Grail Table

Dinner is served. Guided by his dying father's diary, a determined Indy manages to sidestep various deadly booby-traps as he makes his way closer to the coveted Holy Grail. Finally, Jones reaches a room occupied by an actual knight of the First Crusade, his mortal life prolonged by the power of this sacred object. Recognizing Indy as kindred, the knight explains that he's hidden it among the many false cups that are positioned before them... Once again, that text doesn't come from Hasbro anywhere, it's from card #78, "The Surviving Grail Guardian," in the Indiana Jones Heritage line from Topps. Build-A-Figures already don't get any pertinent info, there certainly wasn't going to be any on a line that can't even tell us about the actual characers. The Sankara Stone Shrine in Series 2 wasn't enough of a draw to make me want to bother tracking down all those figures online, but GameStop carried Series 3 and so the Grail Table gets to be completed! With only two dud figures to work around: Swagless Hannibal and Elderly Shipwreck. Hasbro know what they were doing when they gave the largest, most important pieces to those figures (the back panel and the actual table part, respectively). Once assembled, this really is an impressive piece - a little smaller than it should be, but still a decent size. The table itself is nearly 6¾" wide, and the statue relief in the back gets up to 7¼". That just slots in gently, but the legs are quite sturdy - just don't expect to take those apart again after assembling them, because the parts really lock together tightly. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the accessories. Between the various figures in Series 3 there are 11 items to place on the table, and only two of those - the silver plates - actually attach securely. Or at all. The plates slot in because they need to stand upright, but the two flaming bowls and the various cups all just sit there like a real cup would sit on a real table. The nice thing is that there are small indentations to show us where the items are meant to sit, but while they might prevent things from toppling if you breathe on them, they're not going to do anything if you accidentally bump your display. Plus, there's no "right" way to place them. Obviously the two bowls - which have different sculpts for their flames, rather than being two of the same thing, so points to Hasbro on that one - go in the larger dips, but that leaves five nearly-equally sized spots for the other cups (neither the False Grail nor the True Grail get shallows to sit in, because they're the most likely to be held in a figure's hand, and the designers probably didn't want "empty" spots left behind on the surface). And while, yes, the bases of the cups are different sizes, they're not so different as to recognizably belong in any one space over another. Certainly some of the sculpts are based on ones seen in the film, they don't match up perfectly with the ones that were obfuscating the Grail when Indy picked it, so you can't even use screenshots as a guideline for where things are supposed to go. In the scene, the Grail was sitting in the center of five other cups: Golden Trophy, Narrow Silver Goblet, Tall Silver Chalice, Gold With Red Gems, and Gold With Point On Top. Three of those (Narrow, Gems, Point) have been re-created here, so that's at least a start. But the other two we do get, Short Silver Wide Base and Weird Angular Silver, don't appear near the Grail at all. Plus, the Grail and its companions were on the lower "step" of the table, while all the spots on this piece are on the top. It does look appropriately cluttered when you've got everything on there, but it's never going to be accurate. If you find it odd that the temple would have some plates in its collection, there are two possibilities: first, that they're just there to help reflect the light from the candles and further illuminate the chamber ["Aziz! Light!" --ed.]; but it's also possible it's a deeper reference aimed at history nerds. The first Grail story was Chrétien de Troyes' 12th century poem Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, but it wasn't described as "holy" (just special and gold) and certainly wasn't a cup: a "greal" at the time was a shallow bowl or serving dish, as the word probably came from the same root as "crater": Greek krater, a bowl for mixing wine in. The grail wasn't even the only important object in that story, sharing the metaphorical podium with a perpetually-bleeding spear. It's possible Chrétien did intend these to be Christian artifacts, but he didn't finish the poem before his death, so later authors have had to supply their own meanings. You can see this "serving dish" origin even in later stories, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (the Grail is a magic stone that, recharged once a year by a communion wafer, provides a bountiful harvest for the land) and even Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (a vision of the Grail being carried into the knights' dining hall is accompanied by them all receiving their favorite foods); it was late medieval poets who turned the Grail into a cup. Which, if you're paying attention, may make you realize that there wasn't even the barest inklings of any such thing as a Holy Grail until well after the First Crusade was over, so there's no way knights from then could have sworn to find it, let alone succeed! Anyway. Unlike the Ark, which was just unpainted gold plastic, the Grail table looks really nice. It's molded in brown plastic, and given a dark wash to bring out the texture. This doesn't only make the statue on top and the figures on the legs look better, it makes the table look like real stone instead of just molded plastic. The dark brown cloth laying in the center helps break up the area even when the table is empty, and the grey stripes on that make it clear we're looking at fabric that's been draped on there. The statue in the back could represent Jesus. It has a beard, which wasn't a "thing" in Western art until post-Renaissance, but had been around in Eastern Christian iconography since the 6th century; and after all, this temple is in modern-day Turkey, so it could have gotten some of that influence by the late 1090s. The figure is wearing long robes and a crown, appears to be resting their hand on a book on their left knee, and has their right hand raised in a gesture of blessing or peace. Could be Jesus, could be God, could just be whatever contemporary king. Also, was it already in there, or did the knight carve it while whiling away his 800-year work shift? The legs of the table depict angels on two of their sides, and... some kind of bug-man in a top hat on the others? Weird. The Grail gets particular attention when it comes to paint, as you'd expect. We were already lucky that the False Grail got green gems painted on, when all the other contenders are just plain gold or silver, but the true one looks just like it did in the movie: a dirty brown on the outside, but with a metallic sheen within. I don't know enough about Biblical era pottery to know how that would be achieved - presumably the cup is made from clay, but then? Painted? Would you paint the inside or would that wear off while drinking? Would a typical glaze look like gold? Assume it was covered in gold leaf when it was new and that began wearing off over the years. Although we offered an apologia in the Elsa Schneider review for both she and Walter Donovan coming with their own False Grail, here's an idea that ould have been even better: give Elsa the cup, sure, since she's actually part of this series and it's kind of necessary for the Build-An-Artifact to be complete, but then give Walter the font he got the water from. Even if it was just a solid piece with high-gloss paint to make the surface look like water, it'd mean we didn't end up with two of the same accessory, thereby creating more demand for both figures, and would add just a little more playability to the scene set by the Grail Table. The Ark was an important thing to get, but honestly not great as a toy. The Sankara Shrine was okay, but couldn't sell the figures it came with by itself. The Grail Table, however, hits both points really well. It's a great display piece that serves with four of the Last Crusade toys together. Yes, improvements could have been made, both in the selection of accessories and the way they interact with the base, but this is still an absolute winner. And honestly, it makes mad we never got to see any Crystal Skull figures in this line, because imagine the skeleton and throne they'd come with. Indiana Jones | Grail Knight | Elsa Schneider | Henry Jones Sr. | Dr. Jürgen Voller | Renaldo -- 12/14/24 What other Indiana Jones characters do you wish they'd made? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.

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