Just want to check in with Hasbro real quick: you guys do know that you don't have to make every toy a tie-in to something, right? Like, just being based on the comics is enough? It doesn't have to be a movie or a show or, in this case, a videogame?
Marvel Snap is apparently a digital card-collecting game released in 2022? Maybe the company that makes the game underwrote a portion of this SDCC-exclusive set's production costs as a promotional deal? Because this is definitely the first time I've ever heard of it. And we've had lots of figures based on games like Contest of Champions or Avengers Alliance, and none of those have ever been "Gamerverse"-branded, so what make this trio so special?
The back of the box only has photos of the toys
with graphics meant to mimic the game, no text. There's no text in the marketing copy, either, and Marvel Snap just uses art and has no descriptions of the characters to go with it, so we can't even lift a Shanna bio from the source, either. Here's a fun one for you: did you know Shanna was born in Zaire? That means she, like Charlize Theron, is African American. Diversity win!
While stuck on an uncharted Savage Land island with Wolverine, she ended up getting stabbed through the chest by a spear, and being brought back to life in a mystical ceremony tied her life to that of the Savage Land itself, giving her superpowers in the process. She'd already been an Olympic athlete, but now she could run more than 50 miles per hour (current human record is a bit under 28 mph, and that's on a carefully manicured track, not in the middle of the jungle), was as strong as a dozen men, and knew every form of communication in the Savage Land. Way to go, girl!
It's been 17 years since we last got a Shanna the She-Devil action figure, and that was an SDCC exclusive, too. Are they really
so afraid of making her any other way? I'm not saying you have to put the bikini jungle girl on a Walmart shelf, but there are options other than "only available inside the San Diego convention center for four days." Not that she's actually wearing a bikini, but rather a shredded loincloth and top. And, for some reason, boots. Please, Hasbro: please tell us you didn't brand this as a Marvel Snap set just so you'd have an excuse to not make her barefoot. The character debuted in 1972, and has since then worn shoes approximately one time. It's rare enough to be considered "wrong." And these are new sculpts, too: this isn't the same fur Black Cat had. And we know Hasbro has bare female feet, so sculpting something new would have cost more than just doing her properly.
The body looks great. She's got a very well-defined abdomen and muscular
legs, and the various wraps on her arms are separate pieces that slip on. The rest of her clothes are new, as well, with the loincloth just hanging on the waist, and the top taking a cue from Jules by having the boobs be molded as part of the garment and sitting over a flat faux-chest. The face is fine, but the hair is a little too big and cartoony to really look good. It throws off the entire vibe.
Shanna includes a knife to fit in the loop at her waist, a spear, and a rifle. Frank Cho really did poison the well when he did his version of Shanna, didn't he? A core part of her characterization was that
she hated guns, but then Frank drew her with a rifle, and now everybody seems to have forgotten that aspect. Depicting Shanna with a gun should be like depicting Batman with a gun, but here's one included with this toy because it's easier than, like, a cat-sized dinosaur or something. It's a simple hunting rifle, rather than anything you'd expect to see military or SHIELD using, so if nothing else you can pretend she snatched it from a poacher and is just swinging it around like a club. It's not like any of her hands have a trigger finger extended to actually use the thing - just open, closed, or generic gripping. Both sharp weapons are the same that came with Ka-Zar, which seems fitting.
The Comics Code was pointless and stupid well before it got relaxed in the 1970s, so creators working before that had to find ways to get around it. So you've got Sauron, who was a normal person until he got bitten by a creature, seemed to die, but came back to life and now has to drain the life energy from others to survive. Also, he he turns into teh same kind of creature that bit him and flies with big, leathery wings. Neal Adams built a Code-approved vampire!
This is, unsurprisingly, entirely the same mold as Build-A-Figure Sauron; is the only reason Hasbro picked him to be in this set that they'd already pulled the body molds out of storage to make No Way Home Lizard? Probably!
The only real difference between this Sauron and the BAF is the paint: it's a lot more stylized here, with a bigger contrast between
the light and dark areas. The green of the body is more toward the blue side of the spectrum than the yellow, while the highlights are fully green themselves, lacking the orange tint Monkey Boy pointed out. The head is painted with yellow eyes instead of red, and his loincloth is purple this time. That's the same sculpt as before, but not the same mold: it's been done without the pouches and rope belt this time - the benefit of sculpting digitally instead of in clay.
One thing this exclusive has that the BAF didn't is an accessory. As part of his knockoff vampire abilities,
Sauron has hypnotic powers, which were usually drawn as waves of straight lines emerging from his eyes. This figure includes a "hypnotism" energy effect that clips onto the bridge of his nose and makes it look (from certain angles) like he's beaming his thoughts into someone's brain. The piece is molded from translucent magenta, and the lines are actually sculpted - though they only get painted pink on one side.
When Rogue sacrificed herself
to defeat the Master Mold by dragging him into the Siege Perilous, she felt like she was being ripped in two, but then instantly reappeared in her room back at the X-Men's Outback headquarters. Unfortunately, what felt "instant" to her was actually several weeks, and by that point the Reavers had retaken the base. Since she'd popped back into reality bare naked, she only had time to throw on a T-shirt and grab her costume out of the drawer before skedaddling through a portal that dumped her, unprepared, into the Savage Land. Even worse, her powers weren't working - neither the strength and flight she stole from Ms. Marvel, nor her own natural absorption. She was stuck there for weeks, living rough, which is why her clothes are now shredded.
When the Shanna figure was revealed, it didn't take any special insight to predict she'd be repainted as Rogue. She uses the
same body molds, including the great legs and the new, flat chest, though her shirt sculpt is flipped the other way around, so it hangs off the opposite shoulder. She's got a green band tied around her right arm, and another around her right thigh, plus is wearing a necklace of fangs (which has trouble sitting right because her hair keeps wanting to push it out of place). Her boots have ripped edges rather than fur, but that's just as wrong on Rogue as it was on Shanna, just for a different reason: while Shanna would need to be barefoot to be correct, Rogue ripped up her costume herself so she'd have cloth to wrap around her feet, so these being actual boots and not something tied on is incorrect.
They also screwed up the paint. Like we said before, the white streak in her hair is supposed to go all the way back, not just be a spot on her forehead, but Hasbro only did the front. Which is wrong. Also, her skin is that weird blue shade, which stands out even more since Shanna is bright bright pink. They know Mystique is only her adoptive mother, right? She's not supposed to be halfway to Nightcrawler's skintone.
Rogue gets the same knife as Shanna, but a different spear. There's an assortment of hands, but still no "glove off" version - not that it would really matter in this case, since she was obviously unconcerned about exposing skin at this point. There was a recent miniseries that detailed what Rogue was doing all those weeks in the Savage Land while waiting to get rescued, and one of said things was "trying to get the D from Ka-Zar."
Not kidding: she hasn't been touched since her powers manifested, and now here she is spending lots of close, barely-clothed time with a guy who's living the Tarzan workout routine 24/7... that's motive, means, and opportunity right there! But he's a good guy, so as soon as he realized what was going on, he let her know he was married to Shanna. The comic also demonstrated the power of a sliding comicbook timeline by having Rogue reference Cast Away, a movie that didn't come out until 10 years after Uncanny X-Men #269 was originally published. Also, we learned that her parents liked to follow Phish on tour. Anyway, it's a good thing the action figure's chest balljoint has such a great range of motion, because both Rogue and Shanna have hair long enough that even a hinged neck doesn't mean they're able to look up otherwise.
After Ka-Zar and Zabu, we desperately needed a Shanna to finish updating that old, early, Hasbro Marvel Legends box set. (And thanks to her boots and her hair, we kind of still need a good one.) Similarly, this Rogue was the last X-Man from that era we needed. As for Sauron, it's nice that anyone who missed the BAF can now get him, but his presense is doing very little to sell this set. Still, this pretty much wraps up all the Savage Land characters Marvel Legends needs, and that's good fun. But we still want to know why they bothered to brand it as Marvel Snap when two out of three of the designs look nothing like the game art.
-- 08/25/25
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