Congratulations to the Indiana Jones Adventure Series on being the first toyline to hit clearance before it even hit shelves! That's right, my Target doesn't have anything but the exclusives yet, but they've yellow-tagged the pegs where the standard line will theoretically one day be. Big win, Hasbro!
Marion Ravenwood is comfortable in any situation, including ballrooms and barroom brawls.
I honestly don't know why everyone views Marion as "the" Indiana Jones Girl, but every latter-day sequel says it's so, and thus we must accept it. This Marion is wearing her Cairo marketplace outfit, am embroidered blouse and the poofiest red pants you ever did see - not a costume that lends itself well to plastic action figure form. Like, this is supposed to be breezy, desert-friendly garb, but the realities out toymaking turn it into big, heavy chunks she could use to knock someone unconscious. Has anyone ever made a toy of her in her Tibetan drinking contest look?
However the likeness may have looked at the sculpting 
phase, the final production figure is terrible. Comparing the toy to the art on the box, it doesn't look like the photo of Karen Allen, it doesn't look like the painting of Marion Ravenwood... I'm sure it looks like someone, in that there are only so many configurations a human face can take, but Hasbro would have been smart to not put any photos of the actress on this box, because it just underscores how bad the product looks.
One thing they did do well is the articulation. Bulbous clothes like this are usually not conducive to mobile joints, but Marion has ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and head, and the majority of those are balljoints or swivel/hinges. The printing on her shirt is excellently applied, and though it seems like an error that there are no red flowers(?) on her back, you can see in the movie that that's accurate. Her accessories are the frying pan 
she hit the weirdly grinning goon with, and the Nazi monkey. Who doesn't love a Nazi monkey! Fuhre-ous George is wearing their little red vest, and is articulated with little balljoints for the head, arms, and tail. Yes, both arms. So you can make the monkey salute if you want. The set also includes one side and one end of the Ark.
This figure is... fine? There's nothing terribly wrong with her, but the execution is underwhelming. The engineering and paint on the body are great, but the sculpt doesn't live up to their standard. On paper everything's great; for whatever reason, the parts just don't add up to the whole. We can't even say that she's bad; she's not special enough to be "bad." We're lucky enough to be collectors in an era where high standards are considered, well, standard, and this is just "the low side of mediocre." Good effort from the artists, but bad execution from the company.
From the review of the Ark: "There's not a person on God's green Earth who was looking forward to this Marion or this Sallah, but they're still selling because you can call the fans "Moses": they really want to build that Ark!"
Moses? Not Noah? Maybe I'm not getting a joke...
"If we're already mixing up one kind of Ark for the other, might as well mix up who was in charge of that, too." But if everyone thinks that part of the joke doesn't work, we can take it out...
BTW, I'm not sure why some reviews are OAFE Blog posts and some aren't, but I personally prefer the Blog ones since they allow comments. But maybe that's also a reason for the reviewers to prefer the non-Blog ones. 😉
The regular ones allow comments, too: that's why we have a message board. We want comments. Comment on them. We even include a "comment of the week" in the email when we actually GET comments, in an effort to promote MORE comments. I feel like a YouTuber doing that stupid "like and subscribe" stuff, but for the love of god, everybody comment on the reviews...
I perhaps should have written: "... since [the Blog reviews] *directly* allow comments." Yeah, people can comment on the non-Blog ones in out-of-band ways, but it's less obvious and requires creating a forum account, and it's harder for people to read existing comments about a particular review.
I think it might help if there was a noticeable way to comment at the bottom of the reviews. Even if was just a redirect to the appropriate forum topic.
If there was a way to leave comments like on blog posts you would probably see more since it's quicker and easier. But I have no idea about coding a website so I have no idea if it's feasible to add that.
Plus the lower barrier to comment, while increasing commenting overall, would probably result in folks begging for the hard to find toys and people bitching about any political disagreements...
Eh, if our reviews were really as good as I think they are, they'd make people want to comment regardless. We just have to keep trying to do better...
Yeah, I can see that happening easily. I remember once commenting on the Binary Form Captain Marvel figure that despite disliking the MCU take on Carol Danvers, the toy was so good I wanted to get it anyway. I didn't say anything about why I disliked the character, but someone else took offense.
And the hard-to-find-toys thing is true as well, especially once you take into account international comments (e.g. I live in South-East Asia) where distribution can be very different. As an example, I've only ever seen G.I.Joe Classified toys in the wild maybe twice since the line began but I'm told they're fairly plentiful in neighbouring countries.
You started out saying you were mad Mar-Vell was female., and since you've said you didn't watch Kenobi because of Reva, you didn't watch D&D because it made fun of a man, and you didn't watch Across the Spiderverse because it might have a message,, so were theu wrong? However you may feel inside, the person you show the rest of the world is almost the poster style of "fragile masculinity".
I think its a decent likeness (have you seen the Elsa prototype that one is really rough) but I guess I'm the only one since I've read other reviewers complain about it too.
Sucks my Marion didn't come with the baggy of accessories/BAF and since I bought from a local collector shop, they don't accept returns (I'm not in the USA). all I got was 25% store credit. I was indifferent when they changed to windowless packaging but now I'm glad the windows are coming back too.
That blows! 25% is the least they could do!
At least those parts should be the easiest to get secondhand, since they're the most common?
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