fantastic_four

Why? Across the board any given 6-inch figure still has far more articulation and details than any 3.75-inch figure, and that definitely includes the 6-inch versions of Ben and Vader that are the alternatives to those two new Vintage Collection reveals from the Obi-Wan show. The ONLY thing I like about the 1:18 scale is the vehicles are a more manageable size.

This is the reason I've always assumed critics cut TV shows more slack--they just accept that standards are lower for television and they adjust their criticism accordingly. It just seems like lazy reviewing, and because of that I've NEVER had any respect at all for television criticism. There could easily be plenty of good TV critics out there, but I haven't found them yet--and I know for sure Rotten Tomatoes hasn't found them yet. This thread wasn't the best place to start this conversation given that it's certainly possible Ms. Marvel is the best Disney Plus show so far. I've barely put any thought into ranking them since they're ALL worse than the movies have been.

Using the list from that article Tup linked: Ms. Marvel – 97% Black Panther – 96% Avengers Endgame – 94% Iron Man – 94% What If…? – 94% Thor Ragnarok – 93% Spider-Man: No Way Home – 93% Spider-Man: Homecoming – 92% Loki – 92% Guardians of the Galaxy – 92% Hawkeye – 92% The Avengers – 92% WandaVision – 91% Shang-Chi – 91% Spider-Man: Far From Home - 90% I'd have to give it though to be sure but I doubt ANY of those Disney Plus shows should be anywhere on that list. What If is better than any Spider-Man film? Loki and Hawkeye better than the Avengers?

I've been meaning to address this in the forum for years--movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes judge films MUCH more harshly than their television critics do. I don't fully understand why the scoring is so vastly different, but movie and television scores on there are just not comparable at ALL. Anyone know why critics cut television shows so much more slack? Certainly the history of television versus film is that TV is the slums and cinema is the real art, so I assume whatever we're seeing is at least a partial reflection of that divide in perceived legitimacy of the two media. But I really don't fully get it at all...if I were a critic I'd make every effort to judge both using very similar criteria.

Is there any clue from the comics about where that bracelet came from? It looked like it was in a package with a return address in Pakistan who had the last name Khan, implying it's one of her relatives.

Falls into the same quality level of the other Disney Plus Marvel shows in that it's competent and fine. Worth a watch, but not multiple watches.

You're probably right that Stan decided where the bubbles would go; not sure why I said that because I don't recall him ever referring to existing bubbles. But he did go back and fill in the dialogue after the art was done. I've heard him affirm that multiple times in multiple videos that are pretty easy to find. Here's one:

The Rotten Tomatoes consensus line is weird: It's at 40% right now, yet Fallen Kingdom got 47% and Jurassic World got 71%. So is Dominion an improvement or not? The reviews so far suggest the opposite and that it's worse.

That's VERY surprising given that two companies are creating action figures based upon the character. If the trademark lapsed can't anyone claim it now?

If not Hasbro who would he be paying? WWE?

If Hasbro let a trademark expire (they last a decade) then Valaverse wouldn't have to pay them anything to use the name. The likeness falls under copyright which lasts 120 years for corporations and can't be renewed. I doubt he's got a unique enough look for Hasbro to have tried copyrighting him, but even if they did Valaverse could relatively easily tweak his appearance without violating the copyright or having to pay royalties. In any event I highly doubt Valaverse is paying Hasbro anything. Hasbro has licensed GI Joe intellectual property for other companies to make some limited action figures, but all of the ones I've seen aren't in the 6-inch scale so as not to compete with their Classified Series line. The only third-party figures I've seen them license are 7-inch figures to Super7 and 12-inch figures to ThreeZero; both of those scales are far more niche than the mainstream 6-inch scale that sells best these days. They've also licensed 3.75-inch figures to Super7, and THAT has had me surprised since they first did it since Hasbro also makes 3.75-inch GI Joe figures. Usually Hasbro avoids licensing products that compete with their own, but for 3.75-inch Joes they did it for reasons I haven't figured out. The other reason I doubt Valaverse is paying Hasbro anything is if they were they'd sell a LOT better if they'd slap the GI Joe brand name on their licensed figures, but since they aren't I'm guessing they have no license.

I forgot Sergeant Slaughter was a GI Joe character. He was recently released in a knock-off GI Joe line called "Action Force"...I'm guessing Hasbro either never trademarked the name or lost it at some point? I'm curious how Valaverse was able to use the name of a character Hasbro created.

Up to 11 reviews. Still not sure why they're coming in so slowly.

Stan Lee didn't entirely write his comics like Moore and most other authors after Stan have so in that sense he's right, although as usual Moore's tone if he really did describe Stan as "not respectable" is overly dismissive. This is Stan's "Marvel Method" as I understand it from the way he's long described it: Stan and the chosen penciller--which means Kirby for FF--would discuss ideas for a story. Sometimes they were Stan's ideas, sometimes Kirby's, but usually they were a mix of ideas from both of them that have mostly been lost to time as to who had which idea. Stan then left the plot, i.e. how the story is told up to the penciller. Stan is the only writer who I've ever seen do this. Every other one I'm aware of writes a very explicit screenplay-like description for how the story is told through panels, but Stan claims he never did that. That's why he's credited as the writer on so many Silver Age books--he was leaving most of the creative writing of the plot up to the artists. After the penciller was done Stan would go back and fill in empty word bubbles with dialogue. I don't know any other author who left plots up to the artists like Stan did. If you find Silver Age Marvel issues hard to follow then usually the penciller is to blame. Stan's dialogue is in general REALLY good, and his character ideas were of course exceptional since that's what he's best known for. But he left the most time-consuming parts of creative storytelling up to the artists. If Moore's point is that Stan should have focused more time writing for fewer titles then I agree; a dedicated writer developing both the story AND plot leads to the best writing possible.

I go to see cool dinos. If it's otherwise watchable that's a bonus. The BBC just produced a revolutionary new dinosaur doc series with David Attenborough narrating called "Prehistoric Planet" that has CGI about as good as the Jurassic movies. I hope there's a new trend of documentary-based dino shows in the future. "Walking With Dinosaurs" from 1999 has long been a favorite of mine, although the CGI sucked compared to Jurassic Park movies so I still go to these movies for the dino action.

How are they releasing this season's episodes? I thought Prime usually dropped entire seasons at once, but it looks like they only dropped the first three episodes.

Saturday: 8 RT reviews This morning: 8 RT reviews Never seen this before. Why would so few reviews make it up? Was there a small handful of screenings and those 8 reviewers are the only ones RT uses who saw them?

Reviews are trickling in. There's no embargo in place for now, but they're coming in very slowly.

Some of it is good. McFarlane's sculptors are better than the Legends team was about five years ago, but they make large, glaring mistakes somewhere between a third to two-thirds of the time. They're clearly a cut below the Legends sculptors right now, but quality keeps improving. The aesthetic of the plastic they use is very different from Legends; it's firmer, stiffer, less give. At first I didn't like that, but it's growing on me. I'm a Marvel zombie so I ordinarily don't buy DC stuff, but I recently bought the McFarlane build-a-horse wave of four Dark Knight Returns figures pictured below mostly to use the horse with Marvel Legends. I generally enjoy all four of them, although I wouldn't call any of them great. The horse is fun though and I'll definitely be using it in Marvel displays. I would buy more McFarlane DC stuff if he didn't obstinately make the scale of the line 7 inches instead of 6 like his DC predecessors did. I still think he did it for obstinate and stubborn reasons and that he's doing action figure fans and himself a disservice, but hey, his figures are selling better than ever so I'm sure he disagrees.

Hasbro Pulse is just the most expensive retail option right now, and they also tend to get product more slowly than ALL of their competitors. By design, as Hasbro seems to want Pulse to be a secondary option for fans behind their main retail customers, i.e. Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc. They weren't the most expensive when they had free shipping, but without that they are since they rarely ever discount anything. At any given moment Target, Walmart, Amazon, Gamestop, or Best Buy are usually cheaper than Pulse is on almost any given item. They've seemed pretty clueless about how overpriced that Pulse Premium membership is from the start, and once they cancelled the open-ended subscriptions they handed out reality set in and their warehouse started to fill and fill and fill until they realized they had no room for new product. Hence the sale. I see no reason to view the sale as a death-knell for Marvel Legends; it just unveils the need for Pulse to change their pricing to be more competitive. More sales, cheaper premium membership, or whatever; they need to do something. Example--make some Premium-only figure that's at least semi-desirable and they'd get thousands of new subscriptions, which in turn would lead to more fans choosing Pulse over competitors due to the free shipping benefit of membership. The better conversation about the future of Marvel Legends is why in Target's most recent planogram for the summer they gave DC Multiverse a LOT more pegs and took away ALL of the Marvel Legends pegs. My local Targets have 10 or more pegs for McFarlane's toys and none for Legends; they chose to go with all cheaper Marvel toys like the Titan Heroes and 3.75" line of Legends. That's got me more worried about Marvel Legends than Pulse's sale. Not big-time worried, it's just a clear indication that McFarlane is out-doing Hasbro right now in the superhero action figure fight. He did an interview a few months ago linked below where he just outright said he's forgoing profits right now to get a bigger share of the market by keeping his price point cheaper than he knows Hasbro can compete with, and it seems semi-clear that his strategy worked with Target. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out over the next year or three. He's rich, but there's only so long he'll be fine with minimal profitability or a loss.

They're not, but there's a VERY specific reason for it. Hasbro recently killed what are almost certainly the vast majority of their Pulse Premium accounts late last year including mine. It's clear from posts on the Fwoosh forum that a VERY small percentage of people renewed that thing since it offers at best very little advantage, but I would argue it offers almost NO advantage. So buying anything for those tens of thousands of people who used to have free Pulse Premium accounts now involves $6.99 shipping. I used to order regularly from Pulse when I had a multi-year Premium account that I got for just buying a $25 Archangel figure, but I haven't ordered at all from there since it expired except for ordering the Mojo con exclusive and whatever I end up buying from this sale. I knew once they killed all of those accounts without offering ANYTHING new to Premium memberships that they wouldn't get many of them. And with few to no sales (before this one) and full MSRP pricing, Target beats them almost every day of the week...so why would hardcore collectors buy from them? The answer seems to be that they aren't. But I doubt sales are down across all retailers so I'd be very surprised if Pulse's struggles with clearing inventory affects Hasbro's sales estimates for the near future.

REALLY? Hadn't noticed, let me check that out.

Oh and I really want that GI Joe set that has the guy and his alligator. Saw a review of that alligator and he looks terrific, although he's out of stock most everywhere for now.

Yea that's the best sale Pulse has ever run; the best before this was 25% off. I already had most everything so I haven't bought anything yet, but I may get another Snake Eyes and Timber just to army-build that excellent dog which I already have two of.

Yes, I immediately noticed her but she didn't make it into the IMDb credits until later in the day it released. I knew it was her though as I've been familiar with her since I first saw her as Lucius Vorenus's wife in the HBO series "Rome" back in 2005, which is still one of my favorite television shows ever made.