THOR

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

Countdown to Avengers: Age of Ultron: 12 days remaining.

Alright, we’ve seen Captain America and we’ve seen Iron Man. How about we take a look at the remaining corner of the “Avengers Trinity,” Thor, God of Thunder! Ummm, so I don’t actually own that many non-movie Thor figures. I know, bad Ethan. So, this one got picked by default. I swear I didn’t intentionally pick two Marvel Legends figures in a row to torment the readers still waiting for that Hobgoblin. Or did I? No, I really didn’t. Let’s just get to the figure already!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Thor was released in second series of Marvel Legends following Hasbro’s takeover of the Marvel license. The figure is roughly 7 inches tall and has 29 points of articulation. He’s based on the Thor’s more armored, Lord of Asgard appearance from the early 2000s, not long before he died for the first time (spoilers?). It was sort of current at the time, so I guess it makes sense here. Thor got a brand new sculpt for this figure. Supposedly, this was one of the figures ToyBiz had finished before passing the license over, and that actually does make a fair bit of sense. This figure, like a lot of the early Hasbro Legends, ends up feeling more like an extension of the ToyBiz Legends than part of a new line. It’s a pretty decent sculpt, though it’s certainly stylized, at least as far as the proportions go. There is a lot of nice detail work throughout the sculpt; his clothing has lots of texture, and there’s some pretty good work on the hair and beard. One real downside of the sculpt is that it ends up being rather restricting to the figure’s movement, so he ends up being really only good for a basic standing pose. Sure, it’s an intimidating standing pose, but it’s a little bland coming from a line that prided itself on crazy amounts of articulation. While the sculpt may be filled with lots of detail and texture, the same cannot be said for the paint. To be fair, it’s not that the paint is bad, sloppy, or messy. It checks all the basic boxes. The problem is that it’s just very flat. The colors are pretty much just there, with no accenting of any sort or even variety. Also, like a lot of the initial Hasbro Legends, his color palette seems really washed out, meaning he just sort of fades into the back of a display. Thor includes his trusty hammer, Mjolnir, a double-bladed axe, and a piece of the series’ Build-A-Figure, the Blob.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

When Hasbro first started to release Legends, I was deep in my obsession with the line. Still, I mostly skipped the first series of the line due to just not being interested in any of the figures. The second series, however, I was rather excited for. I ended up finding most of them at my closest KB Toys (gee, I miss them…). I ended up buying them in batches, and Thor found his way into the second “batch” of figures. Up until Hasbro’s most recent Infinite Series Thor, this was actually the only Legends Thor I had in my collection. He’s not a bad figure, but he’s definitely held back by the paint. Hasbro actually ended up re-releasing this figure with better paint as one of the figures they did to tie-in to the first Thor movie, but I’ve never actually seen one in person.