A big round of applause for Figura Obscura attemptng its hand at Giftsmas's non-binary icon!
As the clock tolled one, the first of the three spirits
who Jacob Marley warned would visit Ebenezer Scrooge made their appearance in the miser's dark bed chamber. The room was suddenly filled with a brilliant light, and Scrooge looked curiously upon the unearthly visitor who stood before him.
Yes, if you aren't familiar with the actual story and only know it from its many adaptations, you may be surprised to find that Christmas Past has no set appearance: the text initially calls the ghost "him," but thereafter consistently goes with "it" (because Charles Dickens, living in middle of the 19th century, did not have access to "they/them" as a singular pronoun yet). The ghost is both old and young, large and small, light and dark, sturdy and delicate, male and female and androgynous, distinct and indistinct... it's clear Dickens' intended them to be flickering and ephemeral, like a candle flame.
The Four Horsemen have, like so many stage and screen adaptations
before them, chosen to make Pasty more female than male, and for generally the same reason: this story is a fricking sausage fest, and a little diversity is always a good thing. Although now I want to see a version of A Christmas Carol where Present is a big, boisterous lady. Carol Kane was great in Scrooged, but where's the equivalent BRIAN BLESSED type, someone who would need to duck to get their personality through a doorway?
X-Past uses Mythic Legions-style parts for her construction, but since Legions figures all have that weird waist for belts and such to plug into, and not a normal butt, that part of the figure at least is new. The limbs are entirely bare, and she's got a sculpted bandeau to stave off either complaints from prudes or the proclivities of weirdos. Of course, all this is hidden under a lovely dress designed by the softgoods masters of CJESIM. Keeping with the source material, it's a very simple white gown with silver trim (though in actuality the text does say it's trimmed with summer flowers, that may have seemed too weird for fans not intimately familiar with Dickens' prose).
Speaking of things that would surprise you
if all you know is adaptations, this spectre has four arms. "...the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away." If you've never heard that bit before, don't feel bad; it's in the original text, but often gets cut out of even professional readings. The Horsemen knew it, though, and included an extra piece that will plug into the toy's back and provide a superfluous pair of limbs. If you don't like it, you can leave them off for a more standard appearance.
The ghost's silvery hair falls over their shoulders and reaches to their waist. The figure actually includes two swappable styles of hair: one bare, the other wearing an impressive crown meant to represent light shining straight out of their head. It looks like a ring of silver roses, with clear crystals rising at the front, and small twigs or branches shooting up all around. Although the Horsemen considered including a light-up feature, they decided it would be better (for both swappability and price) to just paint the piece as though it were illuminated from within.
While the figure's normal head is clear and youthful, she includes two others. Since the story does go on about Christmas Past's
fluctuating appearance (and because the Four Horsemen love their creepy figures so much), one alternate head is a bit more ghastly. But, as usual, only "a bit": blank white eyes, some wrinkles on the sunken cheeks, and a few tiny cuts. The third head is a split between the other two, youthful and whole on the right, and aged on the left; it even has one eye with a pupil and one without.
Under their robe, the Ghost of Christmas Past moves like any Mythic Legions figure: feet, ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, chest, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, and head. The figure has five sets of hands (open, fists, clawing, and two for holding) that gave me something
I've never had on a Mythic Legions-type figure before: a broken joint!! Trying to swap the hand out, the wrist peg was simply too tight, and the hand ended up snapping. Fortunately, it was one of the "holding" hands, so there's an extra. For the other three arms, I very very very carefully worked the hands out, then scraped a little bit of plastic out of the hole. And took some plastic off the hands' pegs. Now they trade as easily as they usually do! But man, be careful when you first open this one.
To further the Ghost's comparison to a candle, the story says they carry an extinguisher - not the kind of extinguisher you're likely thinking of, a candle snuffer, the metal cone on a stick that puts out the light without having to blow hot wax around. While the Horsemen have included a plain version the ghost could put under their arm, there's also a second version hanging from a long staff, a very nice accessory. Finally, there's a sprig of holly, which the text described the ghost as holding.
It's now a thing for Figura Obscura releases to come with some over-the-top accessory they don't really need, but add some fun value to the set - cf. The Masque of the Red Death's grandfather clock. In this case, it's a large (9¾" tall) Victorian street lamp, a wrought metal light with a candle behind its glass and a pile of snow around its base, plus a patch of cobblestones on the ground. It works well for A Christmas Carol, but could also suit any number of figures, if you use your imagination. The same was true back when McFarlane Toys' Jack the Ripper figure came with something similar.
I didn't notice this until Shocka pointed it out to me, but it's become a tradition for the year-end Figura Obscura releases to come with a secret bonus accessory: Krampus' bones, the things in Father Christmas' sack, and Jacob Marley's iron mask. That tradition continues this year, with the extra piece hidden inside a solid black ziplock baggie. It's actually two pieces: the plain hair, done in black this time instead of white,
and a scary head with its mouth hanging open monstrously. What's the idea with that? It's to turn this cheerful winter sprite into a horrifying ghost woman, a la Sadako, a White Lady, Kuchisake-onna, or perhaps La Llorona (who the Horsemen [or whoever put the page together on their website] seem to think is named "La Lhorna"? That's gotta be the result of either transcribing bad handwriting or an overlooked OCR error). It really ups the options of this set! The point of offering the alternate bare hair was already that perhaps you'd like to use this figure to stand in for any number of other folkloric ghostly women dressed in white, but this takes it even further.
Figura Obscura toys are sold in a tall window box with a thick cardboard "book cover" wraparound that's held in place by magnets. This year Nate Baersch's art on the exterior shows the ghost beaming light in the middle of a snowy field on the exterior, while the interior
shows a scene from their chapter: the Christmas party at Fezziwig's. Apparently the faces of at least some of the partygoers are based on people at Four Horsemen Studios... and what I'm pretty sure is "Steve the Pirate" from Dodgeball? This will be more useful in a few years when we've got an Ebenezer to stand there with her, but for now the insert behind the figure inside the box is Scrooge's bedchamber, as we saw last year. But this time it's bathed in blue light, and he's curled up in his bed!
Christmas Past is precisely what we predicted last year, and yet better than we could have imagined. Hopefully the rest of the dreams come true, as well. We even finally figured out how to make Christmas Future be cool: do Scrooge in his bed gown and such, and then give us a long black robe and a semi-skeletal face to add on to that figure, like he's leading himself to his own grim grave. Two characters at once!
-- 12/25/24
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