JUBILEE

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

“Jubilation Lee is the newest member of the X-Men, able to project plasma “fireworks” from her hands with explosive results!”

Remember how I was talking about how Hasbro’s doing a line of X-Men: The Animated Series-inspired figures?  It was just yesterday, so it should be fairly fresh in the memory, I hope.  Well, they opted to launch the line with not one, but two figures.  Since they were doing Wolverine, they opted to kick off things with a figure that paired off with him, namely his effective sidekick for the show’s run, Jubilee!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Jubilee is the second figure in Hasbro’s X-Men: The Animated Series sub-line of Marvel Legends.  She’s only the third Jubilee under the Marvel Legends branding, with all three of them being during Hasbro’s tenure.  Like Wolverine, she ships in a VHS-inspired package, which helps to really sell the animation-inspiration of these figures.  The figure stands 5 3/4 inches tall and she has 32 points of articulation.  Jubilee is largely based on the same selection of parts as the last Jubilee release.  It makes sense, seeing as they’re meant to be adapting two rather similar designs.  That’s generally not the worst.  It’s a solid enough body sculpt.  While Wolverine got a few new parts to make him more animation-accurate, Jubilee doesn’t get any new parts at all.  She does swap out the boots for the standard Spider-Girl lower legs, and rather than getting the two heads from the ’90s Jubilee figure, she gets one of them, as well as the head from the Build-A-Figure.  I still don’t really care for the standard head so much; it just doesn’t really feel accurate to the character.  The other head works a little better, but she looks a touch too old for the cartoon version.  It’s a shame she couldn’t get a new head like Wolverine did.  Jubilee’s paint work isn’t terribly different from the prior figure, but with the adjustments for the cel-shading.  It works pretty well, and much like Wolverine, it isn’t as limiting as I thought it might be.  The new paint has refreshed the head sculpts a fair bit, at the very least, so that’s a plus.  Jubilee is packed with the two heads, plus the removable sunglasses for the one (in both opaque and transparent), and a pair of pink effects pieces.  It’s not a ton, but it’s an okay selection, and better than the last release.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I was rather let down by the last Jubilee.  She wasn’t terrible, but there was a lot riding on her, and she just didn’t quite deliver.  I guess the follow-up doesn’t have quite as much riding on it, but I was still hoping for something a bit better.  She’s not perfect, and she’s not quite the slam dunk that Wolverine was, but she’s at least better than the last one, and that’s a plus for me.  It’s also just nice that there’s another Jubilee out there.