Rey Mysterio WWE All Scale Set
One of the last lines of product from Jakks Pacific before their WWE license went belly up, was the WWE All Scale sets, containing three incarnations of a single wrestler from their Ruthless Aggression, Micro Aggression and Build N’ Brawl collections.
As a concept, it didn’t quite made sense to me to have three incompatible scale figures in a single package, although I must concede that there must be worse ways to end a license. These sets are usually rather expensive at specialty stores, but I was lucky to find a Rey Mysterio set at a rather reasonable price in a trip downtown.
The largest of the figures is the 1/11 scale Ruthless Aggression Rey Mysterio figure. I am not too crazy about it because the articulation is quite less extensive than in the Deluxe Aggression line, but also because of the sculpting style.
Ruthless Aggression figures are made to withstand rough play at the hands of 5 to 12 year old boys who will slam one figure against another and throw them across a room. Therefore, figure construction is quite sturdy and noticeably stockier, resulting in a rather primitive looking figure, in my opinion.
Accordingly, the articulation is kept very simple and consists of:
• Ball jointed neck.
• Peg & hinge shoulders.
• Upper biceps swivel.
• Hinged elbows.
• Swivel & hinge wrists. Free rotation from a cuff cut, and good in-and-out flexing of the palms from a hinge at the base of the thumb.
• Swivel waist.
• Swivel hips.
• Hinged knees.
• Hinged ankles.
One thing I must acknowledge is that the guys at Jakks did give a very nice paintjob to this Rey Mysterio figure. In fact, the mask on this Rey is even more striking than that on some of the pricier Deluxe Aggression figures I’ve seen. The rest of the costume is well painted and shows almost no slop or stray paint marks with the color selection standing out nicely against the base plastic color.
Next we have the Build N’ Brawl Rey Mysterio. The figure is done in 1:18 scale, making it compatible with the 99% of my action figure collection.
Something I love about the Build N’ Brawl line is that it replicates almost to a tee the articulation range found in the Deluxe Aggression figures, only at a smaller scale, making this figure the most articulated within the set. It has:
• Ball jointed neck.
• Peg & hinge shoulders.
• Upper biceps swivel.
• Hinged elbows.
• Swivel & hinge wrists.
• Swivel waist.
• Hinged Torso.
• Ball mounted hips.
• Upper thigh swivels.
• Hinged knees.
• Peg & hinge ankles.
The paintjob is also very good, and consists on a black and gold halved pattern. There is some very fine detailing on the golden half of the costume: On the pants there is a thin black line skull crest with the word Mysterio printed on the outer right leg and half an Aztec calendar visible at the back of the head. From the front, the golden half of the mask looks extremely plain as the sculpted cross at the brow was left unpainted and there are no additional color accents to be seen.
The black half of the costume fares a little better visually, even though it only has the 619 cipher painted using golden dots on the outer side of the left leg and a couple of golden accents on the black half of the mask.
One interesting aspect of collecting Rey Mysterio figures is that you can tell when these were made depending on what tattoos he had at the time. All three versions harkens back to 2008, when he didn’t have the feathered serpent tattoos on his pecs. The other tats are present and done in different hues of olive green and red in a fairly decent approximation to how tattoos look in real life.
Each of the existing tattoos is insanely detailed, and some have to be seen through a looking glass to believe the amount of detail that can be achieved in such a small scale.
And speaking of small, the last figure included in this set is the Micro Aggression Rey Mysterio.
If the Ruthless Aggression line is a grab for the inexpensive segment of the market, Micro Aggression delves even further into Cheap Territory. Each figure is about an inch and a half tall and is sculpted following an openly toy-ish aesthetic. In fact, the posing style and body proportions match those of the rotocast WWE giant wrestler figures; only these are like, 50 times smaller.
Micro Aggression Rey Mysterio has only six basic points of articulation at:
• Neck.
• Shoulders.
• Waist.
• Hips.
All of the joints work as expected, although the neck joint tends to stick a little and the hips are configured as V cuts. The oversized feet provide decent stability and the whole mini figure feels reasonably sturdy.
There is really nothing much to add since the figure design is pretty basic, but as a toy it works well. If anything, Jakks was probably a bit too ambitious with the paintjob on Micro Aggression Rey. The costume is much simpler, consisting on black pants and mask. The 619 cipher can be seen painted at the left leg in red and white and all of the tattoos on the torso are also present although in this scale they do look a little blurry.
The paint on the mask is just OK. The paint fell mostly within the right spots, but it tends to look a little messy due to a few conspicuous stray paint apps.
While the larger figures in this set come with removable rubber elbow pads, Micro Rey has them painted onto the arms. Still, Micro Rey turned out to be my second favorite figure in this set, the first being the 1/18 scale version.
The Ruthless Aggression Rey isn’t a bad figure, but I never did quite like the articulation design in that line. In fact, the RA Rey was one of the reasons holding me back from buying this set much earlier (cost being the other reason), as I didn’t want to pay the full retail price for a set with only one figure I really wanted and one that I considered (at first) as little more than a freebie.
At the cost of a single Ruthless Aggression figure, this set is actually pretty good value although, had the line included a Deluxe AggressionRey Mysterio right from the start, I would have glady bought the set on sight, at the full retail price.
Individual Scores:
Ruthless Aggression Rey Mysterio 74/100
Build N’ Brawl Rey Mysterio 90/100
Micro Aggression Rey Mysterio 76/100
Overall Score: 80/100
Category: Featured, Other Television, Toy Reviews
Kind of a cool concept for a set.
I always liked these sets. I never really bought any, but I thought the idea was novel. If you collected all three lines (as many kids did) you got one of each. If you only collected one line, the inclusion of the others might entice you to start one of the other lines.
The 3 3/4 figures were the best and shows what Jakks could have done if they’d gotten the line at a different point, as opposed to developing it all over the course of a decade or so.