Here’s another trip into the Realm of the Patently Ridiculous.

I was casually browsing the aisles at the local toy store last week, having expanded my travels beyond the lax selection of the superhero and Star Wars aisles and into the unfamiliar terrain of the wrestling figures. I’ve always been a bit interested in having a Captain Lou Albano action figure, since he played the coveted, nigh-Shakespearean role of Mario on The Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which was a pivotal point in my emotional and social development. Which explains a lot. My admiration of Captain Lou grew when my grandparents would come back from a local restaurant and claim to have seen him eating there, since he lived nearby, and my admiration would wane two decades later when I saw him screaming into a cellphone on a public access TV commercial for tires. How the mighty have fallen. One day you’re fighting piranha flowers in the Mushroom Kingdom, and the next, you’re in a parking lot shilling automobile parts.

I didn’t find a Captain Lou, and I barely know the names of any wrestlers that came into being since 1990, but in my browsing, I came across what is probably the best action figure ever, and from here on into the future. Simply, it was called The Meat.

Upon closer inspection, The Meat was part of the new Rocky line of action figures made by Jakks (who are also responsible for creating a large portion of the wrestling figures). I’ve never seen any of the 62 Rocky films, and I have a pretty serious rule about not buying action figures from movies that I haven’t seen, but I also have a serious love of meat. In the hierarchal chain of Carnivores Throughout the Universe, I’m somewhere between ‘lion’ and ‘flesh eating fleshbeast of Fleshulon 9’. It’s become a recurring theme in paintings, been thwarted by dating various vegetarians, and has become this weird identifier of me among my friends, in which I’ve become synonymous with cephalopods, Batman, and meat products. I aspire to taste every edible animal on the planet someday, so I couldn’t pass up on a figure of The Meat.

The role of The Meat in the movie is a fairly important one, becoming a training tool for Rocky previous to his prizefights, punching the living daylights out of it to increase endurance. I’ve taken this technique and adapted it to my own means and daily routine, regularly walking along the back counter of the supermarket and punching the prepackaged hamburger patties while loudly singing ‘Eye of the Tiger’. I feel stronger already, and no one messes with me. The fact that The Meat would warrant its very own labeling and action figure package instead of being packaged as a accessory with another figure was a glorious thing indeed.

The first wave of Rocky figures is pretty comprehensive - Rocky in three different training and fighting outfits, regular and battle-damaged boxes, Adrian, and even Mick and Paulie, each one with great likenesses and real fabric outfits. The line is impressive enough to convince me to but a Rocky and an Adrian also, and I’m half-tempted to go back and pick up a Mickey, just so I can have Burgess Meredith in action figure form. Jakks plans on following up this line of figures with figures from every Rocky movie, which means that we’ll be getting a Mr. T before too long. Everyone from boxers to loan sharks and ring announcers will be represented in the line. As far as I’m concerned, they can’t get any better than The Meat.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.