Evil Space Alien

Height: 16cm

Articulation: 10 total points: Swivel neck; 3 points each arm - universal joint shoulder, elbow hinge; 3 points each leg - universal joint hip, hinge knee

Colors: Molded black, silver (accessory only); painted gold and silver.

Accessories: Sword

Release Data: Released in the United States in November of 2007 at a suggested retail price of US$6.99.

Gallery: 8 images.

Author: ExVee



There seems a trend forming in super sentai, and by extension Power Rangers. See, for a few series now, we've had villains in at least semi Ranger-styled suits, who for most of the series act as high level enemies to the Ranger team, only through one means or another to reform to some degree and team up with the Rangers near the end of the series. Two of the past five completed series have used this plot element, and the sixth, currently in progress super sentai seems to be readying to make it an even half. Whether the use of this story element remains interesting after such repetition over a short period of time is a question for other forums. What is without question, however, is that having such prominent villain characters destined for salvation allows us to get nice figures of said characters and their interesting suit designs, sometimes in considerable quantity and variation. Yes, we're looking at you, Knight Wolf.

About the name: The figure is sold with the name Evil Space Alien, which is usually how the figures of the foot soldiers are labelled each year. It's a tradition thing. But the character in Gekiranger is named Rio the Black Lion, and is far from a grunt. There's mostly unsupported speculation that this character in his Power Rangers incarnation will be called Dai Shi or possibly Dai Shin. For purposes of the review, I'll refer to figure by the abbreviation "ESA".


The Figure


The ESA represents one of only two figures in the initial basic figure wave to feature a fully unique body sculpt, the other being the previously reviewed Cheetah Ranger. But where she had a much simpler body to tool molding for, ESA is complex and highly detailed. As such there is a trade off in articulation, as you'll have noticed if you read over the basic information at the top.


The head is sculpted as an orante helmet, with a flowing black mane covering the rear half. A stripe of gold "hair" runs down the middle for most of the length. The mane flows down back of the neck and over the shoulders. This rigid wall of hair restricts the movement of the neck joint, itself only a swivel to start with. The mane is not symmetrical, so you can turn more one way than the other. And the hair flows out from the body just far enough that you can push it slightly into the gap between torso and shoulder for a tiny bit of extra range. There's considerable gold painted surfaces on the head, and while mostly done well, there are visible instances of paint bleed on my example, as well as a few splotches of gold paint where they should not be in the first place. Since the large visor area is the same black plastic as the rest of the head, a thin gold strip was painted along the lower edge to give some visual definition between visor and chin. And to my eye at least, the head seems sculpted and attached in such a way that one could take it as ESA is looking down all the time.


Though ESA is like Cheetah Ranger in not having a shock-activated sound feature, he does have a simple action feature. Pressing a small, silver button on the lower torso makes the jaw of the lion's head close. That's, like, magic or something. I told you in Japan he's called Black Lion, as if you couldn't tell by the giant somewhat stylized lion's head shape of his chest armor. The torso is once again devoid of any functional interest aside from the mentioned action gimmick, coming out only slightly better than Cheetah Ranger.

The arms are probably the most frustrating aspect of the figure. Not only are the arms fixed below the elbow, but there's no swivel in the bicep either. Taken by themselves, this could possibly be overlooked. But the figure has a large sword to swing around, and you need swivel joints to do natural looking poses with it. A wrist or forearm swivel would be great, but at the very least the bicep swivel is absolutely necessary. Despite the three joints present in the arm, the result is that you're still left with a basically static pair of limbs that have little useful posing in them. For my money, I'd have been willing to switch the universal joints in the hips for swivels if it meant having a bicep swivel. Trying to manage fighting poses the way it is is just plain frustrating.

The legs aren't much better. I said I'd be happy with swivel joint hips? That's because the shape of the pelvis, and some of the ornamentation on the legs practically reduce the hip joints to that anyway. I can't complain too much, though. ESA doesn't have a skirt, so he can at least do mildly convincing kicks, and stand with an acceptable level of stability without having to spend a good deal of time trying to balance everything. Don't know whether it's an issue just with my copy of the figure, or a widespread issue, but the hip joints are actually a little on the loose side. Nothing fatal so far, but it could be a problem later, depending on certain factors.


Sculpt and Deco

The sculpt is first rate on this figure. A wide range of small, intricate details are molded all over the body. A good paint wash would really do well to bring much of the detail work out, since it's all in black plastic and thus difficult to see from any kind of distance. The paint is on the sparse side, but to be fair ESA is mostly solid black anyway. But what paint there is suffers from some issues. First of all many of the larger areas of gold have spillover into adjacent areas not meant to be that color. But that's not the worst yet. My copy shows more than one place where there's a blob of paint in an area that isn't even near an area of the same color. It's as if the paint was just dripping everywhere during the deco process. Though these occurences are relatively few, they really upset the overall appearance.


Accessories


The sword is the only accessory present. It's a large weapon, made of a single piece of soft plastic, all painted silver. The fit into the hand is kind of tricky, and I recommend starting with the thinner diameter bit at the bottom and then sliding the grip into the hand. That's the easiest way, and the way that doesn't involve unnaturally bending the not-nearly-as-soft plastic hand. Speaking of bent, your sword, like mine, is likely to come conveniently pre-bent to one side right out of the package. The sword happens to be styled like a chameleon with a large sword coming out from her tail. Interesting, no?


Closing Remarks


Y'know, it's really cool looking. If you're happy enough to leave it in a fixed pose on a shelf, you'd probably be rather happy with this figure. However, as a toy, to be played with to varying degrees? Maybe not so much. I know something had to give in order to have the all new tooling for this figure. And since it's simply larger than Cheetah Ranger, even more had to be lost than was with her. Still, I personally would have gladly (further) simplified the leg articulation and given up the really pointless action feature in order to make the arms just one step more poseable. Well, maybe we'll get a mechanically superior variant down the road. For now Jungle Fury's Evil Space Alien comes out with Could Have Been Better.

But hey, I'm more or less okay with it as a nice looking statue...


-ExVee, 12/05/2007