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If this character had been created later, there's a better-than-average chance his civilian identity would have been "Floyd Pinkerton."
Driven mad by jealousy, the brilliant research scientist Arthur Parks becomes the villainous Living Laser.
What do we always say? No such thing as being a "normal" scientist in the Marvel universe. Being smart enough to create wrist-mountable lasers may not sound like much of an achievement in a time when keychain pointers are given away free, but you have to remember that Living Laser was created in 1966; the world's first working laser had been created only six years prior, and ones of any substantial power were still about the size of a refrigerator. So yeah, dude was smart. But not smart enough to avoid a life of crime, which eventually saw every atom in his body turned to photons, making him a real living laser, instead of just some guy with an alliterative name and gloves optimized to entertain cats.
This figure represents Living Laser's most recent look, when he'd been given upgrades by the Mandarin and the son of Obadiah Stane (as they were doing for a lot of Iron Man's foes at the time). It's a good thing the comic immediately named him, because this is completely unrelated to the way he looked before. For one thing, he never wore a helmet that made him look like a suppository.
For another, his powered-up color was yellow, not pink.
Other than the weird dome helmet, this figure is molded in translucent magenta plastic, with a white airbrushing on his chest and shoulders and some white lightning bolts painted along his arms. That's basically the same thing Hasbro did when they made a 4" Marvel Universe figure of him, and it does a decent enough job of duplicating Salvador Larroca's art from the comics, which saw the character generally rendered as a storm of lightning inside a general pink shape. The pods or whatever are painted on the shoulders, but they probably would have worked better molded as part of the helmet.
Living Laser uses the larger superarticulated body, which kind of makes it Hasbro's go-to for "villain whose entire body is something you normally can't touch." It's possible the only reason they opted for this mold is that it originated with Spider-Man 2099, and they wanted to use his arm-spike dealies to represent the small winglets this costume seemed to have on its arms. But it also had them sticking back off the shoulderblades and on the legs, so this look is still incomplete.
He does get some accessories, though: once again, it's the lightning effect pieces, this time molded in white and further raising the question of what Larroca thinks a "laser" is. They're flexible, so even when the figure uses its articulation (ankles, shins, knees, thighs, hips, waist, torso, wrists, elbows, biceps, shoulders, and chest, but no real neck movement because of the shape of the helmet) they'll either move with it or move out of the way.
His piece of the new Warrior Thanos Build-A-Figure is the entire armored torso.
Living Laser is a villain on the same tier as, say, Blizzard: a threat, but not that big a threat. He was originally a foe for the Avengers as a whole, but moved on to focusing on Iron Man alone. This isn't the #1 look I'd have personally wanted for a Living Laser toy, but with clear plastic, faded white paint, a unique helmet design, and lightning bolts, it's easy to see why Hasbro picked it.
-- 06/07/19
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