I’ve wanted this figure since 1981, after being exposed to it in the pages of Marvel Two-In-One #78.
Before Marvel Legends, Before the five-inch ToyBiz era, before Secret Wars, in some mythic Marvel Toy Line that existed right after Mego’s line, Wonder Man in his opinion-dividing Safari Jacket would have been in my top ten most wanted figures. To say this has been a looooong time coming is an understatement.
In the aforementioned MTIO comic, Wonder-man was mind controlled by Xemnu the Titan into fighting the Thing. Biff bam pow and so forth. I can’t believe I got Xemnu the Titan before I got Safari Jacket Wonder Man, but it has happened.
When you’ve wanted such a thing for so long, finally having it in hand is a mixture of relief, excitement and, since I’m an occasionally picky bastard, noticing a few things that could be better.
But only a few. Truthfully, having him finally in hand does quite a bit to soothe over any “I want this toy to be absolutely perfect” niggles.
Wonder Man uses quite a bit from the recent jumpsuit body Hasbro made and used for such characters as Dormammu and Red Skull. There’s a new torso and coat parts to sideways shuffle those parts into Wonder Man.
I’ve always been a little worried that the nature of the Safari jacket would kill a lot of the leg poseability, but they avoided much of that issue by giving the jacket a zippered look, and leaving the bottom part of the zipper open. While Simon’s jacket isn’t usually drawn with a zipper—and that unzippered part reminds me of all the times I’ve had a zipper get stuck, which makes my eye twitch—I am grateful that it leaves his leg mobility only slightly degraded instead of fully straitjacketed. He can’t get his legs into full splits and some of his forward motion is killed, but overall, he can still get into some great lunges and so forth.
The lack of any type of ab-crunch or wobble joint is a shame, but again the nature of the jacket and the preservation of the sculpt demanded it. He does have articulation at the waist. It feels like it’s probably a ball joint under there, but he only gets extremely small motion forward and to the side. Like, very small blip blip motion. Therefore, most of the movement is swivel, so he’s not going to be getting into any insane crouches.
The head is a ball joint, and gets a nice range. I would have liked a little more looking up capability for flying, but I won’t be having him fly that much anyway.
I was a little worried about his size after seeing some earlier pictures online. If I’m being extremely technical I would have liked maybe a bit more size to him, both in thickness and height, but he’s definitely not a shrimp. If that new Power Man figure that’s coming out has a good size to him then I’d have liked those legs to be used on Wonder Man, since I like a little less bagginess to his pants.
Wonder Man’s head is great, with a nice cocky grin. The red sunglasses have a decent translucence so you can just make out his eyes underneath.
Wonder Man comes with a pair of fists and a pair of grabby hands. I’ve said over and over that this is my favorite combination of hands for pretty much any type of figure, but especially for the super-strong types. That combo really lends itself to a nice variety of expressive poses.
When I was opening the package I had totally forgotten that he was supposed to come with a pair of blast effects for his hip jets. I left them in one of the little white bags and almost threw them away with the packaging. They are super-tiny, but they have to be to slot into the jets.
Overall this is a huge want of mine that has finally been checked off. Despite the long wait, I’m glad that it came out at this point, because the figure itself is extremely satisfying. It looks great and is fun to play around with. A nearly 42 year wait is over.
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Source: Fwoosh
