Iron Man Movie

Modern Armor Iron Man (Marvel Legends Series 8)

Height: 16.5cm to top of head.

Articulation: 44 total points of articulation: double-jointed neck; 11 points in each arm- double-jointed shoulder, hinged shoulder armor, bicep swivel, double-jointed elbow, hinged wrist, hinged digits; mid-torso hinge; swivel waist; 9 points in each leg - double-jointed hip, thigh swivel, double-jointed knee, shin swivel, double-jointed ankle, hinged toe.

Accessories: Base, Posterbook.

Colors: Molded maroon. Painted yellow-orange, gunmetal, fleshtone, black, white and blue(eyes), and silver paint wash. Base molded black, painted silver, orange, red, blue, black, and black ink wash.

Release Data: Released in 2005 at a suggested retail price of $8.99. This item is out of production as of this review (February 20th, 2007.)

Gallery: 13 pictures.

Author: RAC
 

The Figure

Good luck finding this at a reasonable price. After doing a couple of Iron Man's older incarnations, Toy Biz finally elected to add his most recent armor to Marvel Legends Series VIII in 2005. Unfortunately, they managed to include him in a wave that turned out to be relatively hard to find, and was released a full year before Tony Stark was put at the center of Marvel's current Civil War crossover event. Couple that sudden infamy with the collector stampede caused by Hasbro's taking over the ML line, and you've got a recipe for some major eBay profits, assuming you were on the ball in `05. Which I wasn't, meaning I had to resort to the secondary market to get mine. Drat.

It's a good toy- Iron Fans aren't going to get stuck with a piece of junk for their $25-50- but there's a few things I'd have done a bit differently.

The Head

The head is just about the smallest of the Iron Men I've acquired so far. Because this Iron Man is also the tallest of the lot- not counting outsized armors like the Hulkbuster and Thorbuster- it's one of a few things that makes him look kind of tall and skinny, even though his proportions are close to normal for a Marvel Legends figure. There's a ball-joint mounting the head to the neck, and a hinge mounting the neck to the torso. The range is pretty good, though the high collar on the armor restricts it somewhat. As with all ML Iron Man figures, the faceplate is removable, showing Tony Stark's face. I'd heard reports that the mask was loose- nothing new, I ultimately glued First Appearance Iron Man's mask on- but as long as I slide the mask on forehead-first and then push the gunmetal "teeth" into place, it stays very well.

The Arms

The arms are set on a fairly long shoulder joint that is another factor for the skinny look. Even so, the joints are covered pretty neatly by the hinged shoulder armor. Which is good- without the armor they'd look completely unnatural as opposed to just sort of weird. The shoulder has a swivel at the torso, and another at the top of the arm for lateral movement. The bicep swivel is well-placed and pretty much unobtrusive. The double elbow-joint is painted- something I've seen ToyBiz do more than once and something I rarely consider a good idea. The second joint really doesn't add much to the elbow, either, due to the shape of the gauntlets. The forearm swivel is well-placed, just under the banded part of the gauntlet.

The wrists are hinged, but the shape causes trouble again, as the hand can't swing up to the most logical, natural pose necessary to use the Repulsors in the palm. So you have to pose the arm in more of a waving-hi type of pose to point the palm outward. It's a small thing, but this has been Iron Man's most common attack for a long time, so it's really a big kind of small thing, if you know what I mean. Moving the joint up the arm a few millimeters would solve it, even if having the joint there would look less natural. The fingers are also individually hinged, a neat feature not always seen.

The Torso

The key proportional misstep, in my opinion, is the torso. It's too long. I feel that all the proportional problems spring from this- if he were shorter, his head wouldn't seem so tiny, his arms probably wouldn't need set out so far from the body, and he'd look about right. The other issue I have is the sculpt of the torso- the current comic depictions of Iron Man show a much sleeker version of the same thing- a few details have been resized, but the biggest change is the depth of the detailing- most of the plates look thicker here than they do in the recent comics. And there's a curious addition in the form of the fins on the back.

All that aside, the sculpt looks quite nice in and of itself. The detail is sharply sculpted, and the plates are detailed well. The mid-torso hinge works well in one direction only- Iron Man can arch his back but cannot lean forward due to the sculpted armor plates on his midsection. The swivel waist is unobstructed, and the hips are covered by a pair of discs that trace their lineage all the way back to the original Iron Man armor. Here, though, they're perfectly round and set out from the body so as not to obstruct the waist or hips. It looks like he's wearing grapefruit halves- there had to be some better way to do this detail.

The Legs and Feet

The hips are the Legends standard, the same kind of universal joints that Hasbro has been using on every part of Star Wars figures except the hips. After that is a swivel, followed by the double-hinged knee. The shape of the thigh and calf allow for a pretty tight bend- not as tight as nice square Gundam limbs do, but the next best thing. The shin has a swivel joint, effective but awkward looking since the shin-guards on the armor are very sharp and very straight- again, sharper than the art would indicate.

The foot jointing all does okay, but like the wrists and elbows are mitigated by the shapes of the armor. The foot can only swing forward so far because of the Gundamesque ankle guards. I am able to speak with much experience when I say this would have worked far better as a separate, hinged piece. The side-to-side movement of the ankle joint is good- later ML figures introduced a version of this joint with far greater range, but it works well enough to allow for some extra poseability. Because of the broad, flat plate on top of the foot, the hinged toe is next-door to useless, however.

Paint and Decoration

Paint's a bit sloppy, a pretty common issue with Marvel Legends under Toy Biz. There's a couple places around the edges of things where the slightly-orangeish yellow doesn't cover as well as it should. But Tony's face is well done, and I like the use of a full-body silver wash to accomplish a metallic look- it's an interesting alternative to vaccum-metalized chromes and metalflake plastics. Even so, I think it'd look better over a brighter set of plastics. Apparently to Toy Biz the adjective "Modern" turns a red and gold suit of armor the colors of bricks and taxi cabs.

Articulation gets 8/10

Sculpt and Deco get 7/10
 

Accessories

-Base

Iron Man doesn't usually need a lot of accessories- his hand weapons are built into his hands, and if Tony Stark needs some kind of extra feature he usually just builds an entirely new suit of armor. Before the advent of the Build-A-Figure (which first hit in the wave immediately after this one), the traditional Marvel Legends answer to this problem was a base.

I'm not usually big on elaborate display bases- I never use them- but Modern Armor Iron Man's is a winner. It implies that we just missed a really great fight scene: standing in front of a melted, still red-hot wall Iron Man, once placed on the base, is surrounded by the shattered bodies of his enemies: in this case, longtime Avengers foe Ultron, looking a lot better and more like himself than he did on his actual Marvel Legends figure in the Legendary Riders series. The base looks great, and the detailing is excellent- each of the Ultrons even has slightly different decoration schemes!

It can be kind of tough to actually get the pegs on the stand attached to Iron Man's feet due to all the Ultron corpses you have to work around, but at the same time they can sort of be used to brace the legs, so as long as it's not shaken he ought to stay well enough. Be warned, though: it's really heavy, easily outweighing the figure it's designed for. The connection between the bottom and the back of the base isn't is strong as I'd like- if you go to hang it on the wall, as it's designed to do, it's probably going to be best if you put a couple nails or screws underneath the base too to keep it from separating and dropping Iron Man and the Ultrons on the floor.

-Poster Book

As opposed to the usual comic book, you get a collection of illustrations of Iron Man in his more recent armors- the oldest shown is the Modular Armor recently featured in the second wave of the ML Face Off series. The quality here is pretty varied, and it helps show that no two artists draw Iron Man's modern armors quite the same way. The standout, to me, is recent Iron Man regular artist Adi Granov. Granov's pretty much setting the style for Iron Man's armor right now, and it's the best looking since the Modular Armor, which is over ten years old. As I mentioned above, it's a lot smoother than the figure's armor, looking less like the figure's overlapping plates in most places and more like large stretches of armor with what equate to the panel lines on Gundam figures. I get the feeling that the figure's sculpt was based more on some of the other versions in the book- there's one that looks quite close except for the strange cables that make up the yellow parts of the legs.

The book's on a much sturdier and more glossy stock than the comics typically included. There are some two-page spreads that can only be displayed by pulling the book apart- I don't really have an opinion about this one way or another, but figured it should be made known.

Accessories get 8/10
 

Closing Remarks:

So, if you had the foresight to purchase back in 2005, this was definitely a good use of almost ten bucks. Today, when it'll cost you three to five times that much? I'm pretty satisfied with my purchase- sculpting choices aside, it looks good, if a bit skinny, and it's got some great articulation. I do find myself gazing longingly at the Granov pages of the poster book and wishing I could have a more accurate version of that Iron Man.

If you feel that way from looking at the pictures? My advice is wait. Unless you want the figure out of a sense of completeness or just get obsessed with finding the thing like I did, odds are good there's a better Iron Man on the way. There have always been lots of them in the ML line, and with a major feature film hitting next year, we'll all be neck-deep in Iron Men soon enough. If Civil War compels you to buy one- because hey, how many really good Captain America villains are there?- and the price doesn't stagger you, then go for it. It's Very Good.

-RAC, 02/20/2007