Rita Repulsa

Power Rangers Samurai MMPR Collector's Edition

Height: 11cm overall height.

Articulation: 7 points total - Swivel neck; 3 points each arm: Universal joint shoulder, upper arm swivel.

Colors: Molded light brown, gold, silver-grey; Painted blue, dark brown, gold, light brown, black, red, skintone, magenta.

Accessories: Magic Wand

Release Data: Released in the US with the Power Rangers Samurai Fall Assortment in August 2011 at a retail price of US$6.99.

Author: ExVee

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This is really something that's been in the making for most of the time Power Rangers has been around. The 1994 Action Feature Evil Space Alien lineup was planned to eventually include a Rita Repulsa figure, a catalog photo of which can be seen on John Green's toy guide site. Just search the page for "2321". That, along with a monster form Scorpina and a couple others never actually came out, and so the next closest thing one could find was a night light in the general image of Rita. Which even as a kid seemed silly to me, but I digress. Toy Fair this year was more than a little surprising when the first photo of the Bandai showroom turned up, of Rita. Being part of the Power Rangers Samurai line, I guess this could be seen as a current-style followup to the previous Super Legends subline. The label on the package even calls out "Collector's Edition" along with a small 2010-style MMPR logo. Now it makes me wish I'd bothered to buy a Goldar or at least some Putties when MMPR stuff was still about.


Rita features a similar sort of exaggerated, almost cartoony style like the MMPR figures did. It makes for some odd proportions. Compared to the photo of the American-footage Rita from season 2-onward, things definitely look wacky. The hands are nearly as wide as the narrowest part of the waist and much larger than the visible face. Compared to the very thin upper arms, they look especially oversized, with the thick fingers just adding to a very man-hands appearance. Rita's collar is a separate piece for ease of packaging and just plugs in at the base of the neck. The design on the collar is much more complex than the simple triangles of the costume, and it's also not black, for whatever reason. You probably don't want to take the collar in and out a lot; I've found the tab that holds it in will bend and kind of has to bend to fit in the slot in the back. It's soft plastic, but I worry it might tear with repeated movement. Rita's flowing dress is represented fully, if not exactly faithfully. The poofy sleeves in this case are more like droopy sleeves - if you've ever had a good look at how the sleeves of a yukata are made that's pretty much what's going on here. The skirt ends up not looking poofed out at all, staying pretty slim and with few wrinkles to suggest excess material. The skirt is completely rigid plastic, by the way. However that doesn't stop there being a full length pair of legs inside the skirt. At least the legs are fully static so points of articulation weren't wasted in there. Also color aside, the style of the boots does more or less match the rare instance Rita's boots would be seen in the show. What in the costume was a length of fabric frills down the back of the dress is instead rendered with the same color and fiber texture as in the "hair-horns" on the head. It's likely the headdress was always supposed to be taken as the character's hair, but the sculptor also seems to have mistakenly believed a whole lot more ended up flowing down her back. I blame anime. And finally, yes, Rita's distinctive missile bra is represented, and while the tips are rounded off for safety, they are probably even proportionally bigger here than was ever intended. I again blame anime.

Rita's face is ...special. In truth the sculpt isn't terrible, but it is unquestionably victim of bad painting choices. A blob of magenta to represent lipstick and a couple black lines for eyebrows may leave the face seeming a bit flat, but are not awful in their own right. What is terrible is the eyes being represented by nothing but two black dots. I'll give this credit for one thing at least - Rita finally looks scary, but probably not in the way that was intended. One instance I saw ended up with the eye dots being painted on to the cheekbones, making an existing problem even worse. Mine managed to have paint applied more where eye sockets should be, but it's little consolation. This is really sad because with better paint work, there's a decent face sculpt under there. It may not be any striking likeness of Machiko Soga or Carla Perez, but it doesn't have to look like an escapee from Coraline, either. The deco really isn't bad aside from that. The headdress has gold painted lines around the small red jewel about the forehead, and lining the edges of the "hood" hanging around the sides of the face. The dress itself is kind of paint bare, but the costume didn't have a lot of variation there anyway. The gold lined patterns are represented properly here, and aside from maybe a paint wash to give the impression of some texture, there's not a lot you could ask for different. But that face... just have such a headache...

Articulation ...well, the neck swivels, but is seriously limited by the collar. With that off, the range is unrestricted, but put together correctly you only get a few degrees to either side. The shoulders move as much as you could want, even with the collar on, but past the upper arm swivel that's the end of it. Entirely. I'd already mentioned before that the legs hidden in the dress are unjointed, and even if they had some articulation, it would really amount to nothing. Those feet don't even reach the ground anyway. The arms are sculpted in a slight bend, but there is no elbow joint, no way to turn the wrists, and not even a waist swivel. It's disappointing that they couldn't have put some extra moving parts in the arms since they're clearly not needed elsewhere on this figure. An elbow hinge each and wrist swivel (the hands are certainly big enough to support that!) would have made all the difference for posing.




Accessories

-Magic Wand

Sculpt-wise it gets all the major details down accurately. Though I think the sentai version may have had a chain hanging from the ring somewhere. I don't really remember specifically at the moment. If it did that's absent here, anyway. Where we lack is in paint work. The gold paint is sort of backward. In the prop the inner and outer flat edges were painted in gold, while the sides were dark with gold trim. This has the gold inner surface as well as the flat sides all done solid in gold paint. It kind of looks right if you're not thoroughly inspecting, but then there's the photo on the package to highlight the errors if you just look for them. The rest of the wand aside from the red jewel is painted solid dark brown, and in this case the absence of detail colors is very noticeable. The whole wand is soft plastic, and so will most likely come right out of the package warped to some extent. Oh well, you'd have to expect it to be a little bent after being thrown in the ground from the moon so often. The fit in the hands is on the loose side, but it'll stay put. Mostly because the space between fingers and thumb is very narrow and you're best advised to feed the staff down through the curled fingers. Sadly the limited ability to pose the arms means you can't really get any good poses with the Magic Wand, such as Make My Monster Grow. Sad ExVee.


Closing Remarks

Ultimately this is more novelty than anything. The Power Rangers brand has existed for 18 years and only finally does a Rita figure actually make it to a retail release. That's gonna be enough for most people who'd naturally have an interest. Once again I suppose I bring a review of the figure to warn you off of paying resale prices. These are short packed, so you may have a bit more challenge finding one, but I don't really rate it being worth anything over regular retail.

Plus I'm not altogether happy with the way the figure was realized. I may be crazy, but it seems like elbows should kind of be a pre-requisite on any action figure these days. Points for the fan-nod, I guess, but I'd say scale differences aside, the prior legacy character figures demonstrate how much this Could Have Been Better. But hey, novelty, and for $7 it's worthwhile enough, I figure.

-ExVee