Mo-Lec-U-Lar

..."THE MOLECULAR MAN!" Mo-Lec-U-Lar's origin as well as nature are a mystery. It is unclear if he is a robot, alien, some kind of bio mechanical android, or something else altogether. He can alter his size and shape via the transformation ring he carries with him. There seems to be no limit to his size or shape. He can also turn into a copy of the SilverHawks, in order to slip by security or use one of their unique physical abilities. Well, that's... less plagiarised than usual. It's improperly copied directly from one of the two wikis, because whoever at Super7 is in charge of this line is simply bad at their job and does not deserve to be getting a paycheck from the company, but at least this time it's sentences from a couple different spots on the page and even changed some of the words, rather than just highlighting a solid paragraph and dragging it over to their own working document. That's almost like doing any work at all! Super7: doing the equivalent of a kid in school using a thesaurus to transfigure their lexemes. Seamless! Mo-Lec-U-Lar is one of the most visually distinct villains in all of '80s cartoons. To make him look like a model of a modern major general molecule, his body is made up almosy entirely of gold balls stacked on top of each other - only his forearms and legs are anything resembling "normal." His proportions are odd, with his torso being about half as tall as it should be. His trunk is truncated! Right in the center of his chest is a representation of a molecule, with its electrons and central nucleus, behind a clear dome. The "glass" is too dark here, making it hard to see the interior. His left hand is regular hand, but his right hand is a stump, terminating in a graduated hexagonal cylinder for some strange reason. On the show, Mo-Lec-U-Lar speaks with a stilted, monotone voice that sometimes has a mechanical reverb added to it. His face is lean and angular, with sunken cheeks and solid black eyes with small dot pupils. The figures includes three heads - one neutral, one smiling, one angry - but they all have the same flawed sculpt: the spheres immediately to the sides of his face are for some reason flat on the front, rather than being completely round. That is certainly not the way they were ever shown in the cartoon, so why did Super7 do them this way? For that matter, why do them as alternate heads in the first place? The head itself is the same on all three; just make swappable face plates and save some moey for more important things. The articulation is the same we typically get from the various Ultimates lines: barbell head, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, balljointed waist, swivel/hinge hips, swivel thighs, swivel/hinge knees, and swivel/hinge ankles. The arms being able to turn both at the top of the upper arm and at the bottom has always been superfluous on these toys, but it's especially pointless in Mo-Lec-U-Lar's case since his biceps are just balls, not something that would look recognizably wrong if it were turned out of place in a weird way. The balls right above his hips are molded from a soft and squishy PVC, so they can get squeezed out of the way when you raise the legs forward. When he gets particularly agitated in the cartoon, all his large molecules tend to split apart a bit, but that's more than a physical toy can do. Like most of the figures, he gets lots of alternate hands. There are a few open left hands, a gripping left hand, and a fist, and then three versions of his right stump: a plain one, a translucent one, and the one shooting his "Mo-Lec-U-Tar" substance. His only accessories are two versions of the ring he uses to transform: he carries it with him, and has to press it against his right stump hand in order to activate his power. The normal one is a translucent red frame with translucent blue spheres on each corner - he was way ahead of that "molecule tattoo" trend. The second copy of it is just translucent yellow, matching the alternate stump, and is probably meant to represent the way there was a flash of light when he transformed. The set includes a blaster rifle, but it's not for Mo-Lec-U-Lar to use: as seen in a couple episodes ("Stop Timestopper" and "Countdown to Zero"), it's actually him! He turned into that gun, which is why it's the same colors as him. As is the style of the Silverhawks brand, Mo-Lec-U-Lar has a pet bird, and this set includes it. However, it's not as good as the other releases. His sidekick is Volt-Ure, a mechanical vulture that has an electrical attack. Clever. He even has contact balls on his wings that he shoots his lightning out of. Pretty awesome, huh? Well, don't expect to see it here, because while almost all the other releases have both active and resting versions of their bird, Mo-Lec-U-Lar only gets the one with its wings folded. What a total rip-off! Volture's only articulation is a balljointed neck, so it's not even like you can open his wings even a little - they will always be stuck to his sides. Mo-Lec-U-Lar was the only Silverhawks villain I had as a kid, so I was really looking forward to this one. I can accept the weird proportions, because they're truer to the cartoon than the vintage Kenner figure was, but some weird choices in sculpting, materials choice, and accessories really keep this figure from shining. -- 04/18/24

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