Oh hell yeah, everybody loves sloppy seconds!
Hoping to win money in a street race to help care
for his brother, Angeleno Robbie Reyes boosted a car which unwittingly jumpstarted his transformation into an all-new incarnation of Ghost Rider, the Spirit of Vengeance.
Please take a moment and think, to yourself, what the second word in the name "Ghost Rider" is. Now say it out loud. Now go outside, ask the first person you see for between five and twenty dollars, write the word on it, and mail it to us. To prove you did it. Anyway, that word is "rider," right? Which implies he rides something, yes? Not that he drives it? The difference in the words is one of agency: "ride" means to be carried by something, while "drive" means to actively compel it to move. (Motorcycles inherited "ride" as their default verb from bicycles, which inherited theirs from the velocipede, which inherited its from horses - its original English name was the "dandy horse," in case you don't see how that happened.) Anyway, if you take a character named "Ghost Rider" and put him in a car, it implies he's not actually in charge of anything, and is just a passive participant in any adventures. EXCITING!
This is, obviously, the big HasLab failure figure, now released
in a normal series and without his unwantable car. Reheated leftovers are everyone's favorite meal, right? Especially when you remove the most important ingredient? Robbie Reyes Ghost-quote/unquote-Rider does have a cool design on his own, with a face that isn't the typical flaming skull, but is instead a flaming metal skull! The idea is that it's not Robbie's face becoming Ghost Rider's face, but rather Robbie's racing helmet, explaining why it's less organic and more industrial. He still gets a big plume of translucent orange flame rising up off the top of the head, which is a normal thing for Ghost Riders, but also bursts of fire shooting out of the sides of the mouth, which is a purely Robbie thing.
The original Ghost Rider's outfit was the demon-fied version of Johnny Blaze's stunt show costume,
and similarly Robbie's is based on a drag racer's jumpsuit. ...Marvel does know that street racers don't wear helmets and jumpsuits, right? They just show up in their human clothing and race? On streets? They're not professional drivers with a support team and sponsors. To capture the look, though, this figure needed to be an entirely new sculpt (something helped by being part of a potential HasLab, no doubt), because no one else had a body covered in wrinkles like this.
The figure is mostly black, which isn't the most thrilling thing in the world, but he does get a white shape on his chest that references the rectangle on Johnny's, but why? Here's a major spoiler for the book and the character: it was eventually revealed that Robbie Reyes wasn't an actual Spirit of Venegeance, but was instead empowered by
something else; so why, then, would he even have a passing reference to a previous Ghost Rider's costume? It's not like that was "the Ghost Rider symbol" to begin with; it's not like Danny Ketch had one, or whoever that girl was that was Ghost Rider for a few months in 2011 [Alejandra Jones --ed.], so why does Robbie Reyes' costume treat it like Superman's S or Batman's bat symbol? The design also gave him white gloves with black fingers, which this figure has interpretted as black gloves with a white stripe on the back of the hands. The stock images show the skull being silver, but the final thing is closer to white. Which you prefer is up to you, but this isn't some production error, it matches the way the comics were usually colored. Spotting some silver on the ears and mouth would have helped, though.
The articulation is normal stuff, though this was sculpted so long ago that he still has boot swivels instead of being completely
solid between the knee and the ankle. The bulky shoulders of his jumpsuit do prevent the arms from raising all the way up, but that can be worked around when you want to pose him. Considering all this mold was originally meant to do was sit in a car, he's plenty poseable even without having things like pectoral hinges or a balljoint at the base of the neck. He's got a pair of holding hands, one fist, and one open gesturing hand.
Ghost Rider's accessories do not include his car, which really makes him more of a Ghost Pedestrian, doesn't it? He only gets
two of the accessories that were planned for the big set: he has a hammer and a crowbar, meaning we're missing the other hammer and both lug wrenches. Alsom instead of a metal chain, he get another reuse of Wild Child's plastic one. We just got that with a Spider-Man figure recently, for some reason, so they're really milking it for all it's worth. HasLab Robbie would also have come with a human head and a drooped-back hood to give the toy a more civilian appearance, and those are really missed here! You already paid to get them sculpted, use them!
We do get a part of the Box Build-A-Figure: the stumpy left leg.
Like we said when the HasLab didn't meet its funding goal, it was foolish to waste money on a Dodge license and needless electronics when a generic design and a hollow plastic shell can be plenty fun on its own. And it's equally foolish to release a character whose only defining feature is "drives a vehicle" without said vehicle. It was foolish when it was Ghost Rider, and it's foolish now when it's Ghost Driver. Maybe if he'd had all the accessories he was supposed to this would be good, but as-is, it's kind of disappointing.
-- 09/14/26
Where can we get a 1:12 scale black car? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
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