Indiana Jones

When these Last Crusade figures showed up, at the end of 2023, I asked around here in the office if anyone else wanted to review them, since I knew I wouldn't have time until, quote, "at least after the new year" to fit them into my schedule. Considering it's now September, it appears I was correct. Indiana Jones races against the forces of evil to find the holy grail and keep it from falling into the wrong hands! The original Raiders of the Lost Ark was (and still is) liked because it was the introduction to the character. Temple of Doom showed him changing from an unlikeable thug to somebody who you could actually root for, so that's something. But The Last Crusade is the best one, because that's when Indiana Jones just got to be Indiana Jones, the character you'd want to spend two hours with in the theater. The movie strikes the right balance between "silly" and "adventurous," without ever getting too ridiculous. Plus, it plays into Steven Spielberg's #1 favorite recurring theme: a desperate need for fatherly approval. This is our fourth Indiana Jones so far - not the fourth in the line, the fourth we've reveiwed. There are at least two others we haven't talked about yet. This one seems to use the head mold from Raiders, with the Temple hat. It's a nice pairing, honestly, and if it weren't just one in a long line of steadily reliable Harrison Ford Indy likenesses, we'd be a lot more impressed by it than this makes it seem like we are. The big difference between this Indy and the classic version is that Last Crusade Indy wears a necktie. A tie with a leather jacket? Thanks for cursing humanity with the fashion statement of choice for the worst people around, Indiana! The majority of the figure's sculpt is the same as the Series 1 Indy, which is fine: they were good sculpts then, and they're still good now. As long as you don't stand the two next to each other, will you ever even notice it? He even keeps the same colors, brown and tan and khaki. There's a lighter drybrushing on the jacket to make it look aged, but it's really just concentrated on the upper arms and the small of the back, so it's not as impressive as it could be. His tie is black, but it's a black that ends up with a bit of a blue tint, thanks to being against such a strong yellow background, which both makes it stand out and allows it to fit with the overall colorscheme and not look out of place. As always, shared molds mean shared articulation. Like the other Indys, there's a barbell head, balljointed neck, pec hinges, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel/hinge elbows, tiny balljointed wrists, balljointed waist, balljointed hips, swivel thighs, swivel/hinge knees, and swivel/hinge ankles. Because he's wearing a shirt with a collar, he also does that thing all the suit-wearing Adventure Series figures have, where the shirt collar is molded as part of the neck, so it moves around when you tip him. A lot of the collars have been recycled sculpts among the various figures, but Indy's is new: you can tell, because the angle is sharper and they're just generally larger than anyone else's. Also, there's a fairly large gap between the bottom of the shirt and the top of the pants, which makes us wonder if maybe the torso was used for another figure? It's hard to say, since everyone else had a jacket or vest obscuring their shirt, though the need to fit another layer over this mold would explain why there's so much space in the sculpt. The big shock, though? His hat is articulated! Were they all like this? How did we miss it?! There's a T-shaped sprue sticking up out of the top of Indy's scalp, and that fits into a track on the inside of the hat that can slide back and forth, so you can push it back, or pull it down over his eyes. What the what! This is quite the choice, and now I'm left wondering if I was just a dope when looking at the first two figures, or if this was something new they developed for #3. Sadly, the gun belt is the same mold from before, which means it has all the same flaws: namely, the PVC it's made from is too soft for what Hasbro wants it to do, and getting the little pegs into their holes to close things is frustratingly impossible. Nigh-impossible. It can be done, technically, but it's tough enough that I'm not even going to bother putting the coiled whip in its little loop. We'll just pretend there's no such thing. Yes, we get the same two whips as every other Indiana, the coiled and unfurled versions. No surprises there. And also his little pistol, that's the same too. His one new accessory is a German MP 40 he took from the Nazis while saving his dad. In the film, he fires it left-handed, because he needed to fire it quickly after disarming the guard and didn't have time to adjust his grip, but only the right hand on this toy is shaped to reach the trigger. It sucks to be part of the third series of figures when even the first series barely made it to stores, but if you get all these, you'll be able to build the Grail Table display. Indy has one of the legs. In three pieces. "Indiana Jones in necktie" is not as iconic a look as the first two movies gave us, but it does allow Hasbro to release the movie's major character without being a straight rehash, and that's something good in and of itself. The figure definitely has its flaws, but the biggest one is that you'll have to turn to the secondary market if you want it. -- 09/07/24

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