Finally, we get to the real reason that almost prevented me from taking this piece home, the base. Now, I’ve complained the bases (with Sportsmaster being the excellent exception) from here til Sunday, but this one really does take the sucky cake and makes Aqualad’s base look good.
While I prefer the bases to connect or at least have a unifying theme, I don’t mind SS Superboy coming with a Cadmus interior. The funky red walls and blue pods make for a cool backdrop, but the problem here is the scale. The main feature of the base is the little DNA selector tube. It’s cool – it’s got the little vials and the robot arm coming down to sort them, but have you ever seen a sci-fi movie where the vials are kept at ankle level? I tried out some different figures and the base even looked too small for Infinite Heroes. I had to get down to Glyos-size to find a decent scale (hey, a cool Glyos base!).
This is another what where the engineers at Mattel thinking moment? The base is the key component of why these figures are $20+ and they go and make a shrinky-dink room? And mind you, it’s paired with a figure that needed one new piece – a piece that has plenty of reuse potential to boot. This base could have featured Superboy’s broken capsule, a busted wall, beaten doors – just about anything from Cadmus in scale and it probably would’ve turned out pretty cool, maybe even connected with Guardian’s Cadmus base, but they chose to shrink it down and all but ruin it. That’s boneheaded for collectors and kids alike. The base just stinks all around (unless you’ve got some Glyos or OMFG to give it to).
Overall, I don’t regret the purchase. My regular readers should know by now that completism runs in my veins and, even though they’re pricey, the Young Justice figures are few and far enough between that they’re easy to collect. I’m looking forward to Guardian and Kid Flash in the next wave, Batman’s kinda of a groaner but he looks to have some cool accessories, and ideally the next figures announced will help complete the team. I’m pulling for Miss Martian, but hopefully they can at least get Superboy some pants…
For more DC reviews, check out our
DC Universe Classics Collector’s Guide.
Here’s a couple pics that didn’t make it into the review:
First, the basic front/back…
And a comparison shot of the various Superboys:
Couldn’t Mattel have just used the pants from the modern Starman figure here? I think it’s close enough that most collectors would buy it. Heck, it’s closer than some of the other figures have gotten to their characters’ looks.
Jack is an adult sized figure, I don’t think it would look good at all even if the joints worked.
It’s Mattel, so I doubt the joint from the larger Starman lower torso would match up with the slimmer teen upper body, but either way they’d be too big methinks.
just got my 4″ Superboy from TRU.com. Even he has a “clean”/smooth body, with the jean details painted on. At this point, I’m not surprised by any of Matty’s shenanigans. :/
I think the lower half of Beast Boy might have been better, depending on the style of footwear they wanted to go with.
This figure is too plain. Even the Regen/Black Suit Superman from DCUC w6 had more personality, and that was basic black figure with a couple silver accents. (Did you not have one to do a contrast/compare shot with?)
Still, a bit jealous you have these down yonder while StL is stuck with Artemis clogging the shelves. just double-checked TRU.com and they have the new 4″ figures, but only Artemis and Aqualad on 6″. (Also the Bat and Aqua 2pks, the latter of which are multiplying like Gremlins in the Pacific up here.)
Why you always gotta come up with cool pics ideas after the fact? You’re right though, something could be done here, but the show designers kept it simple.
Target’s been the one doing the heavy lifting here, but I did cheat a bit and pick up Superboy on a long toy run in Arkansas!
Great review, Noisy! I’m loving the Young Justice line bases and all. I’m stoked for Kid Flash and his torn-up street!
Thanks!
I’m looking forward to most of what’s in the pike, I just want to know who’s coming out alongside Batman…
“…I ultimately just bought it because it looked cool…”
That’s the only reason ever needed to buy a toy. Or anything else really, cars, guns, hookers, dogs, motorcycles, etc….
Anyone who tells you differently probably has testicles the size of raisins, and you don’t need to listen to folks like that anyways.
That’s true.
I think I just felt like I painted myself into a corner in the other reviews. That said, the six of these look great together and I don’t mind that a bit (but I want Miss Martian, dammit).
“…One of the parts of Young Justice that I find interesting is that Superman, acting generally out of character for how I perceive he should be, doesn’t know what to do about Superboy…”
I blame this mostly on the fact that most writers for TV and comics are Yankees. Had any of the writers actually lived in the south they’d know how Supes would really handle the situation. Most likely it would involve sitting on the roof of the barn getting drunk then a couple hours of cow tipping, or tractor tipping in their case. Stolen DNA? Cloning? Illegitimate child? Bah. After a couple cases of beer and it’s all water under the bridge.
Dude, Smallville is in Kansas. The South has nothing to do with it. Kansas has real people in it, not Charlie Daniels fans. The whole “Bleeding Kansas” conflict occurred so that the people of Kansas didn’t have to worry about alcoholism being a central part of male-bonding without the appropriate sport associations.
Kansas sounds like it just got a lot less cool. Maybe Superman should have been raised in Louisiana.
Charlie Daniels fans are real people too. I’ve seen them. They’re not just a myth.
pshaw, Kansas is just western Missouri, only flatter and less populated.
have you ever lived in kansas homes? plenty of charlie daniels’ fans (as if that were an accurate barometer for “southhood”) so thanks for elevating the conversation about inaccurate generalizations by making inaccurate generalizations.
superman might have been raised in kansas, but he’s not kansan, he’s kryptonian. the guy deals w/ the globe, and well beyond, on a scope that not a single human being could possibly grasp. he can hear EVERYTHING and has to drown out the countless sounds of dead, disease, mourning, hatred, and suffering every day, and prioritize human life like you decide which t shirt you wear today. the truth is, no one has ever written superman correctly, not yet, because they grasped how out of sync his physical capabilities are w/ his moral and intellectual capacities. he can save only so many people a day, and if you’re not a complete sociopath, how does that rip your psyche apart, day in and day out? more importantly, if you act at all, aren’t you interfering w/ a mechanism that is designed to be self-sustaining? any person you decide to save today could be patient zero for the next plague, or the gal you decide to let die could invent the cure for influenza.
superman being frozen by a choice put on him should be a regular thing, as he tries to weigh out what the best option is. he’s not superhuman in mental capacity, nor is he somehow gifted w/ a metaethical whiteout that allows him to sleep at night… so it stands to reason that the guy should take careful measure of any situation and really try to weigh out what he knows about a situation before acting. so like superboy comes along… how does he respond to that, since it not only casts another being in his very unenviable situation in life, but it also violates his own physical sense of sanctity (being a clone and all). he can’t embrace the boy as a son or a brother, because he’s neither. but he can’t treat the kid spitefully because it’s too risky having a being w/ that much power not feel it has peers. it would be like telling a woman she had a rape baby, who she put up for adoption, but now she has to raise it. any person w/ a conscience would be very conflicted, and supes is no different. him struggling to make the right decision makes him human, it’s why the character can be related to at all.
But Superman being a dick is PART of comic book canon! Kinda hope the Black shirt/Jeans Superboy looks better. This one looks good, but I prefer the other look
That’s true. I think the regular version will have the same upper body here and hopefully new legs.
I guess this is the same figure that Mattel sold at SDCC 2011 as an exclusive…
No, Jare. That was a four incher and actually in the stylized animation style. Mattel has a smaller line with almost no articulation and bigger base pieces, and then this, the DC Universe-somewhat style line with bad head sculpts but reused DCUC bodies.
Braystreet has it right Jare. The SDCC exclusive was for the 4″ line.
Thanks guys, nice to know 😉 too bad the heads are not well done… (at least in Robin)
Looks like an animated Adrien Brody with a wig wrongsided on.
The group shot is sweet! they look quite nice altogether!
Thanks, Ralph!
Fire King
Dude quit being an ignorant asshat.
You obviously don’t really know anything about the South if you think everyone acts like that. Fact of the matter is people that live up in the North and in Cities are more likely to not raise their children then Southern people.
Also you’re not funny at all.
Don’t get your panties in a twist. No need to be so serious. I just extended gulf state courtesy and hospitality to Kansas. Sorry to make Kansasasians seem cooler than they actually are.
And did you just re-state the point I made?
“yes, that is a piece of styrofoam trapped inside the tube there.”
Heh heh heh! ^^ I love that whole paragraph. It just screams inevitable and expected disappointment.
The important thing to note is that there’s no styrofoam used in the packaging of this figure…
The ’emo teen’ face is pretty good, but honestly, I don’t WANT to see the jeans and jacket deco if they’re not going to do Miss Martian. The teen romance thing going on is just darn fun to watch.
Sorry to be the downer again, I just cannot trust Mattel to do the obvious right thing.
I still have faith that we’ll get her. A lot of places are talking about Artemis piling up, but the later figures seem to be selling better and better. The Batman assortment will have at least one more figure in it and, counting variants, there hasn’t been a wave yet without a team member. Ideally, Miss Martian will be next…
Naive & Optimistic. It’s part of the website’s appeal, okay?
I dig. I do wonder what kind of base they’ll come up with her. It would be cruel if Mattel decided to use her ‘normal schoolgirl’ guise as the figure to make.
And wouldn’t THAT be “that’s so Matty!” of them? Clone Suit Superboy and SchoolGirl Megan? Neither really going with the other.
My fear is that they’ll do her in the black/night ops costume because it requires less tooling. I want white/blue.
Ideally, I’d like both versions, but I honestly like the black look better. I’d want to white to be done first, since it’s the standard, but the black looks cooler. I don’t really trust Mattel, though, to give her the hood necessary to complete the look.
Something I was thinking of on the issue of the scale of the base; didn’t it turn out that the Genomorphs, the guys riding around on everyones’ shoulders, were the ones running things at Cadmus (sorry, it’s been well over a year since I watched the premier, so I might be remembering wrong)? That little piece of equipment seems like it might be scaled to fit those guys