Sentinel

For several years now, Hasbro has been making "Titan Hero Series" action figures: large, simple toys designed for kids to bash together and drag around outside. We approve! The line generally focuses on the big characters (in terms of importance/popularity, not literal size), but in conjunction with X-Men '97, they took the opportunity to put a physically large character in the line as well: in addition to the Titan Hero Wolverine you can easily still find everywhere, there was a Sentinel... that never showed up in any stores. Adversaries of the X-Men, the robotic Sentinels exist for the sole purpose of detecting and destroying mutants. Sentinels are all over the X-Men animated series (both the original and the recent continuation), so creating a toy of them is a logical choice. And in fact, Hasbro did make a multi-hundred-dollar, 22-inch-tall "real" toy of one, but giving the rest of us a budget version is great, too. The sculpt is, as you might expect, very simple. You know that joke about how voters for the Oscars perpetually confuse "Best Editing" with "Most Editing"? Sometimes as collectors we confuse "good sculpting" with "lots of sculpting." So yes, the detail is minimal, and what detail there is is soft, but it's a professional level of work, done as well as it needs to be for the format. Ultimately, you have to remember: this is a toy based on a cartoon that debuted only a few months after Batman: the Animated Series; to do heavy detail would be wrong. The design is very specifically the Animated version of the Sentinel. These killer robots have had numerous looks over the years, but this, with puffy boots and gloves, a thick belt with a rectangular buckle in the center, a big circular vent in the middle of the chest, and the particular shape of the lines on the chest, is right off the old model sheets. In fact, there's even some extra! The parts on the pecs that are inset into the surface, rather than raised above? The small bands at the top of the gloves? New inventions for X-Men '97 that add more visual interest to the model and mean there's a little more to be done on this toy. The way the chin sticks out is weird, though: both incarnations have made that pretty much flat. The colors don't really mirror the show, it must be said. Animated Sentinels in the '90s were a mix of light purple bodies and nearly red limbs; the new show did darken the purple, slightly, but not as much as this toy does. The magenta used for the limbs and head is a decent match, though! Unfortunately, they seem to have mistaken the black shadows on the cheeks for physical dips that need to be sculpted. Meanwhile, while the black shadows around the eyes have a sculpted edge, the red eyes themselves are simply paint. Kinda got that backwards, guys. The Sentinel stands 14⅛" tall, a bit bigger than other Titan Heroes, and has only minimal articulation: swivel/hinge hips, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel forearms, and a balljointed head. The forearms probably aren't meant to be moved, since the shape of the arm itself fights against its ability to turn. And the shoulders can't even raise the arms fully horizontal: the Sentinel can't T-pose, it has to settle for A-posing. There are no accessories of any sort in the package, it's just the robot tied to the cardboard insert. If the X-Men '97 Titan Hero Series Sentinel had been put in stores, I'd probably own a couple of them - it's rare to get an armybuilder of this size, you know? But at a comical $24.99 (this thing is worth 10 or 15 bucks, maybe $20, max), having to make the choice to order it online is just one mental stair too many to make buying multiples worth it. It's a nice addition to the ranks of the Sentinels, coming in nicely between the 8" retro one and the 22" "real" one, but it fails in its idealized purpose: being effectively an online exclusive means parents won't randomly buy it for their kids, and collectors won't buy it as affordable scenery. Like, if it cost $10 online, then you might buy one every time you needed to bump your cart up to the free shipping amount; if it cost $25 in stores, you might be swayed by seeing it in person and actually holding it in your hands; but $25 online is the worst of both options. -- 09/29/25