Thursday, April 14, 2011

Retro Toy Week: Planet of the Apes Leo Davidson!

What could be better than a Mark Wahlberg action figure? That was a rhetorical question, we don't have anywhere near enough space to cover everything that would be better... I am 90% positive I bought this, just before actually seeing the remake of Planet of the Apes. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure I had an employee discount at the time; or I'd still be feeling burned on that one. Tim Burton, Tim Roth, hell, David Warner's even in there; but sometimes even with the best of ingredients, the souffle just doesn't come out. How the hell this has a 5.5 out of 10 at IMDB, I have no idea, unless it got points for good intentions. Back to the figure of astronaut Leo Davidson: again, it looks like Hasbro had good intentions, then failed on the execution. Or, in deciding whether this figure was intended for kids to play with, or as a collectible; they opted to split the difference. I don't think the head sculpt is too bad, even if Wahlberg is about as convincing as an astronaut as Denise Richards made a nuclear physicist. But he only has seven points of articulation: ball-jointed shoulders, swivel wrists, neck, waist, and only one elbow. Yes, one: the other arm is locked in a stiff-arm, to fire his gun or block a tackle. Nothing below the waist. (Insert Boogie Nights joke yourself, I've never seen it.) Davidson came with a gun (not the one pictured) and a helmet, and an oversized scanner-thingus (some versions had a more accurately sized one) that I'm also not inclined to dig up. Not to complain about getting an OK accessory, but I don't know if that helmet's movie accurate or at all useful without a full-on spacesuit. It makes him seem like a little kid playing spaceman... I got this figure, because I wanted to see the heroic astronaut kick some ape ass. Longtime readers of this blog may remember, I hate me some apes, ever since seeing Beneath the Planet of the Apes when I was 8 or 9. Of course, after the movie tanked you could get most of the figures for a song, but I never bought any of the apes. I hate them so much...

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