Raving Toy Maniac

Added my Fearless Photog review!

The dragon is very well-sculpted – it’s just not the sculpt I was hoping for. But again, I’m just not sure how to grade this figure, because I’m not sure what I should be expecting from this line at this point. My instinct is that this figure seems too slavishly devoted to the vintage version, but my logic tells me I shouldn’t have expected anything different and therefore shouldn’t be disappointed.

Despite a few negatives – the smooth limbs and somewhat limited articulation – Castle Grayskullman is still a fantastic MOTUC figure. He’s very well-designed, excellently sculpted, and comes with a load of fantastic accessories. In some ways, after He-Man and Skeletor he could arguably be the one figure you have to have in your collection – he’s representative of so much of this franchise as a whole: Castle Grayskull, He-Man himself (the hair), and the franchise’s amazing ability to take a ridiculous concept and make it work somehow.

These Millennium-based figures are always a bit tricky to review, because the characters they’re based often have had minimal character development and never had a toy. One or the other is generally required for me to establish enough of a connection to a figure to get excited about it – though if the design is awesome enough, a lack of characterization can be an asset, because it allows your imagination to run wild (see: pre-prequel-era Boba Fett, Draego-Man). But if the figure has had minimal characterization, no childhood nostalgia for a vintage toy, and a relatively uninteresting design? It becomes really hard for me to get excited about that figure.