Hasbro has dished Wal-Mart a little love in the form of a couple sets of exclusive 2-packs. Cannonball and Domino get packaged together, while Cable and Marvel Girl enjoy each other’s company in the another set. I was completely sold on Cannonball and Domino - these are the first incarnations of either character under the Marvel Legends banner (be it by ToyBiz or Hasbro) and the figures just came out pretty nice. Cable and Marvel Girl on the other hand were passes. Expand the post to find out why!

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CANNONBALL & DOMINO

Cannonball and Domino are really shining as some of my favorite recent figures. Let’s start by addressing what Hasbro did right with these figures. First off, they reused old ToyBiz sculpts - the ML series 7 Ghost Rider and X-Men Classics Series 3 Rogue sculpts to be exact. These rehashes are perfectly suited to the characters and it gives them solid articulation (which they surely wouldn’t have had if Hasbro had gone with original sculpts). The paint jobs are good enough to not ruin the figures, and the head sculpts that Hasbro whipped up aren’t too bad.

But… (there’s always a but…) Hasbro did manage to muck up Domino a bit. So, here’s what went wrong. Most glaringly, her hair sits way too high and far back on her head, giving her a weird, unnatural hair line and giant forehead. Sigh. Also, they hooked her up with a cool belt with gun holsters, but they glued it too high up on her waist (in the middle of her belly, actually), blocking her flight-stand peg hole in the back. And, they glued it on off-center (at least on mine), so I had to rip it loose and reposition it, leaving her with a strange, sticky residue on her belly (Oh my!). Aside from that, though, there are no major problems and I’m thrilled to have these two characters in my collection.

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CABLE & MARVEL GIRL

Oof. That’s pretty much all that should be said here. But I’ll get specific anyway. Okay, I passed on this set, obviously. Why? Well, first off, Hasbro tried to Frankenstein together a Cable figure that just plain came out laughable. Cable is big, hulking behemoth of a man. He stands 6′8″ and weighs upwards of 350lbs. So, one would think that his action figure would be equally imposing. Hasbro, for whatever reason, decided to put ToyBiz’ original Cable figure’s arms on a reused body from a ToyBiz Wolverine figure (Wolverine is 5′3″, btw). Granted, the particular Wolverine body they chose is too tall for that character, it’s still diminutive compared to what should have been Cable’s stature. So, you get a thin, small body, with huge monkey arms. Why, Hasbro? Why?

Marvel Girl is just as much a screw up as Cable. She’s a direct reuse of the Marvel Girl body sculpted for the third series of Marvel Legends (for those who are confused, this Marvel is the original MG, who later just started going by her name to Jean Grey. The other MG, the one in HML3 is Rachel Grey, Jean’s daughter from an alternate reality, who used to go Phoenix but now uses MG as an homage to her mom. Get it? Eh, me neither). Anywho, the problem with this is that the younger HML3 MG figure has a bare midriff (exposed stomach) while this older MG is supposed to be sporting a tunic that covers her entire torso. Hasbro half-assed it by just painting green over the obvious stomach sculpt. Crap-py. Then, they popped a head sculpt that has to be some kind of a joke. Plus, having a Hasbro sculpt packaged right next to a superarticulated ToyBiz sculpt really just shows how far down they’ve dragged this line. And I guess that’s really all I have to say about that…

Tags: cable, cannonball, domino, exclusives, hasbro, marvel girl, marvel legends

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