Star Wars: The Black Series Inferno Squad Trooper

 

Two years ago the Thanksgiving holiday was spent intensely playing Star Wars Battlefront. This year, Battlefront II has been taking up a significant portion of the break. Seemed like a good time to talk about this Gamestop exlcusive game tie in figure.

Star Wars: MAFEX Stormtrooper

 

Not much is known in these parts about the higher end Star Wars figure lines. Spotted on multiple occasions at C2E2 or among the pages of online retailers, there has been a general curiosity and appreciation for the offerings of lines such as MAFEX, but official forays into them had never happened until very recently.

Iron Factory: Tyrant’s Wings Clone

Here’s something that’s a little different. There has been a vein of the third party mine that has focused on making small, Legends scale figures as opposed to the larger variety. As an idea, this has been one that has been well received, and one that at times has piqued Coffin interests as well. One such company is Iron Factory, and when their TFCon USA 2017 exclusive Sunstorm repaint of their Starscream was announced, it seemed like as good a time as any to jump in to this area of third party merchandise.

So, Iron Factory’s Legend scaled Starscream is called Tyrant, and the other Seekers fall under the group moniker of Tyrant’s Wings. Sunstorm, as established by the Dreamwave G1 continuity, was a religious zealot who identified Starscream as his brother, so it kinda makes some sense that here, in the unofficial realm, that would translate to Clone.

Kinda.

Mass Burial: Giant Squid, Monster in the Creek

So, I got a request for this Mass Burial. Maybe a suggestion would be more accurate. My ten year anniversary of my relationship with my wife is rapidly approaching, and in the time leading up to our dating, I had been investing a lot of time in the band Giant Squid, a now defunct progressive sludge outfit from California. Not entirely defunct, so much as they have morphed into an incredibly similar “new” band with a different name: Squalus.

TFC Toys Hades: Thanatos

 

Thanatos was the second member of the Hades team to be released, and was the second to last member of the Hades team to be obtained. He is the analog for Killbison on the team, transforms into a tank, serves as a leg, and is the same body in both modes as Hypnos. Symmetry.

Grave Considerations: Apple Music

Your boy Moby Richard is notoriously slow to embrace new technology. It was 2012 when he decided to move on to the iPod and ditch the giant CD wallet that was always under the driver seat of his car. The early stages of iPod acceptance were not pretty, as technological misunderstandings and a general sense of frustration with things he doesn’t understand really, really overwhelmed him. But man, did he end up loving that iPod. 148 gigs of music, in his pocket.

Shift in forward in time (and in pronoun) to 2017, and my iPod was starting to cause me more stress than I wanted. It was getting old, and it had been host to many, many albums that were added and removed again and again, and I’d read online that Apple had discontinued the model (the 160gb iPod Classic), which meant that if something happened to mine, I was going to be without my massive music menagerie until I found what would undoubtedly be an inferior replacement option. See, I’m a creature of habit. I don’t so much resist or oppose new things or new technology so much as I find something I like and stick with it because I like it; it’s comfortable. My father, he hated technology, and basically decided against ever even trying to learn how to use it. My sister, who is younger than I for what it’s worth, shuts down at the possibility of technology, preferring to act like a senior citizen from the days of old, decrying new things as crap and bemoaning their adoption by and into society. My dad died without knowing how to operate a DVD player; my sister gets angry because Blu-Ray has replaced DVD. I guess being technophobic runs in my family. But I’m not against technology, I just like what I like, and I stick with what I know and what is comfortable.

TFC Toys Hercules: Neckbreaker

Neckbreaker is the first of the Hercules set that feels not so great. The TFC Toys analog for Bonecrusher, this figure shares a lot with Exgraver, but executes not as well.

By now, the general positives of the Hercules figures have been well documented. Fun. Good looking. Nice Cybertron aesthetic. Amusing to transform. Decently but not excessively posable. Neckbreaker exhibits all of those things. But he is a figure that generally disappoints.