Staff Strike Sif

Man, and you thought the Warriors Three were hard to find! Sif is a born warrior. Few beings can match her prowess with the sword or staff. Along with Heimdall and his compatriot Thor, she is devoted to protecting Asgard from those who seek to destroy it. After months of seeing nothing but Series 1 of the Thor movie toys, new figures began to show up on shelves just in time for the DVD release. Interestingly, every store seemed to get a different batch of previously unreleased figs: Target had the Warriors Three, the Destroyer and Thor with a helmet; Toys Я Us ended up with a dozen bright blue repaints of Thor, Loki and Odin, a black Destroyer, and the line's only woman, Sif. (But still, nobody had Heimdall; the hunt continues!) Sif was played in the film by Jaimie Alexander, but the figure's likeness isn't that great. The stock photo on the back of the card is pretty good, so it may just be a question of paint and lighting. The profile is good - she ends up with a big forehead due to her hair being pulled back, but it was that way in the film, too - it's just the expression that seems lacking. Sif only really wore one costume in the film, and this is it. Well, okay, there is one change made that pegs this as being taken from a specific setting: over her red, silver and brown uniform, she's wearing the hooded grey robe that she put on when they were all going to Jotunheim; even immortal gods can feel chilly. Her boots overlap like petals as they rise up her legs, and her leggings are the same brown. She has a bit of a skirt to her costume, but it's short enough that it only looks like the lower edge of a tunic, rather than something overtly feminine. Small silver panels are arranged over her stomach, and gold is braided into the red along her sides. Her shirt is painted white, but in the movie it was the same sparkly metallic whatever as the front of her skirt. Articulation is good - Sif doesn't have any action features or anything, so all her joints work the way they're meant to. Like many Hasbro figures, she's mostly rocking the swivel/hinge joints - you'll find those at the shoulders, elbows and hips. Her head is a balljoint and so is her torso. Her knees and ankles are hinge joints (double hinges on the knees), and she has swivels at the wrist and thigh. Her skirt is slit up both sides, so she still has a good range of motion in her legs. She includes two accessories, though they're really both the same thing. We start with her sword, a 2¼" blade with a black hilt. Then we've got her battle staff (this is "Staff Strike Sif," after all), which, if you pay attention in the film, is formed when she merely spins her sword around fast enough that it turns into two swords. The real toy can't do that, obviously, so she gets a second accessory. The blades are white, when they should really be silver, but it makes for a more striking look, don't you think? I'm a bit sorry we didn't get her shield, too, but you have to wonder if it was planned and then dropped: she wore it strapped to her back, and there's an odd gap in the back of her coat that looks like it might have been shaped to allow the shield to clip away back there. Sif is a very nice figure - if you can find her. I was very lucky to trade for her in exchange for a figure I picked up at retail, but like the Warriors Three, if you aren't at the store on the one day she's in stock, you're screwed. Hasbro's distribution has been crap all year, and that means everybody who can't over-pay is losing out. -- 12/05/11

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