Superhero Times: a service of Action Online
Some dedicated and wealthy action figure collectors collect all of the output of some particular company or other; everything NECA produces, say, or all of Mezco’s products. More often, collectors are more selective. Some collect entire lines – all of the 3 3/4” scale Star Wars toys, for instance – or do so according to more specific criteria, like ‘bad guys from Middle-Earth’ or the like. More frequent still are those who collect figures, but who do so on a case-by-case basis, not collecting according to set criteria but according to the attractiveness of individual toys. (This group includes members of the other, more focused groups, who are doing a little ‘moonlighting’; it also usually includes children. Children buying action figures – it doesn’t seem right.) It is this last and largest group to which the toy companies must pay closest attention. It’s the undecided voters who call for the salesmanship. And this salesmanship has much to do with the appearance and overall quality of the figures in question. But it has just as much, or more, to do with what the figure is depicting. More people are going to buy a Wolverine figure than, say, a Susan Sontag figure.
So this begs the question: Was the market really clamoring for a Banshee action figure? Nothing against the guy, but he’s a b-list X-Man, really, and moreover, he’s dead. Of course, this being the Marvel universe, death is mostly a debilitating but temporary condition. Like mono. But anyway: To be fair, the Legends line is to be praised for its dedication to releasing such secondary characters. How else would your humble reviewer have gotten his hands on his beloved Beta Ray Bill, or MODOK? Still, one still cannot help but wonder how such characters sell, overall. Only the sales departments of Toybiz, and now Hasbro, know for sure. Actually, they might not, either.
In any case, we are not here to judge the man called Banshee. We are here to judge his action figure. Let the judging commence!
PACKAGING
This figure comes in the new, glitzy, MTV-style Marvel Legends packaging. The white card sports a picture of Banshee, screaming his head off, in the viewer’s upper left. The plastic bubble is full of sculpted areas and cardboard inserts, which latter do partially obstruct the viewing of the figure, but not to too terrible a degree. One of these inserts has four pictures of the yellingest X-Man; most of these are delightfully old-school, and two of them have bits of comic-text visible. Maybe this explains the philosophy behind releasing Banshee – perhaps this figure is being sold to those who still remember the All-New, All-Different X-Men. On the whole, it’s good packaging, as packaging goes.
The back of the card gives us an overview of the line, plus a short bio of Banshee, along with some vital statistics – height, powers, that sort of thing. One of these statistics is listed as “Alias: Irish.” At first, your humble reviewer thought that a rather goofball mistake had been made – no no, that’s not what ‘alias’ means – but then he realized that Banshee’s friends probably do call him this, like you might call someone “Frenchie” or “Swazilander.”
Unlike other figures in Hasbro’s first wave, the Banshee figure is held in place by more than just the shape of the plastic containing him. He is further secured by a number of tiny, thin rubber bands. Though this is therefore less impressive than the Hasbro Legends which you can pop right out, you can still free this figure with just a scissors and five seconds, and that’s still easy livin’.
SCULPTING
At first glance, Banshee’s head looks a little bit silly. But you soon get used to it, realizing that it’s not really the fault of the sculpt. Banshee is a man with big, magnificently tousled 70s hair, who exercises his power through wide-mouthed screams, and this sculpt reflects that. And reflects it quite well; it’s quite good-looking, for the big-haired yelling head that it is. In some of the promotional images, it has looked as though he’s cross-eyed, or at least as though his eyes are too close together, and this is thankfully not the case in the actual figure. He will, of course, always be screaming – articulating his jaw would make him look like a marionette – but you can always say he’s doing other things besides screaming sonically. Maybe he’s in pain, or singing an aria. Or yawning. Yawning angrily.
The body sculpt is very good, though not particularly remarkable either way; Banshee’s your standard Marvel slim-but-toned sort of guy. What’s noteworthy about the body are the…flaps…the wings, that’s what we’ll call them, that extend from the wrists to the boots. These are made of cloth, folded over doubly and very nice-looking. They are held on to the body at the wrists, knees, and armpits by removable pegs. Since there are only these three pegs apiece, the inner edge of the wings could hug the contour of the body a bit more closely, but this is a quibble.
PAINT APPLICATION
There is actually very little paint application at all on the body of this figure. The yellow gloves and boots are separate pieces, and the body is a uniform green with a minimum of shading. And all this is fine. So are the face and head, though on the review copy, there’s a little dark spot on the nose’s right. But, what, superheroes gotta keep their faces clean every second?
Where things go south is around the neck and collar. The line where the yellow of the collar meets the green of the suit is a little bit sloppy – though in a way that could almost make one nostalgic, since it is sloppy in a way that Toybiz’ Legends were, quite a lot of the time. The head joint – well, there’s a lot of green around the head joint, where there ought to be none whatsoever, and this is really pretty bad. Weirdest of all, the pink of the neck merges smoothly, almost imperceptibly, with the yellow of the collar. It is nigh-impossible to tell where the flesh ends and the costume begins. Bizarro.
ARTICULATION
It has been mentioned that the partial shoddiness of the paint job is reminiscent of the old days, Legends-wise. The good news is, so too is the articulation. Almost all of the points Legends fans got used to, even spoiled by, are here, including the twisting joint on the lower leg and the feet that swivel on a forward axis. Only the joints in the middles of the hands and feet are gone, and, hard though it may be to admit, not all Legends really had these anyway.
The only thing that really restrains the movement of the figure is the wings, and these only in terms of how far the limbs can actually move. He cannot stand with his feet together with them on, for example. But then, they are removable, presumably to solve this problem. And on the other side of the coin, the pegs on the wings stay in their holes quite nicely, preventing pieces of the costume from just flyin’ right off; an embarrassing situation for even the most devil-may-care crimefighter.
ACCESSORIES
As is typical for this line, Banshee comes with no accessories, and it’s hard to imagine any particularly appropriate ones for the character anyway. You could, if you liked, consider his wings to be accessories, since they may be removed and used as, oh, let’s say, towels.
The discontinuing of the packed-in comic book for this line is a pity. The continuing of the build-a-figure tradition (for want of a less grandiose word) is nice, though. Banshee here comes with the right wing of Annihilus. We’ll discuss Annihilus as a figure unto itself soon. Not today. Not tomorrow. No telling just when! But soon!
COST & OVERALL IMPRESSION
The price of Marvel Legends has gone up, to about ten dollars on the pegs, and fifteen bucks, give or take a few, online. And you may well need to go online; this whole wave is doing pretty brisk business in the old-fashioned physical world. Bah! The physical world! Who needs it?
Banshee represents a heartening return to form for the Marvel Legends line, after a decent-but-unexceptional Hercules and a lousy Emma Frost. The sculpt is very good, and the articulation is top-notch. Only the paint job, specifically at the neck, is problematic, and this line never was phenomenal in that area. (The paint job area, not the neck area.) If you went back in time two years and gave this figure to a Legends fan, they would presumably be very confused, but they would have no way of guessing that the Legends line had changed hands before this figure was made. You might want to come up with something better to do with your time machine, though.
Review and Images by Matt Kessen