The 2002
release of Godzilla Junior is a hard figure to weigh
in on. It does some things very right, and at the
same time some things very wrong. It generally comes
up ahead in the end, but will have both supporters
and detractors.
The first thing to note is the face of the creature.
It looks nice, and highly detailed. There is one
problem, though: it doesn't look like Junior. It
has the "enlonged" look that the son of
Godzilla had, but is far too menacing and in the
end looks better suited to an attempt to create
a figure of the monster's famous father. Part of
the problem here are the eyes. I'm not sure why
they changed them to white and black, as opposed
to the creature's more normal orange, but it further
removes the creature from its source inspiration.
This is especially odd as Bandai got it right the
first time, with their original 8 inch release of
the figure back in 1995.
Moving away from the face, the body of the creature
looks very nice in terms of the mold. There is a
lot of detail here, very small in scale which makes
the whole thing that much more impressive. The bump-like
look of the chest and the leather-like hide of the
rest of the body are both well done. The creature
also has a nice long tail that is shown off to good
effect here.
Now, moving to the back of the figure, the toy
makes another slip up. The spines of the figure
are very lacking. Not in terms of how they were
created for the mold, but the paint job. It's rather
lazily applied, with a white streak sprayed down
the center of the spines, hitting more of the flesh
between the fins rather than the fins themselves
and leaving the outside ones notably green. It's
a lazy effort, and shows.
Furthermore, in regards to paint, there are also
odd light green spots all over the figure. Their
placement, such as the legs and above the arms,
feel haphazard and random. On the plus side, they
make the painting look less dull than an all dark
green shading would, but on the downside it looks
a little strange.
Bottom line, this figure is hit and miss. It's hard
to really gauge it overall. Despite all my criticism,
I still think the figure looks pretty nice, just
a bit lacking as a figure based on Junior in particular,
with a couple of signs of lack of effort in its
construction being overt.
Rating:  |
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