HUMAN TORCH

FANTASTIC FOUR (TOY BIZ)

“Bombarded by cosmic rays while on an experimental space flight, teenager Johnny Storm gained an ability to match his fiery disposition. With but a thought, his body would ignite and burst into flame! Realizing that he must use his powers in the service of mankind, Johnny became the Human Torch, and fights to protect the world as a member of the Fantastic Four!”

I’ve discussed a few times here on the site Toy Biz’s strange fascination with not doing all four members of the Fantastic Four when they did the team in plastic form.  This first cropped up in their Fantastic Four line meant to tie-in with the 1994 cartoon of the same name, where, for reasons that baffled pretty much everyone, they split the main team between the first two series, with Reed and Ben in Series 1 and Sue and Johnny in Series 2.  Retailers, not particularly keen to carry the first series of a line that was only offering half of a team with the number of members in the name of the team, weren’t thrilled, and demanded the missing two members be added to the line-up.  Since the unique molds for Sue and Johnny weren’t yet ready, Toy Biz had to put together two hastily made replacements, using the parts available to them.  And that’s how we got today’s figure!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Human Torch was a Series 1 release for Toy Biz’s Fantastic Four line.  Sort of.  Kind of.  Not *officially* I suppose, since he’s not actually shown in the Series 1 line-up, but he was on a Series 1 card, and shipped alongside them, just like Sue, making him sort of a Series 1.5 figure, I guess.  This was Johnny’s second figure under Toy Biz, and would of course be quickly followed by another a series later.  The figure stands just under 5 inches tall and he has 11 points of articulation.  Since Johnny’s cartoon-based sculpt wasn’t ready yet, he was represented here as a repaint of fellow Series 1 figure Silver Surfer.  It’s a pretty bold strategy to re-use a sculpt from the same series for a totally different character, but they sure did it.  I guess it’s not the worst thing, since Surfer’s pretty basic in the first place, so he’s a blank canvas of sorts.  The weird DJ arm is even weirder here, but maybe he’s just waving “hi” to everyone.  What has to sell this figure is the color work, which does its best to be radically different.  He’s very orange, so that helps.  Since the sculpt is just basic and there’s no sculpted flames, this one’s just got them painted on, in glow-in-the-dark paint, no less.  It’s a very hokey look that really doesn’t work, but at the same time, it makes me think of the Mego Torch, and that does amuse me.  Human Torch got Cannonball’s launching stand, modified to remove the “X”, and also with the glow-in-the-dark flames.  It’s goofy and silly, but it does send him launching backwards, which is good for a laugh.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

This is the second to last figure I needed to complete my Toy Biz FF run.  I never personally had this one as a kid (my dad did, though), coming into the line late enough to get both of the proper Johnnys from the later series.  This one always felt odd and half-formed.  He doesn’t even get to be a sufficiently different repaint like Sue did.  Just the second best flamed on Johnny in the line that only had two flamed on Johnnys.  He’s an interesting quirk of the Toy Biz approach, and at least one that’s got a goofy story behind him if nothing else.

If you want to see this figure in motion, I did a quick video with him over on the Figure in Question YouTube channel, so check that out here!