-splashed Wicked Witch of the West. While this SNAFU is my fault for not testing the pure lacquer thinner with the runners of where the pieces came from, I wouldn't have gone this route if I weren't trying to paint the areas where the impossible to apply decals were suggested. I learned something from this and the cost of the lesson wasn't too high. The paint job was going to be messy whether I melted a part (or not).

This kit gets a lot of hatred because of the impossible to apply well decals. The reputation of this kit is well deserved.

I think how she would need to get colored was an afterthought in the design process. By the time the designer figured out the kit would be stupidly builder-unfriendly, my guess is the production and design process reached a point where it was financially unfeasible to redesign the kit with proper color separation. I believe that's why we ended up with a kit with a very poor (but a deserved) reputation.

I bought this kit because I wanted to build a kit of an attractive young lady which isn't made by Kotobukiya. (I have tons of gripes with Koto kits in general.) The engineering of the kit itself is excellent with great molding. The problem is with the lack of color separation design.

I can't recommend this kit to anyone. I can't even say this kit is only for seasoned professionals either. Seasoned pros can find thousands of other kits which would be much more fun to paint. This kit is an excellent example of what not to do when designing a kit. Someone with steadier hands than mine, as well as someone with more skills and patience may be able to make this kit look like Bandai's product shots. For everyone else, I would say stay away from it.

If you want an action figure of her, I can recommend the figma version of Asuna instead.

 

i ADORE my Redheads, and she's one of the cutest around. i just might pick her up one of these days.

i'm fairly skilled in model painting, so i'm reasonably confident that i can handle her peculiarities.

 

in the meantime, i've been waiting on these since April from AmiAmi, and they are FINALLY just about to arrive...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 2020 by Tasuke