CAPTAIN AMERICA — CLASSIC

ONE:12 COLLECTIVE (MEZCO)

Fun FiQ Fact #0056:  Classic Captain America was the very first Marvel offering in the Mezco One:12 line.

For the second time in less than a week, I’m going back down a path I haven’t gone down in quite a while: Mezco’s One:12 Collective.  It’s okay, though, because I’m keeping it confined to my “core” character set-ups, which is to say the handful of characters that I like to have in most styles.  Of these core characters, perhaps the one glaring omission from my Mezco collection was Captain America.  I love a good Captain America, so it’s the sort of thing I was really hoping to fix.  And so I have!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Captain America was a summer 2016 release for the One:12 Collective line.  He’s the classically-inspired variant to the more Now!-inspired standard release.  This particular version was an SDCC exclusive the year he was release, and he beat the main release to market by four months.  The figure stands 6 1/2 inches tall and, per his solicitation, he has over 32 points of articulation.

Perhaps the biggest selling point for this particular release was his main head sculpt.  While the standard version gave him a more modernized design, with his ears covered and the head wings adapted into printing on the sides of his “helmet,” this one goes for something more classically inspired.  It’s clearly a variation on the same core sculpt, and it retains some of the modernization, but the head wings are a three-dimensional element, and his ears are visible.  The helmet also sits a little tighter to the head, and the “A” is a touch larger.  It’s not a ton of changes, but they add-up, and they make for a pretty solid adaptation of Cap’s design from the comics, into the style that Mezco was building for the line early on.  Cap gets a second head, this one unmasked, which is shared with the standard release.  The two sculpts are internally consistent, but I myself am not quite as sold on this particular style of unmasked head as I was on the masked head.  Still, it’s nice to have the option.

The base body for this figure is a lot more bulked up than others I’ve looked at from the line, barring DKR Batman.  It’s perhaps a touch squat and wide for Cap’s usual depictions, but it’s really not far off, and it’s certainly more posable than I’d expected it to be at first glance.  His outfit is a mix of different mediums, with an underlying body suit, which is actually a few different parts stitched together.  There’s a rubberized scale mail print on the upper section, which works pretty well.  On my copy, the red and white mid-section have bled into each other, so the white’s a bit pink, which is a little frustrating.  For this release, the pants portion of the suit is tighter fitting, in contrast to the standard release.  Cap has sculpted cuffs for his gloves, a sculpted belt, and sculpted boots.  These are all shared with the modern version, and, much like the Cyclops I looked at last week, it’s not strictly accurate to the look they were going with.  However, there’s enough tweaking to the rest of the look that these parts don’t look totally out of place.  The only thing I’m not overly keen on is the knife sheath on the boot, but it’s a minor thing.

Cap is packed with a respectable selection of accessories, which, in addition to the two heads, includes 11 different hands (pairs of fists, gripping, relaxed, and flat grip, plus saluting and point for his right, and a thumbs up for the left), a shoulder harness, his shield, a knife, two grenades, and alternate pouch for his belt, and a display stand with the shield pattern printed on it.  The coolest thing here is definitely the shield, which has a magnet in it, allowing for easy mounting on either forearm (as the gloves have metal in them), or on the shoulder harness.  It makes swapping it around a lot easier than it might be otherwise.

THE ME REMAINDER OF THE EQUATION

Back in the early days of One:12, I was still kind of intrigued by it all, and trying to find my entry point.  It wound up being Space Ghost, of course, but it was almost Captain America.  I came very close to getting the standard release, but this one’s announcement, and how hard he wound up being to get, meant that I just gave up on the whole venture of getting a Cap from this line at all.  When All Time got in its recent epic collection of 1/6 and 1/12 figures, I was a little bummed that neither Cap appeared to be in the collection.  I was, of course, getting ahead of myself, as Max wound up pulling this one, as he’d found another batch of Mezco buried.  Since he was the version I’d wanted in the first place, I figured, why not?  He’s actually a lot nicer than I’d expected him to be.  I can be a little down on Mezco, but this is just a very fun figure.

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