fantastic_four

The issue with the knees is that Hasbro added ratchets to most of the leg joints, but there's an engineering design issue with them and the QA team never tested them so for most Sentinels the ratchets don't work. But what you can do is tighten the screws in the knees; the video below overviews it. While you're in there, you could also add washers to the knees to prevent the screws from loosening. I bought the washers at the following Amazon link that fit the Sentinel's screws and added three per screw, and there are four knee screws so twelve total: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013G5XSB8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

There was one bit of news about Haslab last week--the Hasbro Marvel team did a bunch of Youtube interviews, and the lead marketer Ryan Ting affirmed that they've decided on the next Haslab project and should be revealing it later this year. He gave no hints about what it could be.

Not sure if you heard all the hype about the Haslab Sentinel's knees being weak, but if it's a problem on yours the fix is pretty easy. I've got three of them that I tightened the knees for and added gaskets to them, and they've all been in bent-knee poses for 6+ months without the knees giving out at all.

RT scores are starting to roll in. It's at 84% on 56 reviews. The early ones are always the highest, so it'll probably end up somewhere in the mid-to-high 70% range, which would mark it as an average MCU film most of which are very entertaining but not necessarily memorable or worth multiple viewings. DEFINITELY going to end up being considered by critics to be not as good as the first one. Ah well, still sounds pretty good and I'm looking forward to it. I always hope for greatness but don't necessarily expect it.

The Metacritic score so far is putting it around the Ant-Man and Black Widow level of quality.

We're ten minutes past the review embargo lift...WHEREZ MAH REVIEWS.

New Mezco Doctor Doom announced today. Looks pretty great, and comes with an insane array of accessories shown below (click for larger images). https://dorksidetoys.com/collections/homepage/products/mezco-one-12-collective-marvel-doctor-doom-action-figure

they renamed him for this There are multiple explanations for the Gargantos leaks, and some of them don't necessitate him being renamed. Maybe they did rename him but we'll see. Until we know for sure I'm calling him the name we all know him by.

I've re-watched the scene from the beginning of the film starting after Riddler kills the mayor with Pattinson doing his voiceover about Gotham up through where he beats the snot out of that clown-face gang probably two dozen times since the film hit HBO. It's definitely not a better movie than the first two Nolan films, but wow, it's really, really good. I agree with the multiple assertions that this is the best version of Gotham we've gotten, and most or all of the fight sequences are sublime. And that first fight might be the best Batman fight we've ever had on screen. I liked Christian Bale in the Nolan films, but I prefer this version of the character. I don't know whether to credit Reeves or Pattinson--I lean towards Reeves but it could easily be Pattinson--but this is the first Batman performance where the character has the personality traits you'd need to have to do what Batman does. He's obsessed and depressed in all the right ways that I never fully bought from past actors with one exception--Michael Keaton did a pretty good job with that side of Bruce. But Keaton wasn't as good as Pattinson's portrayal is. Batman is not the most compelling character in virtually every incarnation of Batman; it's his villains that usually chew up all the scenery. And that was mostly the case here as well with both Penguin and Riddler being more likable than he is. So it's no reflection on Batman actors when he's not what we like most about his stories; there's only so much you can do to make a character like Bruce Wayne or Matt Murdock compelling since they're so obsessive and morose.

Marvel is going full anti-spoiler with this film's release. There are no early screenings until the premiere on May 2nd, and the review embargo doesn't lift until the next day on May 3rd. It's more common for review embargoes to release so late due to the studio knowing a film sucks, but as noted Marvel has done this multiple times before. And it checks out with what we know about this film--we have only limited ideas about who's in the film or even who the big bad is. Is it Wanda? Shuma-Gorath? Mordo? An alternate version of Strange himself?

I don't much care about the price hikes for two reasons. One is that these toys are mostly as cheap as they are because of cheap Chinese labor that if I mulled over too much I could easily decide is immorally exploitative. I rationalize it by telling myself that I can't help it if China is still stuck in the throes of semi-Communism and that's not my fault, but I can't drill down too deeply into that without feeling guilty. If you think THESE increases are steep watch what happens if China does the equivalent of what Russia is doing in Ukraine and decides to finally go into Taiwan. That seems inevitable and likely to happen any year now, and if that happens wow, it could result in an economic blow none of us have ever felt if we sanction China. They make everything we use! It's going to get ugly once China finally carries through on re-absorbing Taiwan. The second reason is that about 20 years ago someone suggested that if you want to keep collecting forever you should learn to fund your collection WITH your collection. I could probably fund every Legends Hasbro will make for decades just by selling a few Silver age comics, but for now I avoid that by just buying multiples of figures I strongly feel will be highly desired in a year, two, or three. So I do that regularly, and although I'm not fully funding my collection that way I'm funding about half. So I'm not too worried about price increases knowing that instead of buying one of a popular figure like retro Spidey I buy two or three and sell the extras in a few years.

That I haven't heard. Any idea when they did that, or how the ret-con worked? The Ultimate version fixed it because it was just a re-telling of everyone's origin so they just left Donald Blake out, but I never figured out how the main 616 would resolve Donald Blake and Thor co-existing.

I already knew she was in it as Thor so that prior comic knowledge may have spoiled that moment a bit for me. Question about other people wielding Mjolnir. Originally all of the power of Thor was contained within Mjolnir, but starting with the Ultimate version of Thor they changed him so that he was a god with the innate power and Mjolnir was just to focus it. What did the comics establish as the powers granted to Mjolnir to others now that Thor has his powers separately from Mjolnir? In the MCU when we saw Cap with Mjolnir it looked as if it mostly just granted him the ability to use it as a weapon, the ability for it to return to him like some sort of boomerang, and the ability to project lightning. But the power level of the lightning was far below what we've seen from Thor himself in the MCU. I'm wondering if it will work the same way with Jane. I know in the comic it also made her physically stronger and tougher, but I have no idea how Jane as Thor's abilities compare to Thor Odinson himself.

Liked it a little. Didn't grab me at all. Hopefully the full trailer is more compelling.

This is the Twitter post making people suspect he's the screenwriter. https://screenrant.com/xmen-movie-writer-michael-waldron-confusion-comment/

Whenever toy manufacturers ship products to retailers like Walmart and Target they can specify a date for them to be put out, but when they send them out too early the employees at both stores inevitably put them on the shelves without paying attention to that release date--and it happened this weekend for this film. I'll wrap the images in spoiler tags, but you can see below some mild spoilers for the film including what Gorr looks like, what Lady Thor and Thor look like in costume, some sort of alternate look for Hemsworth described as as well as several characters we had no idea would be in the film but apparently are, although all of them are exceedingly easy to guess based upon what Thor indicated he would be doing towards the end of Avengers: Endgame. I usually detest spoilers, but nothing below matters at all to me because it doesn't ruin much of anything about the story aside from who will be in it--and as I mentioned none of these are much of a surprise and who I could have guessed might be in it anyway without thinking about it for more than a minute or two.

Amazing collection. Grats, Lighthouse!

It seemed odd to them, too, because they fixed it within a year or two of the 1961/1962 issues where all of the cover graphics were too crowded. They just decreased the size of everything a bit including the price box, the Comics Code box, the comic title, tag lines like "THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE!" etc. Seemed like Stan or one of the artists wanted to jazz up the covers when they did the Marvel switch, and then they realized it was too crowded so they just kept refining the design template used for all of the titles.

Who is this Steven Grant guy? All I knew before this episode is that Moon Knight's real name is Mark Spectre. I'm sure the show will explain it and am pretty sure that they didn't do that this episode, but that's a detail I don't mind having spoiled for me from the comics, assuming Steven Grant is there as well. Was that identity always a part of the character, or is it a more recent revision?

I know pretty much nothing about Moon Knight other than having heard of him, seen him guest-star in the titles I read for 4+ decades, and having generally heard him described as a supernatural Batman. Saw the first episode and I'm digging it.

While generally true, there is a smaller subset of authentic stuff on there. Here's a prime example that captures why they sometimes have cheap authentic stuff--it's the 2016 Marvel Legends Daredevil 12-inch figure that was an SDCC exclusive: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003148251255.html This popped up along with the 2017 SDCC Thor Battle for Asgard 5-pack of 6-inch figures (the pack has Borr who is Odin's father, Ulik the troll, Lady Thor, Malekith, and Unworthy Thor in it) in early 2021 on Aliexpress, and around the same time Hasbro Pulse also offered a few hundred of the Daredevil 12-inch figure on their web site. I have to assume this was lost warehouse inventory that was found that Hasbro imported some of but sold the rest locally. Pretty much all toys are manufactured in China, so when pallets get lost they sometimes get sold from China as well. It's REALLY hard to identify the small subset of authentic goods on Aliexpress though. I only took the plunge on the Battle for Asgard Borr and Ulik figures there after someone in another forum alerted me to their presence on Aliexpress and verified that they were the authentic original releases. And it made sense that they were there since the old Daredevil inventory also bubbled up on Hasbro's Pulse web site. Another figure that's on Aliexpress that I think is legit is the Hasbro Pulse fan vote Silk figure which sold out in hours last year when they made it available for sale: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004039296132.html But it's selling for the same prices it does on eBay. They never re-stocked that figure on Hasbro Pulse after the day it released, so I assume some inventory got lost and bubbled up to Aliexpress somehow.

I own 30 Mafex figures and have never seen any QC as bad as that though. But most Mafex figures have Chinese bootleg versions, so I'm still guessing that's what it is. The easiest way to tell is if you got it from any Chinese seller on eBay or Mercari, or from Aliexpress (which is in China), then it's usually a bootleg. Not always, but usually. China has no respect for the intellectual property of other nations and refuses to stop their citizens from pirating anything. That even extends to Chinese government agencies who also steal and bootleg intellectual property prolifically. They seem to view piracy as an integral part in growing their economy, which it most definitely does do for them. As a result never trust ANYTHING that comes from China, and be wary of bootlegged products that might be bought by people from other countries and sold as original. I'm sure there are more than a few examples of US sellers who specialize in buying cheap Chinese bootlegs and selling them at market prices as authentic. Of course most manufactured goods in the world do come from China, but it's foreign companies who design and sell them and they just use China for the manufacturing. So it's fine to buy an Apple iPhone that was probably made in China, but do not buy that thing from any other seller, particularly ones located in China. If you look at the boxes for Mafex figures you can see that they, like everyone else, outsource even their own manufacturing across the East China Sea over to China (Medicom is a Japanese company for anyone unfamiliar with Medicom and their Mafex line of figures). I have heard the quickest way to know if any Mafex figure is a bootleg is to look at the hologram sticker on the bottom of the package. I've heard bootlegs have no hologram sticker, but authentic figures do. I haven't verified that myself though so I don't know whether or not the bootleg companies have tried to do their own ripoff hologram stickers on some figures.

Is that one of the Chinese bootleg versions? I've considered getting that figure a few times, and the face on yours looks different than the images I've seen before shown below.

Saw it for a second time yesterday. My biggest issue is still the length, and the best way to trim it would have been to exclude Catwoman and Penguin. Riddler is the best secondary character anyway by a long-shot, and neither of the side stories with Catwoman and Penguin added enough to the film that it would be significantly worse without them. I think I now like this film better than Dark Knight Rises, and I like Riddler more than Bane. But not more than Joker or Ra's Al Ghul. My second viewing was on IMAX, and with the higher resolution I was able to see more details of Joker's face. Very creepy skin and mouth, reminded me a bit of how the Killer Klowns from Outer Space looked pictured below, albeit with far more normal facial proportions than they have.

Spike Lee built an intermission into Malcolm X that the theatre I saw it in honored, and good thing because it was 3 hours 15 minutes. This movie should have had an intermission too at 2 hours 56 minutes. Woe be unto those who went into this film with a venti Starbucks on board not realizing how long it was.