MAVERICK

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

“Maverick absorbs the force of enemy attacks, converting it into hyper-concussive blasts of power.”

Hiiiiway through the danger zone!  Oh, sorry, wrong Maverick.  This one’s significantly less Tom Cruise-y.  Though, I bet he still plays a pretty mean game of volley ball.  It’s been quite a while since I reviewed a Maverick figure.  In my defense, that’s because there really aren’t a lot of them out there.  But now there’s one more, so that ups the quantity of Mavericks by about 30% or so.  Aggressive expansion and all that.  He’s very, very ’90s, so that does make him ripe for the picking in regards to the current Legends line-up, and, well, here he is, right?

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Maverick is figure 4 in the Strong Guy Series of Marvel Legends.  While Black Tom eschewed the ’90s trend, Maverick is squarely in the middle of it.  He’s perhaps the central piece of it, really.  He’s Maverick.  Sorry, wrong Maverick again.  This assortment is really a mid-point between Deadpool and X-Force, and Maverick’s connection to both of those things is pretty tangential.  I suppose he and Deadpool are both products of Weapon X, so there’s that.  If it gets me a Maverick, I won’t complain about the circumstances.  The figure is almost 7 inches tall and he has 31 points of articulation.  The nature of Maverick’s design is that it’s somewhat restricting to movement.  Subsequently, that translates to this figure, especially when it comes to the elbows.  That being said, he still manages to be quite posable, and Hasbro’s definitely done their best with most of the articulation implementation.  He can even move his head mostly unimpeded, which is awesome for a Maverick figure; the ’90s figure didn’t even try on that one.  Maverick is sporting an all-new sculpt, which I was actually a little surprised to find out.  I had just assumed he’d be making use of some of the Deathlok tooling, but that’s not the case at all.  That means his sculpt isn’t playing double duty, or aiming for close enough, resulting in a figure that’s a quite solid recreation of Maverick’s original comics design.  For the most part, I’m a really big fan of how the sculpt works.  The details are clean and sharp, and I love how well they’ve captured his mop of ’90s hair under neath of the helmet.  The only part I’m not much of a fan of is the collar piece, which is a free-floating add-on piece for some reason, rather than being properly attached.  It doesn’t stay in place very well at all on my figure, and ultimately, I just kind of prefer him without it.  It would be nice if it could at least tab in or something to keep it in place.  Maverick’s color work is pretty decent overall.  The gold goes more orange-y than what we saw on the ’90s toys, but I actually think it looks pretty good.  It feels more in line with his comics depiction this way.  The actual paint application is decent overall, though there’s some slight bleed over from the mask to the face.  Due to the layout of the mask, though, it’s not terribly noticeable.  Maverick is packed with two different guns.  The smaller (based on the Nerf Vortex Proton; thanks Tim!) can be stowed in his holster, but he’ll just have to always be holding the other one.  He’s also packed with the left arm of Strong Guy.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I have a perhaps somewhat irrational love of Maverick.  There’s never been much to the character, but I always thought he was really cool on X-Men: The Animated Series, and I tended to have him on my team whenever playing X-Men: Under Siege board game as a kid.  His ’90s toy eluded me until I was an adult, but I was super excited when he was announced for this line, and he was definitely my number one want from this line-up.  I’m very happy with this figure, and he turned out even better than I was expecting really.  A very solid offering.

Thanks to my sponsors at All Time Toys for setting me up with this guy for review.  If you’re looking for Marvel Legends, or other toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.