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Come on, Walmart, you couldn't have gotten this figure out for us last month?
When the Venom symbiote attaches
to Captain America, he gains extreme new powers.
"He" who: "he" Captain America or "he" Venom? There have been several times Captain America has been Venomized in the comics - on variant covers, in alternate realities, during the Venomverse crossover - but this isn't based on any of them. Rather, he comes from the current Disney XD Marvel's Spider-Man cartoon. Season 3 was subtitled "Maximum Venom," and saw a bunch of heroes getting taken over by symbiotes. Mostly off-screen. So the Avengers returned from space, and they were already covered in black goo. Hope you weren't expecting to see a big cool scene where Steve Rogers fights valiantly but ultimately gets overwhelmed or anything.
A lot of the Venomized heroes were designed by Patrick Brown, though the art was drastically simplified for the cartoon. This toy changes things as well, in a totally different way. Brown's art depicted the heroes still in the process of being absorbed, while Marvel Legends has opted
to give us a Cap who's completely covered. A few of the pieces are reused - mostly from the 80th Anniversary figure, which also means a lot of this body - but the forearms and the legs from the knees down are new, to better match the animation model (cartoon Cap is the only one to have bands running over the tops of his feet, for example), and he gets Carnage hands. The chest has raised stars on the chest and back, and a texture designed to match the shoulders. All the new parts were sculpted and engineered by Dan Mitchell.
One element taken from Patrick Brown's art rather than the cartoon is the A on the forehead - Marvel's Disney's Disney XD Marvel's Spider-Man's Captain America had a plain blue mask. The A is as jagged as the eyes, which, in this case, blend around to the side of the head themselves to form bits suggesting his ear-wings. It's really neat! His mouth is open to show off tiny fangs, and a bright pink tongue lolls to the side.
The original design merged Captain America's star
with Venom's spider to make a really cool chest emblem. The cartoon... did not. Hasbro opted to create a pattern that manages to vaguely suggest the stripes on Cap's abdomen by having dark spikes pointing toward each other over a white backdrop. Tendrils of symbiote creep around the edges of the star(s), and there's a metallic blue sheen around the shoulders.
Cap has all the usual articulation -
head, neck, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, chest, waist, hips, thighs, knees, boots, ankles - though the head definitely sits too high. There's even a big gap between the head and neck. He gets his shield as an accessory, and it's been just as Venomized as he has: it's the mold without the sculpted star, and a new piece clips onto the front, with shiny blue symbiote goop running all over it. Too cool!
If you want cartoon-accuracy, this toy isn't it. But hey, even the cartoon isn't accurate to the original character design - if you want that, the Minimate is closest, but this Marvel Legends exclusive is a wicked creation in its own right.
-- 11/02/20
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