Marvel Retro Wolverine – Random Toys

Continuing our Wolverine Celebration, we’re looking at a sort of What If? styled toy. Diamond Select Toys answers the question: What if Mego had made a World’s Greatest Super Heroes figure of Wolverine?

 

In 2015 Diamond Select Toys added Wolverine to their new Marvel Retro line. The toy line is an 8″ Mego styled figure with various cloth outfits and spare parts so you can create 3 different appearances for each character.

The Wolverine figure has 14 points of articulation and the 3 outfits he comes with are all his classic appearances: Brown uniform, Yellow and blue uniform and street clothes. The figure is constructed well but does have some of the limitations of the Mego style (most notably the shoulders and hips don’t really hold any position other than a static standing pose. This is due to how the figure is constructed with two thick rubber bands connecting the arms and legs together through the hollow torso)

One drastic improvement over the original Mego construction is the addition of screws holding the torso together (Original Megos and many repros have a single hollow torso rather than two halves making a hollow torso) Being able to unscrew the torso halves makes switching out the various heads a LOT easier than trying to boil and pop them.

 

Speaking of the heads, here’s the three unique heads that comes with Wolverine. There are two unmasked heads and a sculpted brown suit mask. By itself, the masked head looks like it could potentially be used for both suits, but once you get it near the yellow suit, you see just how orange it really is. The two unmasked heads have two different facial expressions, one head also has shorter hair (this is to allow the removable mask to fit on the head)

 

First off, let’s look at the street clothes outfit. Ignore the skin color difference between the neck and chest, I’m using a loaner body from another Mego-like company. We have the classic Logan outfit with boots, blue jeans, undershirt and leather jacket. There is a set of spare flesh colored fists with extended claws that can be plugged into most Mego-like figures. The shirt is the weak point in this outfit, but otherwise I like everything here. If you don’t want to have a civilian Logan, you at least get clothes for another figure or bystanders or something (you could even slap them on a naked Fonzie figure if need be)

 

The Yellow costume is the one the figure comes packaged in. This costume has some really good points, most notably the jumpsuit, sculpted boots and removable belt. It feels well constructed and fits nicely.

 

The removable cowl is rubbery and can be easily pulled off of the head or put on. I’m not a fan of the removable cowl. Removable masks were used with a few figures back in Mego’s day like Batman & Batgirl, Mattel even included a removable cowl with their Retro Batman a few years back. In pretty much every case, the removable mask looks too big and bulky.

 

The other hindrance in this outfit is the sculpted gloves. The gloves themselves are ok. They’re not exactly great, but not horrible either. The problem is what they reveal…This figure has no normal hands at all! The gloves just slide onto the forearms (which is problematic as there are no hands stopping the gloves from sliding too high on the arms thus making Wolvie’s arms seem shorter than they should)

 

Lastly, we have the Brown outfit. This is by far my absolute favorite look for this figure! It’s pretty much the same construction as the yellow suit with a few improvements made to the gloves and head. The removable belt has a slightly thinner buckle with a gold color rather than the thicker silver buckle on the Yellow costume’s belt.

 

I love how this head is sculpted. This is pretty much a perfect Wolverine head. The paint could be a different shade though. It’s a lighter orange than the costume is. Really, I wish they had made the orange parts of this costume yellow and paint this head yellow as well so it could be used with the yellow costume if you wanted instead of the removable cowl. I think that would’ve been the best way to go since the brown costume has had varying shades of yellow or orange over the years.

 

This outfit comes with two pairs of hands, one as fists and the other as an open hand. Both are painted brown and both have extended claws. The rest of the glove is created with a brown leather cuff piece that goes on the arm before you plug the hand in. The effect works well and is a welcome change to the sculpted glove pieces in the yellow costume or the oven mitts of the old Mego figures.

 

 

All of the Marvel Retro figures also come with a vintage styled long box for the figure to be displayed in. The box is a nice throwback to how many of the Mego figures were originally sold. On the sides of the box you can see other figures in the line as well as the Diamond Select and EMCE logos. ECME Toys are basically the people companies partner with when making Mego-like figures. They’re behind the Star Trek Retro figures Diamond also made along with the Retro DC figures I mentioned earlier that Mattel released.

 

Wolverine fits in well with vintage Mego figures standing around the same height as Spiderman (I never realized how short the Hulk figure was until I took this picture)

 

 

As I said earlier, I love this figure in the brown outfit. There are a few missteps with this $80 set though. The body color of the figure itself makes putting the other heads on any other bodies near impossible with out some glaring color differences. That coupled with the lack of regular hands and removable cowl makes this a tough purchase. I think had they made the sculpted head yellow and slightly changed the colors on the brown outfit, there would be a bigger redeeming factor with this set. As it is, the street clothes and brown outfit are basically the best of this set making the yellow costume unusable  (unless you have Wolvie unmasked)

For Mego collectors these sets are nice and I have to admit, I love being able to add Wolverine to my Mego collection.