QUICKSILVER

X-MEN (TOY BIZ)

It’s officially Friday!  Oh yeah!  We made it to Friday!  Let’s do a bit of Flashing back, but, you know, not to this week, no rather to the far away land of 2023, with a look back at Quicksilver!

“The speedster known as Quicksilver belongs to a family of strong mutants, his sister is the Scarlet Witch and his father is Magneto! Quicksilver spend the early part of his career as a member of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, before realizing his powers would best be put to use for the good of all Mankind. Since that time, Quicksilver has been a member of several super-teams, including X-Factor and the Avengers!”

Though he hasn’t quite made the lasting impressing that his twin sister has in recent years, Quicksilver is still certainly in a better spot than he was back before 2014. Nowadays, he’s almost a household name…well, one of him is, anyway. Not sure which. Probably not the comics one, but that’s the one I’m looking at anyway, so let’s just stick with that. Anyway, here’s a Quicksilver, I guess.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Quicksilver was released in the infamous “Muntant Armor” series of Toy Biz’s X-Men line. There were two variants of Quicksilver available, one in his classic blue and white costume and one in his his then-current white and grey one. Back in 2015, I looked at the white and grey, so today’s review focusses on the blue and white. The figure stands about 5 inches tall and he has 11 points of articulation. As noted in the prior review, Quicksilver was built on the smaller male base body, which Toy Biz got quite a few uses out of around this time. He shares his mostly new head sculpt (retooled from the Battle Brigade Archangel) with his variant, and it’s still a pretty good take on the character. His paint work was obviously the main selling point. It’s a pretty solid recreation of his classic design. For true accuracy, it should have the black shorts, but this isn’t horribly inaccurate or anything. Application is pretty clean for the most part, with minimal slop or bleed over. Both versions of Quicksilver got the same accessories, a weird machine gun thing (missing from both of mine) and a dust cloud running effect stand, which was re-used from Meanstreak, but was now in a fun translucent grey, which was generally just a little more effective for the appearance of a dust cloud.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

My dad had this version of Quicksilver, while I had the other one when I was growing up. I was always a fan of this one too, but I liked having my own distinct version. Over the years, though, I’ve been slowly working at getting a full run of the Toy Biz Marvel, and I was able to snag this guy at a toy show, in order to help me towards that goal. It’s intriguing that Toy Biz did Pietro with both costumes, seeing as he’s exactly the sort of character that you don’t really need multiple figures for, but now, well, now I have both, and I guess that’s kinda cool, right? 

This review was almost written back in 2018, when one of my ideas for making up for the “lost days” of reviews from my first year before moving ending my fifth was to review a bunch of Toy Biz variants to figures I’d already reviewed.  When I got all the Vipers for the Day of the Vipers, I scrapped the Toy Biz idea, and this guy got shelved.  The final review is from March of 2023, which was the lead-up to my daughter being born, and I was writing a *lot* of reviews in advance to prep for some reduced time devoted to the site.  As such, I was focusing a lot more heavily on stuff I could pretty much slot anywhere, without worry of references being dated or out of place.  This one was written about six months ahead of publication, which is a heck of a lead time. It’s kind of short and loose, but also I’d already reviewed the other variant, and even done an addendum, so I’d said a lot about the release and the mold.  I have since then added a *second* addendum to the variant review, so even more has been said.  As with the last Quicksilver addendum, the big addition here is that I found the weird machine gun accessory, which makes little sense for Quicksilver or the “Muntant Armor” gimmick of the assortment.  He can’t even hold it all that well.  But, he’s got it, and I guess that’s the most important thing.