Toy Review: Proving Ground boxset

07/20/10

Iron Man 2 Proving Ground 3-pack

If you grew up in that magical time between the advent of the Internet and the time when it became that incessantantly nagging friend that wouldn’t let you sleep because he wanted to tell you about this great movie he saw last month that totally re-defined the science fiction genre for him, then you probably remember that toy collecting was NOTHING like it was now.

There were no advanced announcements about what manufacturer got which license. There were no prototype pictures that whetted your appetite months before release. There were no test shots being sold on eBay. There was no advance marketing, no sightings report, no variant rumors being circulated, and no post discussions about distribution and quality control. It was all go-down-to-the-toystore-and-check-out-what’s-available. That was it.

My thinking is that if the Iron Man 2 (IM2) Proving Ground 3-pack had been released during that time, it probably would have been much more well-received by me. Sadly in this case, it was not. Prior to it’s release, we’d already seen what the IM2 4″ lines had to offer. We’d seen test shots and prototype photos of these figures for months at various websites. They looked ok, but when they arrived, they were a big dissapointment.

The back of the box shows some of the prototype photos I mentioned. They look ok, right? Nice, clean paint applications. Despite being a trio of re-used figure molds, they look like something I’d want to add to my 4″ Iron Man armory. Sadly, if you’ve been to the Iron Man shelves since these came out, you’ll see that the figures are wracked with quality control issues that are too obvious to be ignored.

Paint quality is the elephant in the room now when you talk about Hasbro’s 4″ Marvel lines, but especially with the Iron Man movie figures. They’ve been using this odd glossy paint for Iron Man’s fire engine red that is prone to uneven applications, clumping, splashing, and chipping. To make matters worse, they’ve chosen a gold paint that fades over time, becoming dark and dull.

It’s enough to make you want to give up all together.

The box itself is something I still take issue with. You don’t need something this big to hold 3 relatively small figures. It’s not as bad as the first Marvel Universe 3-pack boxsets (like the Spidey-Friends or Silver Surfer, Yellow Daredevil & Stealth Iron Man packs) since it’s got the Ironmonger sized Hulkbuster there, but it could have definitely been trimmed down to something similar to the recent 2-packs.

I’ll start with the new Hulkbuster. The back of the box doesn’t really bother to diffrentiate this version from the one that came in the mainline, which is much more accurate to the armor’s appearance in the comic. I have no idea what this version is supposed to represent. It’s basically a re-color of the Movie Ironmonger that was released in the Iron Man 2 mainline, but with some major retooling. A dome helmet was added to the top that replaces the head of the original.

I’m not sure the modification really adds anything to the design. It looks exactly like what it is; an afterthought. Unlike the Comic Hulkbuster, the proportions seem completely off, despite the bigger size of the Ironmonger mold.

The original Ironmonger had minimal paint applications, since he was basically never painted. It’s just raw steel. This one has that aforementioned red and gold paint and it displays all the awful qualities I mentioned. To top it off, the one I have has paint-locked elbow joints. The paint on the hinge joints was allowed to dry and froze the joints in place.

Bad Hasbro.

Moving on, I thought that the War Machine re-color would redeem this set, since the movie War Machine was among the best of the original figures. I was wrong.

Unlike the Omega Factor re-color that came with the Tactical Armor boxset, this one seems to be less thought out. It’s basically an old school camouflage dye job. It might have been nice if they had thought to include the hands and guns in the revision. Instead, those extremities are black. It’s either a glaring oversight or an awfully design. Either way, you end up with a War Machine that isn’t really good looking.

Since the Omega Factor Armor is already primarily green, it would have been far more interesting if they design team had chosen to re-paint this guy for work in another climate zone. Maybe a desert camo pattern, or an artic one that was primarily white. Hell, pink would have at least diffrentiated it from the first two.

There’s one redeeming factor here and that’s the fact that this one comes with a missle pod instead of the large gatling gun/ rocket launcher that the first two came with. It’s removable like the rest of the shoulder attachments, but it’s a different shade of gray from the Movie War Machine. If you want really use it to increase the show accuracy of that figure, you’re going to have to do some touch ups.

The real reason I finally gave in and bought this set is because I really wanted the Hologram Mark VI. It’s basically a re-color of the Mark VI that comes in the main line, just cast in translucent blue plastic so it looks (not well, mind you) as if it’s one of those holograms that Tony Stark used in place of paper schematics.

As I’ve said before, I love transluscent figures. There’s just something about them that makes me over-value a toy. If it’s see-through, I’m usually going to give it a higher score than most think it would deserve.

Again, this is not the case here.

First off, there’s a weird red tinge to the blue plastic, making the figure slightly purple in color. I don’t know exactly why the red is there, but it seriously throws me off.

Second, the whole figure is covered in white and blue markings that I figure are supposed to be diagrams. It doesn’t work because they’re way too light to really register with the viewer, and they’re too thick. They just don’t look like schematic drawings at all.

I probably should have left this on the shelf, but as I normally need to meet a minimum purchase if I want to defer payment at some establishments, I sometimes take a hit like this to fill that quota. In this instance, I really wanted a Transformers Generation Thrust and Drift.

I can tell you I had way more fun with those two toys than I did with these.