Wal-Mart Exclusive Iron Man Stealth Operations Suit

Height: 16 cm to top of head.

Articulation: 31 total points: Ball joint neck; Mid torso double-joint; 7 points each arm - Universal shoulder, pre-elbow swivel, double hinge elbow, universal wrist; 7 points each leg - Universal hip, mid-thigh swivel, double hinge knee, universal ankle.

Colors: Molded metal-flake gunmetal, clear blue, clear orange, grey; Painted silver, dark grey, blue, white.

Accessories: Forearm cannons x2; Missiles x2

Release Data: Released exclusively at Wal-Mart stores in the United States on March 23rd, 2008 at a price of US$9.96

Gallery: 21 images.

Author: ExVee



As some of our longtime readers may know, Jim Rhodes has been one of my favored characters from the Iron Man series, but sadly he's been somewhat underrepresented between Toy Biz and Hasbro's various efforts in the past few years. The first Marvel Legends entry was essentially a crime against humanity, and a remold of a remold of a prior Iron Man figure. Next was a recolor of the Marvel Legends Face Off Modular Armor Iron Man with only a remolded face beneath the mask. Now with the release of the Iron Man movie, Rhodey is again represented as a remold of an Iron Man figure, but this one doesn't even have a removable helmet. I'm not sure how to judge that one on the grand scale of getting screwed over.

Indeed, Hasbro is getting a fair bit of mileage out of the movie's Mark 03 design, and their basic figure of it. Besides the original and a plain recolor, there's a Target exclusive red and silver recolor, and this Wal-Mart exclusive recolor/remold. Strictly speaking, this figure is not War Machine. It's being sold as Iron Man Stealth Operations Suit. But the intent is of course very clear, especially since the bio on the packaging names the operator as Rhodey. There's suggestion that later this year we might get a War Machine in name as well as appearance. Hopefully, for the first time in modern comic book derived figures, we'll end up with a War Machine that is not a second run of an Iron Man figure.



The Figure


Hasbro did well to capture the appearance of the helmet design, which ironically I always found to better resemble War Machine than Iron Man. The head is articulated upon a very large ball joint, which the head can easily be dislodged from. This massive neck joint also serves to restrict articulation for the head; while it can easily swivel all the way around, tilt in any direction is sadly lacking.

The torso features all of the remolding this figure enjoys, which is to accomodate the standard heavy weaponry attributed to other suits of this color. Both of the special weapons have a missile launching function, which means they have holes of variable conspicuousness added to them. Both weapons can be removed from their hinged hardpoints - a little too easily, even. Apply pressure to the wrong spot on the minigun, and it'll pop right off before you get it moved all the way into place. The micro-missile pod fares a bit better in this area, but because the mount point is far off-center the missile launcher tends to sag down to the side. The minigun, for having a launcher gimmick, is unable to spin its barrels (personally, I'd have probably preferred a button-driven spinning action for this rather than the launcher) and the micro missile pod looks a bit odd for having two sets of four missiles, with a large space and hole between them. Finally, I'd have just loved if these weapons could have swiveled, even a little bit. As it is, when deployed they look a little bit too close to the head, relative to their mass.

On the other hand, I'm really digging this mid-torso joint. It's fully concealed, so I can't see exactly what's going on in there, but it allows bending the torso forward and backward, as well as full-range swivel. It works very smoothly and is so hidden that it can't detract from the figure's appearance in any way. Probably the best execution I've seen of this kind of jointing, especially since Toy Biz's early Iron Men had a sad way of snapping in half at their torso joints...

Finally, there's a problem here that's really present throughout the figure. The build is really on the slim side. The movie didn't seem to portray Iron Man as being this thin or tall, and Rhodey certainly didn't look this lean. Seems to me like a powered suit of armor should appear a bit wider relative to its height. To go by this figure, both Stark and Rhodes must be 6'8" and weigh 98 pounds.

The arms are capped with spaulders, which at least with my copy of the figure don't fit as securely as I feel they should. There's a marked habit towards sagging away from the torso, and they're somewhat prone to popping or even simply falling off. It's possible these are case-to-case issues with the pieces getting slightly bent during assembly or packaging. The articulation in the arms is pretty much standard, and certainly conforms to the Hasbro Marvel Legends pattern of jointing. Noticably missed is the forearm swivel, though in this case its essential function can be taken over by the wrist joint with little functional loss. What neither I nor apparently anybody else can figure out though is what the deal is with the crazy fixed-poses of the hands. The right hand has all but the index finger and thumb tightly closed. The thumb and index finger are in a position that looks like he should be holding a gun. ...or maybe picking his nose, although this model armor has omitted that feature. The left hand is a bit less bizarre, and could easily be a 'firing repulsor' pose, except the armor plate on the back of the hand prevents the wrist hinge bending to make that possible.

The legs thankfully manage to blend the large universal joint hips into the legs better than most such attempts I've seen. But this is balanced by the fact that the joints seem to act a bit peculiar. The swivel joint going into the pelvis is at an unusually high angle - at least for an action figure, it's pretty close to correct for a real person - which makes the swivel motion of the hip feel a bit unusual. Plus, the mid-thigh swivel is tighter than the hip joint, so when you try to turn that joint to match the hip swivel, you end up moving the hip instead. It's actually pretty difficult to get the legs exactly in the pose you want since there's not much to grab on to in order to brace the hip joint. The rest of the articulation is about what you'd expect. The ankle is fairly nice, actually. It's basically put together the same way as the wrist, so while it doesn't have as much range of motion as some other figures, it still gives you some nice possibilities.

The real downside here is that the knee joints are made of a suprisingly soft plastic, that is very unfortunately prone to warping in-package. See the gallery for my own personal example of this condition. As with any sort of soft plastic held in the wrong position for an extended period, the plastic will bend, but it won't go back. It's very difficult to determine this before taking the figure out of the packaging, but do try to pay a little extra attention when choosing your figure.


Paint and Deco

All of the silver is painted, and the covering fairly smooth and consistent. Then it's topped with a blackwash to give it a somewhat grungy appearance. To be honest, I probably would have been just as happy without that, especially since the coverage is pretty spotty and doesn't serve very well to bring out the details in the sculpt.

The worst painting offense is the helmet, where the blue for the eyeslits is noticably both crooked, and off-center. The spots in the sculpt where the eyes are intended to be is partly visible and unpainted, and the crooked just throws off the lines of the helmet altogether.


Accessories


-Missiles

The photos on the package seem to suggest these were meant to be two different molds, but the actual missiles are both the same sculpt. One missile is molded in translucent blue while the other is translucent orange. The launchers have a respectable power, launching either missile several feet. While this missile design is passable in the minigun, I have to say that it just looks stupid in the micro missile launcher.


-Forearm Cannons

These have cuffs, basically. They fit over the narrow part of the forearms, and you slide them up toward the elbow until they wedge into place. I'd have been much happier with simple pegs. It's difficult to attach these and make them hold position, and at the angles they seem to hold snugly, it's awkward to pose the figure to fire them. I've also found that these tend to be mis-assembled. They're molded in halves, which are glued together. Thus, both of my figure's guns are put together where the barrels are visibly out of alignment, and there's visible gaps between the pieces. Although these were included for completion of the standard War Machine design, I tend to just leave them off.



Closing Remarks


While I do appreciate the concept of this figure, in some ways it feels like this just wasn't given the attention it really needed. While there's really no contest between this and the Marvel Legends War Machine, there's definitely room for improvement here. If we do get a new sculpt War Machine later down the line, hopefully some of these issues will have been addressed.

However, I have to admit that the base figure here is certainly pretty capable, and while the special modifications for this remold seem to bring it down a touch, the overall package manages to get by. Be careful when choosing your figure, but as long as you can't pick out any grievous errors, you'll probably be fine. Iron Man Stealth Operations Suit is pretty Good.

-ExVee, 5/11/2008