VENOM

SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (TOY BIZ)

“Eddie Brock, former newspaper reporter, has joined with an evil, alien symbiote, giving him spider-like powers greater than those of Spider-Man himself! Driven by a twisted sense of justice, Brock has become Venom, humanity’s Lethal Protector…and he’s decided that humanity needs protection from Spider-Man!”

For a character only introduced in 1988, by 1994, Venom had a surprising amount of action figure coverage.  Toy Biz had added him to their run right at the start, and really just kept adding him.  By the time they launched their dedicated Spider-Man: The Animated Series line, they’d already done four versions of him under the Marvel Super Heroes banner, but that didn’t stop them from putting him in the first Spider-Man line-up too.  I mean, really, can you blame them?  He was pretty popular, and also on the cartoon, so it’s hard to avoid such a thing.  Let’s look at that fifth Venom today!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Venom was released in Series 1 of the Spider-Man: The Animated Series tie-in line, which hit retail in 1994, right in time for the show’s launch.  Like others in the early assortments, Venom was drawing more directly from the show’s design, rather than the comics.  The figure stands 5 1/8 inches tall and he has 8 points of articulation.  He gets the standard movement on the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, but loses the neck articulation in order to accommodate his action feature.  Much like the Marvel Super Heroes figures, this Venom is about he same height as his corresponding Spider-Man, mostly just relying on bulk to differentiate them.  That would become a gradual shift towards more monstrous sizes as the line progressed, but at this point, he was downright diminutive.  His sculpt was all-new, and a departure from the earlier Venoms, which had leaned into the character’s “symbiote with a mouth” look from the early days.  This one more represents his turn towards beastlier depictions, with much more intensely shaped eyes, a wider spread mouth creeping well past his ears, longer teeth, visible gums, and a whole lot of veins.  Truly, he’s a Venom who probably thinks this song is about him.  This was the Venom sculpt that served as the basis for the 10-inch figure as well, though that one had a more conventional neck.  Apart from being perhaps a little bit on the small side, it’s a pretty good sculpt, and looks quite a bit like his animated counterpart.  Squeezing the figure’s legs together activates his action feature, which extends his head upward, while keeping the jaw in place, so it looks like he’s opening his mouth.  It’s only a small extension, so not super noticeable, but it’s not the worst thing in the world.  In terms of color work, he’s predominantly just molded black plastic, with accenting in white and red.  The paint work is generally fairly clean, with only some minor fuzz, notably around the top of his logo.  Venom didn’t include any accessories, not even one of those weird plastic pins.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

As I’ve noted before, I didn’t have any of the proper 5-inch Venom figures as a kid, though I did have on of the 10-inch figures that was based on this mold, so I kind of experienced it a bit.  This one’s actually one of my most recent additions, picked up over the summer while I was on vacation.  He’s generally a rather straight forward figure, as far as Venoms go.  A bit more involved than some of the earliest offerings, but certainly not as crazy as some of the later versions got to be.