Indiana Jones: Adventure Series Rene Belloq (Ceremonial) review

Sorry, everybody - I went to take a picture of the pre-stock clearance for you, and the store had finally gotten some figures in! Better... four months late than never, I guess?

(Still no Indy, obviously.)

Rival archaeologist René Belloq prepares to open the Ark of the Covenant - a mistake that will prove disastrous!

Rene Belloq.

In his cosplay smock.

Ignored all the warnings and opened God's box.

His head went ker-splat, the Nazis got zapped, leaving Indy and Marion tied to a shaft!

We already discussed Belloq's ceremonial robes in a different review, but obviously they're more detailed here. The sculpt and paint are very detailed, but dresses never look great on any action figure under 12", and even then it's only because those use softgoods instead of trying to sculpt them. All Belloq does is stand in one spot while wearing these, so unless Hasbro was going to make them removable, the better choice would have been to just mold the lower body as one big, solid chunk. At least then we wouldn't have the big splits up the sides that are supposed to allow the legs to move. (The robes are too stiff for them to move anyway.)

The figure's likeness is... good, I guess? Like Sallah's beard, Belloq's turban does a lot of the work of making him identifiable. His left hand is open to gesture over the Ark, and his right is shaped to hold the ram-headed staff. There was that thing going around a few years ago saying that if Indy hadn't interfered, the Ark would have been opened in Berlin and Hitler would have been killed, meaning it's his fault the war kept going; but obviously that's not true, because the entire reason the U-boat stopped at that little island was because Belloq was already planning to open the Ark there; did you think he was just carrying these robes and staff with him everywhere? The opening scene of the movie establishes he's a crappy archaeologist and genuinely a bad person, but he's great at planning ahead.

Belloq also includes the carrying poles for the Ark of the Covenant BAF. Sorry, BAA: Build-An-Artifact. Presumably because we were already getting one stick-shaped accessory, so six more wouldn't make the paper bag the accessories are in a weird shape?

Belloq is one of the figures you can probably find - not as common as Sallah, but on par with Marion. The order of availablity goes

> Sallah
--> Marion or Belloq
------> Toht
---------------------------------------------> Indiana Jones.

Or, well, technically "every exclusive", then Sallah, then the rest from there. Anybody wanna buy a dozen Kazims? I'm sure my Target would be glad to move some of them at last.

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