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Thor (Blob Series)

February 24, 2014 | By Errex More

Well, many of you may not remember that the Marvel Legends line was not originally made by Hasbro, but by Toy Biz, a company that held the Marvel license since the late 80’s up until 2007. Although Hasbro acquired the license that same year, it still took them some time to set up the proper production lines to start churning out their 6-inch scale figures.

One of the characters produced for the second wave in the Hasbro–made Marvel Legends line was Thor. But not just Classic Thor, but the bearded, Lord of Asgard version inspired by artist Walt Simonson’s run in the Thor comic books.

One thing to remember is that at the end of Toy Biz tenure of the line, they had reached a point where almost every action figure produced by them had insane amounts of articulation, and when Hasbro took over they had to dial it back a notch, which was a sore point with the fans of the old line.

Thor’s attire strikes a pretty good balance between the Jack Kirby design and more modern versions. Lord Thor is depicted bare armed, wearing scale mail under a heavy, fur-collared cloak. His winged helmet has a cheek plates that hide a good deal of his face, but the long hair and beard can be clearly seen.

The overall sculpture is really good. Thor’s face does convey a nice amount of expression despite most of it being covered either by the helmet or the beard, and the armored bits have sharp, clean lines.

The body proportions are suitably heroic, although the figure seems to have a slight hunched-over stance, probably a design choice to help balance the heavy rubber cloak with the accessories included.

Articulation is nowhere near the Toy Biz standard, but is not that far behind current Marvel Legends figures. The articulation spread for this Thor goes like this.

• Ball jointed neck.

• Pegged hinge shoulders.

• Pegged hinge elbows.

• Pegged hinge wrists.

• Hinged torso.

• Swivel waist.

• Pegged hinge hips.

• Upper thigh swivels.

• Double hinged knees.

• Pegged hinge ankles.

I a nutshell, this is a very similar design to what Hasbro used for the 3.75-inch scale lines, except for the hinged torso and the double hinges at the knees. Overall, functionality is decent, although the hair sculpt blocks entirely the movement range at the neck.

The one ting that really feels like a letdown is the paintjob, or more likely, the lack of it. Even though Thor has a good deal of sculpted textures, his body was molded in bright blue plastic that overpowers what little painted details are there. The cape fares a little bit better because the plastic it was molded from has a subdued red hue, but overall the color scheme looks very basic.

Lord Thor comes with a fair amount of accessories. For a start, the cape is removable, which adds a lot of play and display value. And as it turns out, the shoulders pads underneath the cape can also be taken off the figure.

He also comes armed with a really large battleaxe and a very worn version of Mjölinir. Again the paint applications on these weapons are very sparse and fail to take advantage of the textures sculpted on them.

Additionally, Lord Thor comes with the head of the Blob, who was the Build-A-Figure from that wave. I have to admit that packaging a severed head alongside a character equipped with a big axe is pretty clever, although not precisely subtle.

In retrospect, I do think that this version of Thor still holds up pretty well, despite the lack of decoration. I would certainly love to see an update of this particular version of Marvel’s God of Thunder, but chances are we won’t in the foreseeable future.