It was an exact decade ago that our dear Rustin Parr reviewed the Rom Mighty Mugg and said Hasbro should do an update of the character in the Marvel Legends scale - nobody could have predicted they'd do it in the actual Marvel Legends line!
The Spaceknight Rom tracks the vile Dire Wraiths across the cosmos, arriving on Earth to continue his pledge to defeat them by banishing them to Limbo.
In 1979, Parker Brothers approached Marvel to create a backstory for a toy they were producing. Rom: Spaceknight ran for seven years before the series ended, and eventually the license expired. The property went to IDW for a while, but it seems to be back at Marvel now - last year they were finally able to reprint the original series as well as some of the more important crossovers and guest appearances, none of which had been seen since the '80s. And while that hasn't meant any new comics yet (beyond variant covers), we do somehow get an official Rom action figure with the official Marvel design in official Marvel Legends packaging. Clearly no small dose of legal wrangling went into making this happen, but all we care about is the toy!
The original Parker Brothers/Marvel IP split was pretty simple: everything that existed before Marvel got involved belonged to the toy company, anything else Marvel created belonged to them. The comic design wasn't a direct copy of the toy, however, and since the book was more popular than the toy ever was, that's what people think of when they think of the character.
Rom, as he's presented here, is very much the famous version. He's got a small, rectangular head with no facial features
beyond the red eyes, arms and legs that look organic, armor on the chest that's straight and angular, tall boots that reach all the way up to the thighs, and feet with inset notches on the top. The forearms should be smooth, but they have a line molded around them. There's barely any separation between his fingers in the sculpt, making his hands almost look like mittens; that's exactly how he was drawn in the books, so even if it looks strange it's correct. His back is sculpted with the big jetpack thing he wears ("rocket pods, which can instantly send him soaring").
The figure is painted silver, rather than being vac-metallized - thank god! He's silver, head to toe, with the only other paint colors
being black for the slit exposing the eyes, and red for the eyes themselves, the two gaps on his abdomen right above the bolts or rivets, and some accents at the bottom of his backpack. It's not much, but it's exactly what was needed. (If you pop the head off, the balljoint there will reveal the grey plastic the toy is molded from, which is how we know he's not molded in this silver color. That and the conspicuous lack of any swirling below the surface. Hasbro made the right choice.)
Rom was always a towering character,
so the toy is 7⅛" tall. Since the arms are pr-existing, they do look slightly short on him. You can tell the legs are new sculpts, because there are no shin joints, Hasbro's current favorite corner to cut, but then he gets a hinged abdomen and balljointed chest, which is very useful. The boots hide his thigh swivels without getting in the way, and they've chosen to do a balljoint neck and a hinge/balljoint head, meaning he can actually look up! What a rare and special treat!
We get two hands for holding accessories, an open left hand, and a closed right fist. His accessories are two of the three things the 1979 toy came with: the smaller one is the Energy Analyzer, with it he can see through appearances and determine the true essence of any being; the chunkier one is a weapon unique to his order, the Neutralizer, which can disorganize any molecular structure. That means he does not come with the two-handed Translator through which he can
communicate with any intelligent being in the universe. The weapons are the same silver as he is, with a translucent red tip like the vintage ones had. There are no electronic lights or sounds, of course, but we do get a translucent red energy blast effect that can plug onto either of them, so you can pretend he's scanning for hidden Dire Wraiths, or teleporting them to Magik's home dimension. Doing that made civilians think he was a villain, by the way: Rom would show up, scan a bunch of people, pick one who didn't appear to be any different than anyone else, then zap them with a beam and they'd be gone; everybody thought he was randomly disintegrating humans! There's a cool Easter egg on the back of the Neutralizer, too: it's sculpted to look like there's a battery cover and some wiring, as though the toy might have been electronic. Fun stuff, and a neat idea.
Then there's the bad. Beginning with Series 13, Hasbro has officially dropped the Build-A-Figure concept; so you're now expected to pay $25 for a figure with no bonus character pieces to help offset that cost.
Oh, but don't worry, to make up for it, the figures now include a "replica comic," which is an in-scale comicbook featuring the cover of whatever issue nominally inspired the toy. So, like, Rom gets Rom: Spaceknight #1. It's plastic with a sticker for the cover, and is easily one of the most useless pieces of junk to ever be put with a figure since collector lines became a thing. It's a joke that they included it, and it's insulting that they think it does anything to add even a modicum of value to the purchase. But because people like it when we say nice things instead of just bad, here: it would be even worse if it had been made out of paper, like it seemed when these were first shown off.
The figures in this series would have been a hard sell even at $20 and with a BAF piece. Another Miles Morales? Dokken Daken? Maybe it is time for Marvel Legends to take a little rest. But Rom? Rom is exciting. Rom is like Death's Head, in that he's one of those characters we've wanted to see in this scale for a long time. And since we're unlikely to see him again any time soon, he may be worth paying that $5 overcharge for. In his time, he was a major Marvel character, interacting with the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and others, and even being at the center of a crossover event that's pretty much forgotten today because Marvel could never reprint or directly reference it. Heck, because Bill Mantlo and Chris Claremont were buddies, it's implied that Rom is part of the reason Rogue turned good! Fans would have been elated if Hasbro had just released their own in-house Rom action figure in the 6" scale, but doing it as a true Marvel Legend is even better.
-- 06/16/25
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