Fin Fang Foom and My Quest For His Legs
07.23.08 By Collin DavidTrue to Hollywood marketing form, every superhero-adventure-summer-blockbuster film has been accompanied by a line of collectible action figures. Mattel produced 2 lines of figures and vehicles to coincide with The Dark Knight (which were exceptionally hot due to the untimely death of Heath Ledger), and Hasbro gave us an array of Iron Man and Hulk toys for the selfsame movie.
While Hasbro’s Hulk movie figures were met with derision due to their substandard quality and ad nauseum repetition the Hulk himself (all with different action features), Hasbro also took the opportunity to ride the Hulk hype and produce an entirely different, comic-based line of Hulk figures - which are selling with wild success, even at the unusually high $15 price tag.
This line of eight Hulk-related figures has been a holy grail for me since I first saw them back at Toy Fair. While I have a causal collection of Hulk toys (because really, the guy’s gone through about a million changes and ‘costumes’, and he’s iconic), I was more interested in the enormous figure that you can build if you collect all eight - Fin Fang Foom. While the name might be ridiculous, the character is a shining example of the wacky energy that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby pumped into their comics in the 1960s. As a semi-rabid Kirby devotee, this was a thing that I needed to have around. Plus, he’s a giant space dragon - a combination of three of the greatest words in the English language. You know, aside from ‘naked sandwich robot’.
Other great Jack Kirby names : Arnim Zola, Flippa Dippa, Agnar the Fierce, Baron Zemo, Bombu, Devil Dinosaur, Galactus, Annihilus, MODOK, and Giant Man. Interestingly, nearly every ‘build-a-figure’ that’s been made in the Marvel lines is a Jack Kirby / Stan Lee creation, from X-Men’s Sentinels to The Blob, excluding Onslaught, Apocalypse, and The Brood Queen. Kirby’s just that epic. You need to buy eight figures just to build one of his.
Whenever a new line of figures comes out, I hit the message boards and browse for sightings. Toys generally start out in California, and over the next three weeks, slowly make the crawl to New York. The original plan for this Hulk line was to release the first four figures in July, and release the second quartet in August. There would be a two-month long interim in which you’d only have half of a space dragon built. It was a strange plan for Hasbro to make, especially when collectors feel very unsettled about half-completed things, but it was Foom. My love affair with space dragons could endure.
I hit Toys ‘R’ Us one morning and found the first five figures, and immediately loaded them into my arms and ran to the checkout counter. I was so excited (and possibly sweaty) that I didn’t even bother checking deeper into the pegs, since the back of the package now revealed a change in Hasbro’s plans. These first five would ship now, and the remaining three would ship in August. Because these were being touted as ‘limited edition’, reports were also coming in that if your local Toys ‘R’ Us (my only real buying option, due to my remote location) was going to get any at all, they were pretty much limited to one case - and that these were all shipping at once. My Foom was legless, and even after returning to the store about 4 times each week, my search turned up nothing. When the pegs were finally taken down and replaced with Batman stuff, I resorted to eBay. Again, for the unrequited love of a space dragon.
But for a while, I was on the hunt again. The toy collector climate in my area isn’t all that heated, since I’m friends with one other serious collector, and the only other collector that I know of is the ‘greasy hat’ guy that I’ve caustically written of before. I’m not the kind of guy who’ll wait outside of the store, breathing heavily on the windows until I’m let in. My dedication isn’t worth the cost of my soul or dignity, or a healthy breakfast. I’m of the mindset that if I’m meant to find something, it will present itself to me, and that stress-less (and somewhat Zen) attitude towards collecting has served me well enough. But somehow - I was really serious about Foom. I was hunting hard, just short of wearing a snazzy camo getup and carrying a compound bow through the toy aisles. I had something to look for - but it was never about ‘having’. Somehow, it was more about Jack Kirby, and having something of his around to inspire me creatively. When it comes to creativity, I’m relentless, remorseless, and have no budget.
Today, I finished my Fin Fang Foom, legs and all, and he’s a towering monument to the heart of comic culture - and by far the best ‘build-a-figure’ made since Hasbro’s taken over the ‘Marvel’ lines from ToyBiz. Sure, Foom has no formal relation to The Incredible Hulk, as he’s more of an Iron Man villain than anything else, but I’ll take him where I can get him. While the classic Marvel Legends line seems to be either fading out or spinning into less ‘Legendary’ characters since Hasbro rook over, the Hulk line keeps true to both recent and classic comics.
Stay tuned for a detailed review of the eight Hulk figures!
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Article Tags: action figures, fin fang foom, Hulk, Jack Kirby, Marvel Legends================
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