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Hasbro Marvel Legends, Take 2!
Telepathic controls. Biological integration.
Meet the new Invincible: Iron Man enhanced by Extremis!
Well, Marvel Legends may be back, but they're certainly not wasting any time telling you about the characters on the back of the card. That's okay, it lets us pick up the slack, and thus fill space next to the main photo of the toy. After getting his ass handed to him by a superior enemy, Tony was lamenting the fact that, as technologically advanced as his armor was, it still had to respond to external controls; ie, he had to tell the armor what to do, then the armor did it. It was a short delay, but it was a delay nonetheless. The Extremis upgrade allowed his brain to interface directly with the armor (as well as any other electronic devices in the vicinty), and also improved his own body, making him stronger and healthier - in addition to being able to mentally process the sheer amount of data fed into his brain by the suit.
Until now, if you wanted an Extremis Iron Man, the best you could do was use the movie armor as a stand-in. And yes, that was fine:
after all, the Extremis armor was the strongest visual influence on the film, so the two looked a ton alike. However, it wasn't a perfect match, so many fans were dissatisfied. This, however, is an entirely new sculpt that should please everyone. It's a very sleek suit, but still manages to look like metal instead of cloth. The feet have prongs on the front and back, and there are flares on the ankles that come down from the shins - metal bellbottoms? There's no surfeit of detailing on the armor, but what we do get is right. Most of the suit's surface is perfectly smooth, with just a few simple, curved lines etched into the surface.
The main color of the suit is a darkish metallic red, with pale gold accents on the thighs, biceps and face. The repulsors on his palms and the unibeam on his chest are white, but a tinge of the red still shows through. There's a black app to delineate his mouth, but on my figure it's crooked. We've seen the same incorrect application several times, so be careful.
Iron Man's articulation is good, but it isn't perfect. It seems that a fair benchmark for any Iron Man toy is that it be able to duplicate the now-iconic "punching" pose, right? So we'll judge a figure by how well it can mimic that. Okay, technically it was the Advanced Armor depicted in Adi Granov's art, but the Extremis should still be able to do it.
Unfortunately, the shape of the hips prevent the igure from raising his leg far enough to the front, so no dice. And don't try to force it, or the only thing you'll accomplish is scoring the front of the leg. Nobody wants that. He has swivel/hinge ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs (hidden cleverly beneath the "boot" tops), swivel/hinge hips, swivel/hinge wrists, double elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel/hinge torso and a swivel/hinge neck. Additionally, the shoulder pads are hinged to move with the arms, and the pods on his hips swivel so they don't block the legs. Nice!
The figure has no accessories: no energy
blasts, no flight stand, not even a removable faceplate so we can see Tony inside it. All he has is his part of the Series 1 Build-A-Figure, Terrax. He gets the right leg. It's actually pretty nice, with stony grey skin, a red boot and a golden band that plugs into place to keep it from sliding around.
There's a variant of this figure available as well: same exact mold, just painted in two tones of blue. Yep, it's a Stealth Armor variant! Right now it seems easier to find than the standard figure, but it's not like any toy from ML1 is plentiful at the moment. If you wanted an Extremis Iron Man, the movie armor was good enough, but now we have something better.
-- 03/05/12
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