figures – Page 3 – CaptainJLS.com

Dragon Stars Super Saiyan 4 Vegeta

There comes a point in every long-running franchise’s lifetime where it comes time to either wrap it up or reboot it back to a default, classic state. For He-Man it was the sci-fi flavored The New Adventures, intended as a shot in the arm for the aging line, that marked the time to call it quits for a generation. For Ninja Turtles, Saban’s live action TV series The Next Mutation and the darker, seedier Volume 3 comics from Image were a last hurrah for two separate markets until the 21st century. Transformers threw a variety of figures and storytelling against the wall in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. following 1990’s non-transforming Action Masters until Beast Wars began a short-lived renaissance that crashed again with the bizarre techno-organic stylings of Beast Machines. In all three cases, when the early 2000s rolled around these franchises shed their ’90s evolutions and tried to revert to their 1980s glories, with varying degrees of success.

Gundam Universe RX-78-2 Gundam

It’s absolutely terrifying to realize in the awful dystopian future year of 2020 that it’s been about sixteen years since the end of Bandai’s big push to get Gundam toys into American toy aisles, an effort that ended with a last-gasp cough of 4″ Gundam SEED figures in the style of the Wing, Universal Century, and G Gundam figures that had previously littered Walmarts, Targets, and Toys ‘R’ Us stores nationwide. What a time that was — when you could walk into Walmart and come out with a sturdy plastic Zeon Gallop and a handful of Zakus and Doms! (Seriously, Bandai really wanted the original Gundam to be a thing in the early ’00s — it was nuts, but the good kind of nuts. The kind that got us a deluxe Zaku set that came with a Magella Attack Tank so you bash them together into a Zaku Tank. I miss those days …)