The Toy Fair’s Not Back In Town

Action figures are good, but they can be better! All you have to do is become a customizer! Toys are like drugs except you need to find a place to keep them after the high wears off.

NY Toy Fair has been cancelled for 2021. In lieu of the big press show, many companies are doing smaller virtual conventions through the year. The most hyped was last week’s Hasbro Pulse Fest Fan Fest. Rather than spacing things out, Mattel, Diamond Select, & NECA decided to post similar events around the same time with less fanfare. They were all underwhelming to various degrees. I would’ve made more impulse pre-orders had Hasbro not suddenly jacked up the price of all their 6″ lines by $3. It doesn’t sound that steep on an individual basis, but it adds up when they encourage you to buy entire series of Marvel Legends to complete BAFs. With customers’ budgets already stretched thin by the terrible 2020, this feels like a precarious time to raise prices on non-essentials.

“Ach, I’m not some nouveau riche piker! I employ people to burn my money for me!”

Godzilla Vs. Kong: Dawn Of Kaiju Combat!

 There are only two kinds of people in the world: Are you Team Lizerd or Team Monke? A clash of Titans reunited The Wages Of Cinema for an unusually animated collaboreview! Godzilla was declared King Of The Monsters in the last movie. King Kong is just Kong in the Monsterverse so he’s gotta do a regicide to earn his title.

This movie is exactly what it says on the tin, so that should decide for you if it’s your bag. It’s the sort of movie where there both is & isn’t that much to write about. None of this rumble takes place in the jungle, but let’s burrow straight into the Pellucidar Skartaris Hollow Earth of Godzilla Vs. Kong SPOILERS!

Supergirl’s Swansong Starts In Season Six

Supergirl’s sixth & final season didn’t have a trailer until a week before its premiere? The CW is giving it the Black Lightning season four treatment. (At least it appears to be getting unique “next week” promos.) It’s taking the time slot of Superman & Lois until it resumes in May. Is this the first time superfriends Kara & Barry have regularly aired the same night? Here is your obligatory SPOILER warning for what ought to have been its fifth season finale. There some The Flash & Justice League stuff too if you’d prefer not to stay on topic.

“Was it Earth-Perv?”

Getting Up To Speed On The Flash’s Seventh Season

Now that I didn’t review the Snyder cut of Justice League starring Staplewolf by popular demand, we can get up to speed on The Flash! (Since the DuckTales finale was the runner-up, you’d expect me to get to that blog first. It takes longer to write reviews where there are hardly any criticisms. I will definitely get to it when it’s no longer newsworthy!) The tail end of The Flash’s sixth season was off to a solid start at the beginning of its seventh season. (There’s a sentence!) How about the last two episodes to close it out? Well I’ve got some good news & some bad news… Oh, season seven officially starts with episode four. SPOILERS ahoy for its latest three episodes!

Instead of Mirror Master or Mirror Mistress, Eva “not a true Scotswoman” McCulloch opts to dub herself Mirror Monarch just to spite my running gag. Would Reflection Ruler be more precise?

Justice League Snyder Cut Discourse Is Served!

Welcome to my sixth blogiversary! I had three different blogs in progress (DuckTales series finale, The Flash’s “season Finale,” Justice League Snyder cut) for the stacked events of this anniversary week. I let the people vote, & they chose violence the Snyder cut by a huge margin. Nobody voted for the poor F-Lash, which may explain when last year’s anniversary blog performed poorly despite an adorable Grodd pic. (Aren’t they all?) Keep your eyes peeled for the two losing blogs sometime in the near future.

Black Widow is the opposite of the Snyder cut in the sense that it existed before the pandemic yet its studio doesn’t want you to watch it at home post-pandemic. (If a movie needed $70 million extra dollars for special effects & reshoots, it did not exist in a finished state before.) The Snyder cut of Justice League is being reviewed … elsewhere! Sorry! I still want clickbait visits, just not enough to subscribe to HBOMax. I can’t even afford to review the official tie-in meal kit that sounds like an expensive prank. I have no journalistic integrity! For actual critical analysis, refer to my blogs on Superman & Lois, The Flash, & WandaVision. Here are SPOILERS for a movie I’ve yet to see, so all my spoilers could be wrong? This could be a fun comparison game for you to play at home. So you’re not already sick of this discourse, this blog’s for you!

Check out the leaked pic of Stryfe from Deadpool 3!

Does WandaVision Deserve Derision?

D+ means Disney used to have a higher average before absorbing Fox. Wand Division is the new math. WandaVision was supposed to be bumped it forward to 2020 to make a perfect 20/20 vision joke. Although it completed filming before the pandemic production pauses, unlike Falcon & Winter Soldier, it then got pushed back to its original 2021 slot so it wouldn’t compete with The Mandalorian’s second season. Viewers are supposed to be excited for bona fide Marvel Cinematic Universe characters appearing on a televison show instead of a movie, as if Phil Coulson, Peggy Carter, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Sif, Jasper Sitwell, Edwin Jarvis, Gideon Malick, Dr. List, & the Howling Commandos didn’t already on Agents of SHIELD & Peggy Carter. Remember when SHIELD premiered & people were mad they’d have to watch one series on free network television to fully understand the Marvel movies they paid for? Now that there’s a bunch of more directly influential series that behind a subscription service paywall, fans are excited?

Marvel Studios’ movies are sometimes described as television in cinemas since they link to form a larger story. This time it could argued that MCU’s lucky thirteenth television series is a long movie split into weekly installments. (So are these Disney+ Marvel series going to be event series? I don’t feel like making new tags for them if they’re each one & done. So this’ll just get the standard “Avengers” & like it. If renewed, we can consider making unique tags.) SPOILER warning for nine episodes of the most popular television series of the moment. You really deserve a prize if you’d made it unspoiled this far.

Wanda Maximoff defies her name by being a witch who doesn’t wield a wand. Her Zatanna cosplay was actually scarlet.

The Scarlet Speedster’s Seventh Season Returns In A Flash!

Da mit Barry Allen, everyone’s favorite German talk show, finally returns! What became The Flash’s de facto seventh season premiere got pushed back a week when the series premiere of Superman & Lois decided to take both time slots. (I suppose I might as well discuss episode two too.) Much like Riverdale, last season’s run was cut short by three episodes. Am I going to need to come back in a fortnight to recap what would’ve been the sixth season finale & then do what would’ve been season seven’s premiere the week after?

Season six’s impromptu finale ended on a great note with Mirror Mistress victorious, Sue a framed fugitive, & Iris even more missing than before. There’s also a Ralph Dibny debacle that this episode doesn’t directly address. Unlike Riverdale, this season premiere had more intriguing stuff going down. The Flash is back but not a flashback! Full speed ahead for SPOILERS & Grodd puns!

She doesn’t appear in this episode, but Ultraviolet was prepared for the Coronavirus crisis. I now have a greater respect for her.

The New Adventures Of Superman & Lois

Hasbro’s first Marvel Fan First Friday of 2021 didn’t unveil a Marvel Legends of Polaris from The Gifted. This is both underwhelming (because she deserves one) & a relief (since I just made one). So although I may have jumped the gun on that, I’m arguably punctual for the series premiere of Superman & Lois! The Flash’s return was supposed to lead into this but got pushed back a week. (I’ll cover that next week ahead of Wandavision.) The CW let this series premiere run long & then put a special afterwards to fill up the remainder, but you didn’t miss anything if you skipped that. Do I need to make a specific tag for this show since its title is so close to the “Superman” one I already use? Lois & Clark had the better title. SPOILERS are up, up, down, down, & away!

Polaris Is The Most Gifted Custom?

Whilst watching The Gifted, it occurred to me that its Polaris could be customized from a Marvel Legends Jessica Jones. Shortly thereafter, I saw someone had used this recipe. Not being the first person to execute it dampened my zeal to make one. When I decided to try my own, I found the price of loose Jessicas had skyrocketed since I acquired mine. Then I saw a bootleg custom The Gifted Polaris on eBay. I don’t normally go in for these gray market pieces, but this one included a superb Emma Dumont likeness I’d not seen in this scale. (Perhaps it was hydroshrunk from one of an unlicensed 1/6 scale Polaris, of which there are a few varieties?) My winning bid ended up being only slightly more than an official Marvel Legends figure. It was supposed to be delivered within the broad range of June 10 – August 4. A China Post tracking number was created on May 21 when I ordered it & then nothing. As 2020 was an exhausting string of calamities, I decided to wait patiently for it & save my anxiety for other matters. The day before its last possible delivery date, I leaned “this user is no longer registered on eBay” from my purchase history. The other listings for this product from assorted sellers disappeared too. That’s the karmic thanks I get for trying to be a good citizen of the ‘Net & alerting other fans to its existence.

Dare I trust AliExpress? Its price was double the refund I received from eBay. (A version with Lorna’s head on Elektra’s body was moderately cheaper.) I decided to go for it while they were still in stock rather than miss out & pay triple later. (It doesn’t appear to be available there anymore either, so I did something astute for a change.) I shaved a few bucks off via a coupon from a friend, Kinou Menthe, who was already a customer. I had to specially authorize my credit card to make this payment. The downloadable invoice PDF did not reflect the coupon, which panicked me greatly. It arrived three weeks later, which is quite reasonable considering I ordered it amidst a pandemic. Then I panicked that the reason it had such a good likeness with a professional paint job is that it was stolen from Hasbro’s secret production line & an official version at a more reasonable price would soon be unveiled now that Fox X-Men are back on the table. Thus far one hasn’t materialized (he wrote as as he rushed to publish this before the inaugural Marvel Fan First Friday of 2021).

If Lorna Dane gets an advanced degree she could also be Dr. Polaris.

Black Lightning Remains Better Than Riverdale

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk on Barbara Minerva! Much like “Blue Monday,” her entrance theme inexplicably wound up on the cutting room floor. If WW84 was made as an excuse to increase the amount of Kristen Wiig merchandise, many licensees are not upholding their ends of the conspiracy. Keep a weather eye out for a companion piece on Doctor Domino.

Now we must venture back into SPOILER territory for the final season premiere of Black Lightning & a few episodes of Riverdale that would’ve been more momentous had the pandemic not shortened last season. As if that wasn’t enough, I have a tangible reason to hate Disney monopolization at the end.