Wednesday, December 17, 2023

Clear Plastic Fetish, Part 2: Heroes and Spacemen.

To bridge the gap between clear plastic "robots and monsters" in the previous post, and "heroes and spacemen" in this one, I need to bring up a toy line that I fell in love with the minute I started seeing it in the bargain bins at my local stores.

Mantis Alien

Here we have the "Mantis Alien" from the Kenner line of Aliens toys. A line that to this day confuses me, given the fact that none of the Alien movies have ever been kid appropriate. Still though, I love the silly variety and cornball approach that Kenner took when marketing the whole Alien idea to children.

And speaking of marketing, what could be better than these next two? First we have the "transporter" version of Captain Kirk from the brilliant Playmates Star Trek line. I love everything about the Playmates Star Trek figures, but nothing seemed better than a version of Kirk where half of his body is made of glittery yellow jelly, and he actually lights up!

Captian Kirk

Yes, I did put Star Trek above Star Wars on this list, because long before I started wishing that I could have my own protocol droid, I was wishing that I could do the Vulcan nerve pinch. Still though, I do love Star Wars merchandise, and I'm a sucker for any and just about all of the "holographic" figures that Kenner and Hasbro have put out.

For their simplicity, these figures of Vader and the Emperor are favorites.

Holographic Vader and Emperor

A few years ago I was given a "stealth" version of Master Chief from the Jakks Pacific line of Halo figues. As much as I've been enjoying the McFarlane Halo 3 line, I do think that Jakks did a great job of building some very solid and play-friendly Halo figures. In particular--and for obvious reasons--I love this clear version of everyones favorite Spartan soldier.

Master Chief

Having grown up a Marvel fan in the '70s and early '80s, it was only in the last decade or so that I started to appreciate many of DC's secondary characters. Martian Manhunter has become a favorite, and better yet, he offers up plenty of reason for transparent figures to be made.

Mattel has done a great job with their handling of Justice League toys, and have given us a number of fun, clear plastic versions of Martian Manhunter.

Martian Manhunter

And from DC Direct came this "translucent" Martian Manhunter figure, which pushed me single-handedly into buying figures from this line.

Martian Manhunter

One of the most recent additions to my ever growing army of transparent plastic toys, is a figure from Hasbro's Marvel Legends line. It's a toy that for the most part I wasn't really looking to buy, but once I saw it in person, and saw how well Hasbro had managed everything from sculpt to build quality, I couldn't resist.

This is probably my favorite version of the Human Torch that either Hasbro or Toy Biz have done. Though it's pretty much just a rework of an earlier version, enough has been changed to push it from being mediocre to something great. (Now all we need is a decent transparent version of the Invisible Woman.)

Human Torch

So there you have it. A tasty little Whitman's Sampler of clear plastic toys to be found cluttering up my home. Obviously I could have included a number of other great toys into this mix, and though a few more fell into my lap as I was sorting these out, I think it's a pretty good example of what I like best about these kinds of toys... or perhaps toys in general.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

i didn't know there was a glitter pants captain kirk, that's awesome.
i went to a junk shop and found picard and data. picard has pink sparkle pants lol. they had a worf also that i kind of want to go back and get too.