If you want to ride the bike, you’ve got to put on your Helmut.
The Legends team has been on a helluva streak with iconic villains lately, and Baron Zemo continues the trend. We got poppa Zemo back in the Toybiz days, and we got a modern take on Zemo a while ago (I liked the updated look, but it didn’t fill that hole that gnawed at my internals) but after too many years, we finally have a classic Baron Zemo, with the floof at the shoulders and even more floof at the boots.
You can call a Zemo a Zemo, but a Zemo won’t Zemo at full capacity without some floof.
Baron Helmut Zemo arrives as a Walgreens exclusive, which is nobody’s favorite thing. He recently went up on the site and sold out within a day. Hopefully he will make a return appearance so everyone who wants one can get one. I preordered mine from Zavvi so I wouldn’t have to deal with the whole Walgreens situation, something that definitely takes the stress out of what should be a fun hobby.
Being a huge fan of various incarnations of the Masters of Evil and the Under Siege storyline in particular, I’ve been waiting and waiting for a proper classic Zemo.
Zemo is a mishmash of various parts along with some newly sculpted extras. The new parts include a torso with sculpted ridges and, as mentioned, the floof. There’s some fur at the top of his boots, and there is some ingeniously inserted fur at his shoulders that rotate along with his arms while inhibiting absolutely no movement.
The head gets a ton of movement on the ball joint, allowing Zemo to look in any direction with much disdain and scorn. He can scorn to the left, the right, up and down, and tilt with much disdain. There’s scorn and disdain as far as the eye can see.
And derision. So much derision.
The arms are Dormammu/Red Skull reuse, parts that came along at an advantageous time and will no doubt continue to serve. There’s a new waist overlay with that strange bar that is an integral part of his design and yet serves no purpose other than to be ornamental. When you crunch his abs, it bends, but I’d be wary of leaving him crunch for too long. It’s flexible, but it also feels like it might get damaged if left bent for too long.
The purple and fuchsia tones used are excellent. He looks like he stepped right out of a comic. There’s even a darker paint wash inside the lines of his neckpiece and neck/mask to make the sculpted lines stand out.
Zemo comes with two sets of hands. One is a set of gripping hands, and the other is a right sword hand and a left fist. The sword hand has up-down hinge instead of in and out, so it allows him to hold his sword in more accurate sword-poses. He does come with a sword, which is a reuse of the sword that came with the modern Zemo. He’s missing a gun, which I guess isn’t essential but I wouldn’t have turned down.
The sword-holding hand gets very deep forward and backward flex, so he can point that sword all the way forward.
It is great to finally get a classic version of such an important villain in the Marvel Universe. It’s felt like a glaring omission for too long.
Source: Fwoosh