Remember when these Retro figures were actual updates of old toys, not things that didn't exist yet when the lines were actually happening?
With Stark tech wreaking havoc in the wrong hands, Iron Man dons a new high-tech suit designed to fight the evils of the world.
It took 40 real-world years to go from Iron Man's Model 01 armor (designed by Jack Kirby in 1962) to the Model 20 (designed by Michael Ryan in 2002) - an average of one new model every two years. It then took only 12 years to get from 20 to 50 (2.5 models every year), and six years to get from 50 to 70 (3.33 models every year). "In the beginning, the kaiju attacks Iron Man armors were spaced by 24 weeks. Then 12, then six, then every two weeks. The last one, in a crossover, was a week. In four days we could be seeing an armor every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes. We should witness a double armor event within seven days."
It's been a long, long time since this armor got a toy. Well, there was a 4" version in the Iron Man 2 line, but as far as 6" figures go? Believe it or not, this is the "Modern Armor Iron Man" we haven't
seen since ToyBiz 20 years ago. It actually was "modern" the last time we got it! From a historical perspective, this is functionally what he wore the entire time between Heroes Return and Extremis, and the old ML8 figure came out before the Extremis story was published.
As much as we love and respect Dave Cortes as a sculptor, that old figure was rough, even for the time it was released - very detailed, but whoof, those proportions! This new one was sculpted by Rene Aldrete, and it's miles better than before. As better as you'd expect a toy made 20 years after the fact to be, something that's not always the case (considering the insanely high level ToyBiz was working at back then).
When this armor (known by fans as the "Tin Man" armor, after the title of the story where it first appeared, or the "Pentagon"/"DOD" armor, since it's what he was wearing while he served as Secretary of Defense) first appeared, the legs and waist were bundles of cables,
similar to the "Heroes Reborn" armor, but they got smoothed out month by month as artists got tired of drawing them, so now the "official" stance is that they've always had these wide bands. Technically the Evangelion fins on the back weren't a feature until the Model 24 armor, but like we said, this is basically what he wore for three solid years before switching to Extremis - if Marvel (or, let's be accurate, the people editing the Marvel wiki, and then later a Marvel writer uses that as though it were a reliable reference) wants to count every minor cosmetic change as its own model number, that's their prerogative, but artistically and narratively it's the same suit.
The sculpt is 100% new, but it feels like it still used the regular body as a starting point. Like, the legs may have angled lines sculpted on them, but the size and shape is nearly identical
to the 80th Anniversary Iron Man, make sense? Such are the wonders of working digitally! The figure has swivel/hinge ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, balljointed hips, a swivel waist, balljoint chest, swivel/hinge wrists, double-hinge elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders, pectoral hinges, a balljointed neck, and a balljoint/hinge neck. That's mostly fine, though the torso would have been better with a hinged chest and a balljointed waist; remember that Adi Granov's famous "ground punch" art depicted this armor, but it's hard to move the toy's chest far enough to get it into the pose well. Plus, it would be nice if those cutouts on the side of the thighs were actually cut out, and we were just seeing them turn over the legs beneath instead of having to fake it.
There is one area where this figure falls short of the ToyBiz benchmark, and that's above the neck. We've pointed out before how Hasbro has never done an Iron Man toy with a removable mask, and that's not changing with this figure. Being able to pop the mask off and see Tony's face inside was a ton of fun, and if ToyBiz could do that in 2005, Hasbro darn well could have done it in 2024; they just chose not to.
We don't get much in the way of accessories here: there are fists or open hands, and four of the regular repulsor blasts in translucent blue. There's a nice fade on those, and it's nice to have enough for his hands and feet at once, but we'd still have traded a couple of them away in exchange for a faceplate. (And obviously a fight stand, which is something, like, 70% of all Marvel Legends should come with, but we're starting out small with our requests, small and realistic.)
This Iron Man Retro Collection series is not super impressive when you just see the lineup, but the Model 20 armor was one that severely needed a modern action figure, and this is a wonderful version of it.
-- 07/01/24
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