Oooh, this is my first NECA
thing on the blog.
I only dabble in NECA
products, I like pretty much everything they put out but very few licences they
have are ones that I’m super passionate about, or I guess passionate enough
about to use my limited money and space on them – they do have Gremlins, which
is one of my favourite things ever, but some of the early (and essential)
figures like Mogwai Mohawk and Gremlin Stripe are now very expensive and that’s
kind of put me off buying into the line completely (I do have three or so), so
I just pick up the odd figure here and there and have since the company, National
Entertainment Collectibles Association (which is far too stuffy a name for a
company so badass), started making Head Knockers. I think the last one I bought
was the Gorilla Soldier from their Planet of the Apes line.
This Christmas though I ended up getting two for Christmas - actually for Christmas not two weeks later from Forbidden Planet with money I got for Christmas like how I get most of my collector’s figures, I got to unwrap a Godzilla and Gremlin on Christmas Morning and MY NAN BOUGHT ME THE GREMLIN (Mum (while trying to figure out a mystery unmarked present): did I wrap the gremlin? Nan: No! I wrapped my own gremlin!).
This Christmas though I ended up getting two for Christmas - actually for Christmas not two weeks later from Forbidden Planet with money I got for Christmas like how I get most of my collector’s figures, I got to unwrap a Godzilla and Gremlin on Christmas Morning and MY NAN BOUGHT ME THE GREMLIN (Mum (while trying to figure out a mystery unmarked present): did I wrap the gremlin? Nan: No! I wrapped my own gremlin!).
Part of Neca’s Reel Toys
output, Godzilla 1985 is simply Godzilla as he appeared in the film of same
name (also known as The Return of Godzilla), Godzilla has actually had many
different looks over the years beyond ‘Godzilla’ ‘that American one’ and ‘the
cartoon Godzilla’ and you better believe there’s a list of them with links on a Godzilla Wiki .
Honestly ‘my Godzilla’ is probably what the wiki dubs ‘MegaroGoji’, the outfit
worn in Godzilla vs Megalon and Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla but this design,
(84Goji) is so nice and looked so good in the packaging that I couldn’t put it
down and mum ended up getting it as one of my gifts on our bonding shopping
trip we do every Christmas.
Out of the box – a state
that took some achieving as Neca’s packaging remains an utter bastard – he’s,
well, mostly he’s fucking heavy, he’s all solid and thus comes in weighing more
than most of my larger Godzillas. I really don’t feel like I need to review the
sculpt, it’s brilliant, nearly all NECA sculpts are brilliant, nearly all are
spot-on, nearly all ‘just walked off the screen’; they’ve got the proportions
that make this figure the 84Goji look and not one of the various other costumes
down, the headsculpt is great and even comes with a hinged jaw, something that
should be included as standard with any long snouted character. Articulation is
a little less perfect; it’s not a case of getting your money’s worth - he’s
absolutely covered in artic points that I will now attempt to run down for you,
top to bottom: hinged jaw, ball jointed head, ball jointed neck, ball jointed shoulders,
bicep swivels, ball jointed elbows, ball jointed wrists, ball jointed ab crunch-waist
combination, thigh articulation, knee articulation, hinged ankles and SIX
joints on his tail – two ball joints and four swivels. You may have noticed the
type of joints got a little bit vague in the middle there around the legs?
That’s because these joints are so fucking limited and so fucking worthless
than I couldn’t even figure out what type of joint they were, if you want a
Godzilla who can open his legs, bend his knees or even achieve his ‘tails
surfing’ pose then this isn’t the figure for you. Neca have always had a…
sticky relationship with articulation, especially below the waist, their
figures started out very much in the McFarlane Toys mould of being plastic
statues with all the articulation of your average McDonald’s toy1 so
I don’t know why I was surprised, maybe I just assumed they’d learned something
since 2001? Actually they have in their own way, the articulation points are
all very well hidden and the ab crunch and neck work brilliantly, it’s just
under the bellybutton where things fall apart.
‘Zilla has no accessories,
a blast of Atomic Fire wouldn’t have gone amiss guys, but the second half of
his tail has to be attached - it had to be pushed on a fair way before it pops
into place and I started to perspire more than once while trying to push it on
but once on its ball joint works fine. I’m still having mixed feelings on the
tail, but mostly I think they copped out half-way down and we could have done
with another ball joint near the end (yes I want MORE articulation on the tail,
actually no, I just want better spaced out articulation points, I think). All
this articulation-based grumbling is a little redundant as all he’s going to do
is stand on my unit looking awesome (and make no mistake, he looks awesome) but
I’d feel like I’d’ve failed at even a quick crappy review if didn’t bring it
up.
Also part of the Reel Toys, our Gremlin, who is unnamed
on the packaging but is Mohawk (and named as such on the official site) is a
figure I didn’t know I wanted until it was revealed, and then subsequently
realised it was the Gremlins figure that I’d always wanted. I am not the
biggest Gremlins 2: The New Batch fan, but I do love all the Gremlins it
introduced, especially Stripe stand-in (reincarnation?) Mohawk, and I am
fucking mental for the NES tie-in game; it was one of the very first video
games I owned and I played the tomatoes off of it, other than some
pixel-perfect jumped being required here or there it’s actually a very good
game that is closest to (oddly) a top down shooter. Mohawk is a boss both in
his regular and spider forms and because this is the Nintendo Entertainment
System was grey and pale orange, something I never noticed as a child, in fact
until this figure was released I failed to realise that I always thought of
Mohawk as looking like his NES Sprite, but then I play the game a lot more than
I watch bloody Gremlins 2 so I guess it makes sense.
Happily for my subconscious
NECA hit upon a winning formula of combining whatever licenses they happen to
have and old off-model video game sprites back in 2013 when they released a
repaint of their Jason Vorhees figure done up to match the sprite from his
appearance in the infamous (in video game circles) and infamously terrible NES
game Friday the 13th – where Jason Vorhees was bright blue. They
released this as a San Diego Comic Con exclusive, complete with a box that
replicated the game’s original packaging and fans went mad for it, since then
their ‘Classic Video Game Series’ of repaints has become one of the highlights
of their output (and you can find a checklist here).
So far I’ve been (just) able to pass up on all of them – then they revealed a
figure based Gremlins 2: The New Batch for the NES.
Before I get into that
figure though, I have to rave about packaging. You may notice (or may not,
depending on how much of a shit you give, which I doubt is very much) that the
only time I really bother to mention packaging is to complain about it when
it’s hard to open; this is because I have very little interest in modern toy
packaging because very little of it is interesting, the dizzying heights of
Playmate’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hasbro’s G.I. Joe: Real American
Hero cards are long over and in their place are boring all-purpose graphics
whipped up on a MAC, and I hate MACs. NECA’s video game releases are the
exception that proves the rule, though fittingly this is mostly because they
ape box art from roughly the time of those two aforementioned lines. The
outside of the box replicates the Gremlins 2 NES Cartridge’s flimsy old packet;
the front uses that awesome red-lit picture of the Mohawk puppet with the NECA
and Reel Toys logos replacing the Nintendo and Sunsoft logos (giving us a great
‘NECA seal of quality’) while the back replicates the back-of-box but replaces
game screen shots with pictures of the toy. I do wish they’d bother to line up
their own copyright bumph to match the layout of the old NES boxes but other
than that IT IS FUCKING SWEET. Inside is possibly even better as it’s a little
more creative, the flap of the box features a screenshot of the shop from the
game (which was also used on the back of the original NES box) and though you
probably can’t see it in my quick crappy photos, inside are graphics to make up
level 2 (where you first fight Mohawk), Gizmo’s life bar (three hearts)
finishes things off, giving you the impression you’re looking right into the
game. I was going to take a packaged shot with Mohawk still in it but I got all
excited and took him out on Christmas Morning and then the plastic trey got
thrown away and y’know.
The figure (finally) is
just fucking great, it’s simply the 2013 Gremlin Mohawk figure repainted and on
this they’ve done a great job of realising the sprite art and even building on
it a little with some of the black markings (they are there on the sprite but
the figure hosts a much more complex patterning). I could nitpick and say I
don’t think the yellow on his ears and stomach match up perfectly but I’d be a
bit of a cock if I did that, oh, too late, well I’m a bit of a cock but the
paint job on this figure is superb, my compliments to the slave-wage Chinese
woman. Sculpt is equally awesome, NECA’s Gremlins line is one of their finest,
their sculpt team just seemed to naturally ‘get’ the Gremlins and Mogwai look
and proportions pretty much from the start with the few Mogwai based issues
they had getting ironed out very quickly, their Gremlins 2 Gremlins are the
pinnacle of this ‘getting it’ for me plus the flat style of paint masks a lot
of sculpted-in texture. Articulation’s more functional then exemplary and I do
admit I wouldn’t mind a few extra ball-joints and especially some hinges at the
ankles, he has a total of 14 joints with all bar the knee hinges hidden nicely
so he can get into most poses you’d want a Gremlin to be though his lack of
hinges/ball joints at the wrists and ankles hinder some, as well as getting him
to stand on uneven ground. This means that he can’t be posed in the jumping
stance he has in the game which was a bit of an oversight really wasn’t it? But
he can stand holding his gun with both or either hand and cock his head into
all manner of curious and/or evil positions. Oh yeah he comes with a machine
gun; the original 2013 release also came with this and though he never uses it
in the game you’d never know, it’s been given a new grey and yellow paint-job
to match the figure and it looks like it came straight out of a NES title, even
though it didn’t. Actually that’s my only real complaint about NECA’s video
game line is that so few include items from the games as accessories, I know
they’re repaints and being repaints is the probably the only way they can exist
at all, but I’d have been extra chuffed if my Gremlin had come with a power-up
rather than a gun he didn’t use in the game.
This Quick Crappy review is
in danger of becoming a Long Crappy Review (and no one wants that) so I’ll wrap
up; in conclusion: typical NECA fare, amazing looking figures that could have
done with a few better choices when it came to articulation. And as an added
bonus my NES Mohawk means I have no immediate need for any other version of the
character so I won’t have to spend the large monies required for his previous
figures on the secondary market, so with that done, remember – it is very poor
manners to not wrap your own gremlin.
"you have the best dad ever!" |
No comments:
Post a Comment