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Pacific Rim is like The Silence from Doctor Who - if you're not looking right at it, you forget it exists. Or at least, you forget how good it is. It's true for the movie, and it's true for the toys.
The only nuclear-powered Jaeger still in active duty, Gipsy is a titanic mechanical reinvention of the all-American hero. Customized OS and armature were developed to engage the Kaiju on all fronts - combining CQC, melee combat and special weapons deployment with equally devastating impact.
At this year's Toy Fair, NECA announced an Ultimate Gipsy Danger, which will come with lots of hands and weapons and whatnot, but what it won't come with is any kind of battle damage. So while you'll be able to have all kinds of fun with it, there's still a lot of the movie that it won't be able to duplicate, which is why I was perfectly happy to pick up this Anchorage Attack Gipsy Danger when I finally had the chance.
The fun begins on the head. As you may have been able to guess from the name, this figure is based on the movie's prologue, when Gipsy got her butt kicked by Knifehead. Since the defining moment of that fight was the kaiju taking a big ol' bite out of the conn-pod (and Fry Raleigh's brother Yancy), Gipsy's head has been remolded with a big ugly gash. Sadly, you cannot see a tiny pilot anywhere in there.
Of course, that's not the only damage Gipsy underwent during the fight. First, the entire left arm was severed at the shoulder, so here we just get a (sculpted) bundle of loose wires. It's the same sculpt
later used for Reactor Blast Gipsy Danger, and thus also Anteverse Gipsy Danger. But even more than that, there's a big hole in the chest where Knifehead stabbed in. Now, in the movie that stabbing went all the way through, but here it's just an indentation on the chest (because they still needed to get all the internal articulation and support inside the toy), but it is sized to perfectly fit the tip of Battle-Damaged Knifehead's head-knife! That's fun toy synergy!
But to really re-create the scene from the film, Gipsy Danger also gets a new right forearm, with the hand rectracted to form the
plasmacaster she used to finally defeat Knifehead. It's a solid piece from the elbow down, but even in this small sculpt you can tell that the fingers of the hand split to form the shape of the cannon. The shapes of the armor on the normal arm are still all present here, though it's split apart to reveal more of the internal workings. The set includes an alternate "plain" arm and a closed fist, but do you really care about those? You're here for the cool gun-hand!
Of course, the arm swaps out at the elbow thanks to a large balljoint, which means you could easily transfer this plasmacaster to any of the other Gipsy figures that use the same thing (much the same way that Hong Kong Brawl GD could swap hands). In fact, since this figure is built on the same "Gipsy 2.0" body as Hong Kong Brawl, she's got the same articulation - sliding panel on the bicep, balljointed shoulder armor, ankles that don't move as well as they should, all that. Swapping the arms is tough,
which is another reason that, other than for the photo at the top of this review, it's not a feature I plan to ever use.
The paint is nice, however. The body is the same dark blue as the rest of the good Gipsys, the chest turbine is yellow and orange, and there are numerous small silver scratches painted all over the body. This is even better battle damage than Battle-Damaged Gipsy Danger had! Of course, she's still missing the apps on her shins that Monkey Boy pointed out, which is just getting ridiculous at ths point. The interiors of the face and chest wounds are the same dark color as the other internal mechanics, though they (and the shoulder) are ringed by small dots of orange to suggest the sparks or small fires or whatever it is that's surrounding the openings. It might have been cool if they'd done a "frosty" paintscheme to represent when Gipsy comes limping back to shore covered in ice, but this is still good.
So here we are, three years after the movie supposedly "flopped," and the Pacific Rim train finally seems to be slowing down. NECA showed off a "Battle at the Docks" Gipsy Danger that's never come out, and now they seem to be focussing on the "Ultimate" releases instead. But it's been an amazing run, and the variant Gipsys all have their own unique strengths - in this case, not just the gun-hand we've wanted since Series 1, but also the remolded head and chest.
-- 04/02/16
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