Bert

Some things go together like jelly and peanut butter... er, wait, that's not right. A phrase like "peanut butter and jelly," where the words are always presented in the same order, is called an "irreversible binomial." It can apply to foods (pepper and salt), clothing (socks and shoes), sayings (swim or sink), even people... so why in the world are were reviewing these figures in the order of "Ernie and Bert"! I had to order these figures from Best Buy, because neither Target nor Amazon ever had them, and that turned out to be an ongoing hassle: first the figures shipped, but disappeared at the last FedEx stop before the box would have reached my house; so I had to get customer service to send new ones, and I chose in-store pickup to avoid any more shipping problems; Ernie was available right away, but the day Bert was supposed to show up, Best Buy emailed to say he wouldn't be; so I had to call customer service again to get him sent out, and now all of a sudden they also charged me a shipping fee. Good lord! It's great that Best Buy has toys, but ordering from them is more trouble than it's worth. Bert is Ernie's roommate, but more out of necessity than by choice: Bert needed someone to split the rent, and Ernie was the only one who responded to the ad. They've become best friends, despite their wildly different personalities; Bert is the tsukkomi to Ernie's boke, the Chalmers to his Skinner, the calm and reliable pillar of normalcy against which Ernie's storm of weirdness rages. His entire personality is that he's boring - Frank Oz couldn't find a character hook to make him interesting, so he just leaned into that and turned Bert into the most boring man alive. "If he was a spice, he'd be flour. If he were a book, he'd be two books!" Like Ernie and Count von Count, Bert gets two swappable heads: one with the mouth open (slightly), the other with the mouth closed. But where both those characters had short, spherical heads, Bert's is taller and more ovoid. His half-circle ears poke directly out the sides of his head, and his bulbous orange nose overlaps his eyes slightly. The hair on both heads pulls out, but since they're functionally the same sculpt, there doesn't seem to be any reason; maybe just not glued well enough? It's not like swapping them would mean anything. In a move similar to Boss Fights Studio's Fraggles and their swappable eyes, the bottom of Bert's box also reveals the heads' unibrows can be removed and traded between them. In theory, the idea is that one brow is flat and the other arched up, but in practice the sculpt is so similar you could have gotten the same effect by just turning them upside down (not that you can turnthem upside down, because the peg [and equivalent hole] on the right is larger than the one on the left). Bert and Ernie have no definite age. Like, they live by themselves, so presumably they'd be adults, but they also take a regularly scheduled nap and play games like children. Some of the storybooks even show them as being in the same class at school as Big Bird. But Bert plays into his "boring fuddy-duddy" reputation by wearing stiff saddle shoes instead of comfy sneakers, an chinos rather than jeans. Never trust anybody who doesn't get out of their dress clothes when they get home, that person's got deep emotional problems. Bert's wearing two sweaters: a red, blue, and yellow-green striped cardigan over a white turtleneck. Or possible a single sweater that combines the features of the two. The stripes on his sweater are painted cleanly, but the black outlines around his eyes are a little uneven. Weirdly, the shade of yellow used for his head is not the same between the two versions: the open mouth head is slightly yellower than the closed mouth head. That's... very strange. Obviously NECA would want them to be the same, so how did this one make it through production that way? Is it a common problem, or did I just happen to get one from when the factory switched to a new batch of plastic, and it just happened to be slightly different? Are they both molded in this bright color, but this one missed a paint app that's meant to tone it down? It's not like the "lemon" head looks wrong, it doesn't even look particularly incorrect when compared to the skin on the hands; it's just noticably different, and we don't know why. In the package, Bert's hands hang limply, fully relaxed. The set also includes a pair for holding accessories, and a pair that's pointing. (For what it's worth, the hands appear to be about halfway in between the shades of the two heads, which is just adding to my confusion.) You can probably at this point predict what his articulation will be like, because NECA is reliable: barbell neck, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel/​hinge elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, a balljoint chest, balljoint hips, swivel thighs, swivel/hinge knees, and swivel/hinge/swivel ankles. Like his buddy, the paint doesn't survive first contact with the elbows, leaving big lime-green gaps in the stripes, but that seems unavoidable unless they were going to extremely carefully dye stripes into the plastic instead of just painting it. Okay, explain this one to us: NECA has, so far, released three Sesame Street toys - one through stores and two through the power of positive thinking. In a lovely nod to the show's educational bona fides, and following the lead of what Palisades planned to do, they've included Muppet letters. With three figures, you would think that figure 1 would come with the A, figure 2 would come with the B, and figure 3 would come with the C, right? Obviously. It makes sense The Count would have a number instead, but Ernie was figure 1 and had the C, and here's Bert as figure 2 with the A. What the heck! If you're not going to go in order and just pick things at random, how do you not hold the C back for Cookie Monster?! C is for Cookie, and that's good enough for him! "What letter would Bert have, then?" He's president of the National Association of W Lovers, so what letter do you think? Bert's accessories depict his hobbies: he likes reading, so he has a book of Boring Stories; he collects bottle caps, so he's got a framed display of 35 of them; he also collects paperclips, but those just get tossed in a cigar box rather than anything fancy. The book is a solid piece, molded open so he can read it, the frame has a stand on the back so it doesn't have to lie flat, and the cigar box has a working hinged lid, showing us they're "Boy Oh Boy" brand smokes. Finally, we get Bernice, Bert's pet pigeon. Unlike Ernie's Rubber Duckie, Bernice is a real bird. Like, a real real bird, not a Muppet real bird. This Bernice is unarticulated, a single solid sculpt, but she's painted very nicely. Bert likes pigeons because they are, after all, not wild animals, but domesticated - as domesticated as dogs are. Humans used them initially for food (both meat and eggs), and later for carrying messages; but when available technology surpassed the speed of a pigeon, they started to be abandonned, meaning all the feral pigeons in any large city are the equivalent of stray puppies and deserve the same kind of care and attention. Which Bert is happy to give them. Bert is just as good as Ernie, and they were both worth the long, long wait after the release of The Count to get. It would be nice if that had been easier - ie, not requiring dealing with Best Buy - and the miscolored alternate head is strange, but even those issues aren't enough to ruin this one. Hopefully NECA will make more. And make them easier to get, so they don't then end the line prematurely. -- 09/18/25 Which yellow is right? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.