IRON MAN — FIRST APPEARANCE

MARVEL LEGENDS (TOY BIZ)

And here we are, back at the Toy Biz Marvel Legends.  Sure, they’re not as numerous as the 5-inch line (especially not when it comes to my collection in particular), but there still are a lot of them, and they still make up a decent little chunk of my Marvel collection.  As Toy Biz went deeper into their run with the line (which was, admittedly, just a drop in the bucket compared to what Hasbro’s been doing), they revisited some of the main characters.  Despite not yet getting his major boost from his live action movie, Iron Man was nevertheless a consistent character in the line, appearing in six out of its fifteen series.  Towards the tail end of their run, we got him in his original get-up, which I’m taking a look at today!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Iron Man was released in the Mojo Series of Marvel Legends, the 14th standard assortment release, and penultimate series from Toy Biz.  He and his cohorts were a sort of under the wire release, hitting just before the holiday season, a month or so before Toy Biz handed the reins over the Hasbro.  The figure stands almost 7 inches tall and he has 39 points of articulation.  Boy, is that a lot of articulation.  It’s partly so high because they gave him individually articulated fingers, which don’t do a ton, but also manage to not look as terrible here as on other figures from the line.  He does notably lack the line’s usual mid-torso movement and toe joints, but neither of those was likely to work to well with the design.  As it is, he’s got a lot of joints that give him an okay amount of movement, but not as much as other figures, due to his bulky nature.  His sculpt was totally unique, and remained so, only being shared with his variant.  It’s honestly a pretty good one.  The articulation sticks out a bit in some spots, but not as badly as some of the other TB Legends.  He also manages to look quite a bit like the proper first appearance design, and to my eye looks more on the mark than Hasbro’s more recent offering, especially around the shaping of the eyes on the mask.  His faceplate is removable, revealing Tony Stark’s face beneath.  It was a feature share with most of Toy Biz’s Legends Iron Men, and one that works better, I think, on those than it really does here.  Still, it’s not a bad sculpt, and this one feels like it was the closest Toy Biz got to just giving us Timothy Dalton as Tony.  There were two different color schemes in play for this release.  The standard was silver, depicting his proper first appearance armor, while the variant was gold, as it was starting with his second appearance.  The paint’s pretty much the same for either, just swapping the palette out.  There’s some slight accenting on the main armor, which works okay, but they’re also a little prone to scuffing.  And, if you want to get technical, the variant *should* get a different waist piece, but that clearly wasn’t in TB’s budget at the time.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I stuck with Toy Biz’s Legends to the very end, though I did get spotty on some of the releases.  That said, this one I didn’t skip.  At least the standard, who was a Christmas gift from my parents on the year of his release.  He’s one of the handful of Toy Biz’s run that I think honestly held up pretty well, hence my rather critical view of the Hasbro version.  I managed to snag the variant in the last year or so, for a pretty good deal, just before Hasbro updated that one, too.  They have some spots that show their age, but I generally really like them.