fantastic_four

I don't know why it took this long to finally get one, but now that we have I'm not sure I can get enough references in Star Wars to inter-species dating. And this one was just plain funny for multiple reasons--Sedaris's wacky personality matches well with the wacky way the Jawas act and sound, plus she's TINY, so it's easier to see her matching somewhat with a Jawa. Now I really want to see how hairy they are under those robes...

I haven't seen the shows with him yet so I have no real opinion, but I'm trying to decide who from 1983 you think is comparable but that he doesn't eclipse...is it the Ewoks? Lucas didn't do enough with Maul before offing him, but he's still my favorite villain in ALL of Star Wars mostly due to one thing--Ray Park's physical performance in the role. They need to get more martial arts experts to play Jedi or Sith in the films. I've long wanted them to pull Jet Li in as a Jedi, but really any actor/athlete who can hop around and look bad-arse like Ray did would be fine.

I'm so confused...I clicked an episode of Boba Fett and got an episode of the Mandalorian.

Has Hasbro pulled out of SDCC?

Is he pooping? If he is, M. Night Shyamalan at the end of the clip doesn't look NEARLY shocked or disgusted enough...but I suppose that could just be his WTF?!?! face.

We'd have to know why he passed out after escaping to know how that would have impacted his memory of events at the time. Whenever anyone loses consciousness events before and after that moment are usually always affected. What made him pass out--hunger? Thirst? Exhaustion? Something about the Sarlac's digestive acids? Dunno, but I'd guess exhaustion--and that would definitely affect his memories from that general period of time. People who collapse from heat exhaustion usually lose some segment of time prior to when they pass out. Which as you point out begs the question of how he's remembering it in the Bacta tank if he doesn't remember it while awake. They should have just shown the Sarlacc escape separately from his Bacta tank memories; it would have worked as the very first scene of the show as if they were just showing it to us in real time. Every fan would quickly realize they were picking up from at some point after the last Tatooine scene from Return of the Jedi.

I watched Mandalorian with my 5-year olds, but I haven't shown them Boba Fett at all because it's too dark for them. I assume the scenes you're referring to are Favreau trying to lighten it up for kids the same way Lucas tried to do repeatedly (Ewoks, Jar Jar, etc), but that he's not doing a great job at it this time around after knocking that out of the park with Grogu.

Is there more on Paramount Plus yet besides Star Trek justifying a subscription? Still haven't seen any of these new series due to them being put behind that Viacom pay wall that isn't worth the price.

It was the final piece of the puzzle for how the series fits with what we saw in the Mandalorian. We now know how Fennec survived getting shot, who the caped figure was at the end of that Mando episode from a few years ago (easy to guess for most of us, but it verified the suspicion), why he's going after Jabba's position, and most of all he gets Slave I back and uses it satisfyingly to gun down those bikers. Plus his Sarlac almost swallows Slave I whole, and we get to see the Sarlac getting nuked by one of those seismic charges Slave I is outfitted with. Seemed noteworthy to me! Definitely the best episode so far. But I do get why people are disillusioned with it...lots of mistakes being made with the story and direction. Still PLENTY of good stuff in there that people are overlooking, but hey, same thing happened with the prequels which also had far more awesome than cringe-worthy elements, so it's what I'd expect.

Yikes. Long article, still making my way through it. I noticed the article's author says she interviewed Whedon in the spring, which would mean June 2021 at latest. Has she indicated why she waited 6 to 10 months to release it? I'm guessing it was to do full research, but that's still quite a while to release an interview--particularly when the coals on this fire were burning SO brightly at the time she did the interview since that's around when Ray Fisher was going public with everything.

That label is snazzy, haven't seen those before. When did they start with the pic labels? Are they still noting somewhere in text that it's the first appearance of Silver Surfer and Galactus? I don't see that in your pic.

If you mean Empire and Return of the Jedi it's because he was in a car accident and messed up his face towards the end of filming Star Wars. He tried to swerve across four lanes of traffic to make an exit and rolled his car a few times. I heard conflicting stories about how bad it was--the only consistency I heard was that he at minimum broke his nose and cheekbone--but it was bad enough for Lucas to feel that it had to be written into the Empire screenplay by having the Wampa smack him silly on Hoth. If you mean the Abrams/Johnson sequels, then he WAS old enough to have use for an AARP card in those.

Here's a visual reference for a few Mafex figures and how they scale with Legends. Left to right is the Legends 90s Cyclops, Mafex Cyclops, Mafex Psylocke, Mafex Wolverine, Legends X-Force Wolverine, Mafex Spider-Man, Legends black suit Spider-Man, and Legends retro Spider-Man. The Mafex Cyclops is about a quarter-inch smaller than the Legends for a character who's supposed to be 6' 3", Psylocke is 5' 11" so probably should be a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch taller, Mafex Wolverine should probably be a quarter-inch shorter like Legends is, and Mafex Spidey is probably closer to accurate for the 5' 10" Peter Parker than the two Legends figures to his right that are about the same height as Cyclops. So are there little possible inaccuracies? Yes, but not much, and in general fewer size mistakes than Hasbro makes. So I think they blend PERFECTLY with Legends in terms of both lines having plenty of little inaccuracies to complain about.

90% of the time they scale perfectly. Some are a little too short or a little too tall, but not many--and no more or less than the size disparities that Marvel Legends figures from Hasbro also often have. The only Mafex figures I've seen that are noticeably too small are the Infinity War Thor and the comic Venom figures. Thor is just slightly small, maybe a quarter-inch, but Venom is more off--about a half-inch too short. I really, really wanted Venom, but he's barely taller than Spidey, and that's just not right even for the first appearance of Venom when he was just the same size as Eddie Brock at 6' 3" (later versions of Venom slowly began to get bigger and bigger than their host human). About a quarter of Hasbro's Legends figures are off compared to the comic or film character they're portraying and relative to the other figures Hasbro has already made, so Mafex in general is doing a better job at Hasbro's scale than Hasbro themselves do. Mafex has two Wolverines that are the same height, and both are probably somewhere between an eighth to a quarter inch too tall, but they're still noticably shorter than all of the other X-Men from Mafex and Hasbro, so they're mostly fine. SH Figuarts is another Japanese company who makes a ton of Marvel stuff, and their stuff is consistently too short to scale with Legends by about half an inch. To their credit all they're doing is strictly adhering to a 1:12 scale by making a 6-foot human exactly 6 inches in height, but unfortunately Hasbro's scale crept up to be more of a 1:11 or 1:11.5 scale such that a 6-foot human is about 6.5 inches, so Figuarts is generally too small to fit with Legends.

Tough question because for a character to be "consistently" not done right it has to have been released a bunch of times and is therefore an A-list hero or villain, but I'd have to say Spider-Man. He's too flexible for the current state of action figure art; NONE of them can achieve some of the insane positions artists like McFarlane did that came to define the character for entire generations of fans. That's not to say some haven't come close. The Mafex Spider-Man is still the best ever, but the Marvel Legends retro Spider-Man is a close second. And both can achieve lots of great poses most other figures can't, but neither can do what Spidey has been drawn to do in thousands of panels. As just one of countless possible examples consider this cover to Spider-Man #1--NO figure can crunch down like this.

Two more recent pickups from the last few months that are also best-ever versions of their subjects--the Mafex Psylocke and brown suit Wolverine. Logan in particular is just plastic perfection, like the character jumped right off of the comic page.

One of the main reasons I ended up passing on that superb Batman Year Two figure is I realized you can achieve similar--and if you're ambitious, the same--sorts of poses with the large, wired cloth capes that come with the two Batman figures I already have, the Mafex Batman Hush blue and black versions. Both are, by FAR, my favorite figure forms of the character in twelfth scale. Medicom creates the best-ever version of a character in the scale with virtually EVERY one of their releases. Both of their Batman Hush figures are just spectacular, and I'd much rather spend an hour or two positioning their capes than buying one that's stuck in the same pose forever. I posted here about the blue Batman Hush back when I first got it in 2020, but in early 2021 I also bought the black version which I much prefer. Just utter perfection for a comic Batman.

That flowing cape though...wow. I'm sure I wouldn't regret having bought it had I pulled the trigger; it looks amazing however it's colored. Never seen anything like it, particularly with an action figure. I watched several reviews of it just to see how that cape works, and it looks VERY well-designed.

It was a Target exclusive released late last year for $50. This is it: https://www.target.com/p/dc-designer-edition-batman-year-two-nycc/-/A-83727503 It also comes with a second cloth cape for more dynamic posing if you don't want to use the huge flowing one. I came close to getting this, but I didn't want to dedicate the space, plus I'm not a fan of this ultra-light colored version of Batman.

Who made that Mark IV? Is it ZDToys? I've heard decent things about their Iron Man MCU figures.

Robert E. Howard nor his estate ever trademarked the name "Shuma-Gorath". Trademarks only last a decade anyway, but at no point did they ever do it even back when he was first created. And that's not at all surprising because usually people only create trademarks for primary characters in a work of fiction, not supporting characters like this. But even if he had trademarked the name renaming the character would avoid a trademark infringement but not a copyright infringement. Here's what Shuma-Gorath looked like when Howard created him: Just as all Marvel versions of Shuma-Gorath have to date this creature we're seeing in the trailers CLEARLY looks similar to Howard's character. He's huge, he has a big eye in the center of his body, and he has tentacles radiating from around the eye. Just as trial judges repeatedly did find Captain Marvel to be an illegal copy of Superman back in the 1940s and 1950s, it's also clear that Shuma-Gorath in every Marvel incarnation descends from Howard's version of the character. So I don't get the speculation about a name change to avoid a trademark infringement that doesn't even exist when copyright infringement would still be a clear risk with or without the name change. I'm guessing it's just misunderstanding about how trademarks, copyrights, and patents work.

I still want to know what's under those masks the Tuskens wear. I thought we'd finally see it this episode, but nope!

It's easy to prefer almost any twelfth scale figure to any Hot Toys figure. The articulation is worse on Hot Toys, and the faces usually linger squarely in the uncanny valley. SO strange how that works...you start off admiring the insane detail they achieved with the faces that NO twelfth scale figure can achieve, but then it gets worse and worse, creepier and creepier the longer you look at it. They only seem to fully cross the uncanny valley on about one in every five or ten figures.

That's a steal on what looks to me like a great figure. I've had that in my Amazon "saved for later" for over a year looking for a low enough price, and yea, $25 is fantastic.