It’s
getting even more expensive to run this website and has gotten to the
point where I quite frankly can’t justify paying what the various
servers and hosts want. So in the post linked above I explained the
situation and asked if you folks could help out by buying merch from
here:
Straight-up
donating dollars here:
Or
just by sharing these fundraising posts all over the internet.
And
here’s a thing I’m going to try:
The
Needless Things Mystery Box!
It
could be toys, comics, books, t-shirts I’ve worn once or never
(that have been laundered! Or not if you’re weird!), or any one of
a number of weird tchotchkes laying around the Phantom Zone. There
will be a Needless Things sticker (or three) in every box.
Finally, each Mystery Box will include a M.U.S.C.L.E decoration put together by me! That's right – I used my own two hands and a pair of needle nose pliers to screw an eyelet into each and every one.
WOW!
What a bunch of work that was!
Simply
go to needlessthings.storenvy.com and order yourself one (or more!)
Mystery Box! Believe me – I have a ton of cool stuff just sitting
around the Phantom Zone.
Finally,
if you are band or have a website or sell some kind of service or
something; I am selling ad space on Needless Things. For twenty bucks
you get one of the attractive buttons on the right sidebar for one
year. ONE WHOLE YEAR! That means every person that sees me at a con,
wrestling event, or live podcast that decides to check out the site
will see YOUR ad. They will be positioned first-come, first-serve; so
get your request in now to be closer to the top. OR you can pay a
little more and get preferred placement.
To
arrange for an ad, e-mail me at the address in my Facebook badge in
the sidebar, or simply message me on
Facebook.
I’m
going to try mentioning this every day this week and see what
happens. If I don’t raise the funds needed to keep things going…
well, I don’t know. I love writing for the site and I love doing
the podcasts even more, but it might be nice to have all that time
and money. Doing this is essentially a second full time job that
doesn’t pay me anything. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.
In
order to show you what you’ll be getting, I will be spending the
whole week running down my favorite Needless Things posts from the
past several years. Each day will feature a different category of
posts so you can see just how many things we do here.
I
think I’ve spoken more than enough about my love for RoboCop.
It’s a perfect movie and I guess I’ll by pretty much anything
that NECA decides to release. Like, say, a “Melting Emil
Antonowsky” figure.
But
so far all we have is RoboCop, Battle Damaged RoboCop, RoboCop With
Spring-Loaded Holster, Video Game RoboCop, and ED-209. RoboCop With
Jet Pack and Huge Cannon Thing is coming later this year. That’s
not bad, really. As much as I want figures of every single character
from the movie, I recognize that likeness rights are going to prevent
that from happening.
Fortunately,
ED-209 had a shitty agent and NECA was able to make a figure without
securing rights.
This was
the first larger-scale figure I considered buying from NECA. While
I’ve been very happy with their 7” scale releases for the past
year or so, I’m still a bit wary of the company because of the few
years where they were producing some poorly thought-out figures. I
didn’t feel confident that they would move into a new size without
some growing pains.
Oddly
enough, as much as I wanted this figure, I ended up getting the
Spider Gremlin first. It’s odd because I only have a couple of
other Gremlins figures and I really hate spiders. It’s an amazing
figure (which I will get around to reviewing soon) and it gave me
confidence enough to ask the comic shop to order ED.
FIRST
GLANCE
The
box is pretty big, but compared to the Spider Gremlin it doesn’t
seem that way. The figure itself is all angles and clean lines. The
sculpt looks beautiful. It’s one of those toys that looks like it
might be metal even though you know it’s plastic.
PACKAGING
The
painting on the front is beautiful. The box front looks like what a
toy from the 1997 depicted in RoboCop
would be packaged in. If that makes any sense. The art is by Jason
Edmiston, who got a credit on the box. This is something I haven’t
seen before from NECA. I will always admire their habit of crediting
their creators.
The
top of the box has some slick graphics with the OCP logo while the
sides feature pictures of the toy.
The
bottom has those creator credits that I am so fond of.
I’ve
never seen a toy packaged quite like this before:
It
just looks like it’s standing in some kind of packing crate, ready
to deploy. The toy was very securely fastened in the cardboard
insert, so I wasn’t worried about breakage.
“Halt,
citizen. This course of action could result in… trouble.”
LOOKS
Without
this toy I never would have realized just how detailed the ED-209
units are. While a lot of it is armor plating, there are a ton of
wires and gizmos all over. It does look like a functioning thing as
opposed to just a fantasy robot.
The
main chassis has the maw-like opening in the front, which is the
source of the first problem with this toy. There is a molded piece
inside of the opening that has a bunch of detailed parts – wires,
vents, and a plate. It’s glued into my ED crooked:
It
looks fucking terrible up close and in this picture, but from afar it
isn’t a big deal. Not a big enough deal to try and mess with a
return, anyway. If I could just go to a store and swap it out I
probably would, but these larger NECA items can really only be had
through Previews or an online store. Toys R Us seems to be shying
away from them.
Otherwise
the “head” looks fantastic. The mesh canopy or whatever on top
(that I so wish was removable to expose the brains and inner
circuitry of this robot but I know it shouldn’t be because we never
saw that in the movie) is finely detailed and a great matte black
that contrasts the rest of the machine. Behind that are some hoses
that actually stand separately from the housing. There are rivets all
over this thing that look like actual, functional rivets. But they’re
just sculpted in. The exhaust vents on the back have a little painted
grime that looks nice.
The
arms are big honkin’ cannons. The shoulder flaps are attached to
the body with hinges and can move up and down to allow the arms to
move more freely. I admit – I never paid that much attention to
what these arms actually looked like. I just knew they were thick and
stumpy and shot bullets and rockets. People – there’s a ton of
stuff going on here. The “elbows” have massive gear joints and
wires that are separate from the sculpt. Beyond those elbows each arm
is different.
The
left arm has two massive cannons with a ton of little wires running
between them. This is problem number two – one of the wires came
loose on mine. It’s very tiny and I do not possess the manual
dexterity to get it back into its socket.
This is an actual
wire, so it has lots of little ends coming out of the tubing. Other
than that this arm looks awesome. There is a large housing for
ammunition on either side – one for each cannon.
The
right arm has a different cannon setup with only one ammunition
housing. The other spot is taken up by an articulated rocket
launcher. The housing has a detailed sculpt and there are three
(non-removable) rockets inside. This arm also has a pretty hilarious
deco:
“Danger
– You could lose two fingers!”
The
accordion-looking part that the body is seated on is very simple, but
for whatever reason I think it looks cool. There’s not much to the
“torso” of this robot, but I do like that texture. It gives the
appearance of a cover over a moving part.
The
legs are thick and bulky and have all kinds of panels and wiring
sculpted on. The pistons on the reverse articulated knees look thick
and powerful. The bottoms of the feet have treads and plating:
The
only thing I don’t like here is that the boxy knee joint at the
back of the leg is a different colored plastic from the rest of the
figure. I can’t speak to whether this is accurate or a bad use of
plastics, but I’m leaning towards the latter. Still, overall the
colors look good.
There’s
a ton of small, painted detail on various wires, warning signs, and
parts that would probably light up if this were a much more expensive
and larger toy. Overall the paint and color are flawless. There’s
paint in several places that NECA could have probably gotten away
with skipping.
ACCESSORIES
ED-209
didn’t come with any accessories. I suppose they could have thrown
in some battle-damaged swappable parts, but that would have probably
cost a lot more. I would imagine if this toy does well enough we’ll
see a battle-damaged ED-209. That would be a lot of fun. I think NECA
could probably come up with a way to do one figure that can have the
look of the various blown-up and trashed ED-209 units seen in the
movie.
FUN
If
it weren’t for the electronics this toy wouldn’t be a whole lot
of fun. I feel like they didn’t quite
nail the articulation.
I
feel like the arms should be on ball joints. There’s one scene
where an ED goes into aggressor mode and its arms sort of drop down
in a way that this toy cannot recreate. The toes are not articulated,
which is disappointing. And the knees don’t bend. They swivel and
the pistons in the back do…
Let
me just run down the articulation. Then I’ll talk about those
pistons.
The
turret/body/head or whatever is on a swivel.
The
shoulders are swivels.
The
elbows are pivots with swivels at the “bicep” and “wrist”.
The
rocket launcher is confounding me. There is a plate sticking up in
front of it and the launcher is on some sort of hinge so that it can
raise, but I can’t figure out how it comes all the way up. I’m
afraid to mess with it too much because the plastic is fairly thin
and rigid and I don’t want to just yank the thing off.
There
are swivels at the tops of the knees.
The
knee “boxes” move up and down on the pistons, but it is hard and
scary to move them. The left one moved easily enough until I got
close to the top of the piston. Then it just stopped. The right one
would not budge at all while I was taking pictures. I tried again
later and managed to move it, but it wasn’t easy. And once I got
the pistons loosened up, they still didn’t move any more easily. I
pulled the knees up to a certain point and have just left them there.
Also,
there are clips on either side of each knee. They seem designed to
hold the pistons in place, but feel extremely
fragile.
ED-209
can be posed a good bit, but not quite as much as I feel like it
should.
The
electronics save the day, though. I’ll let the sound effects speak
for themselves:
So
you can’t do a whole lot posing-wise, but if you’re like me those
sounds will provide lots of entertainment.
OVERALL
ED-209
is a pretty darn good toy, but I think NECA could have done better.
It just isn’t quite as much fun as it should have been.
But
on the bright side, it is huge, it looks beautiful, and those sound
effects are rad.
If
you love RoboCop
like I do this toy is a must-have and will make you happy enough to
justify the $69.99 price tag (or less if you’re clever). But that’s
if
you can get your hands on one with no defects like mine had. I think
it would have been a shade more reasonable to charge $54.99 for this
one, but I suppose those electronics have to count for something.
NECA doesn’t do a whole lot with sound chips at this scale. This
would have been a “4” without the broken wire, difficult joints,
and misaligned “maw” piece.
3
out of 5
Prices
are already going up on ED-209, so if you want one, act fast. Online
stores are likely to be your only option here. BigBad and
Entertainment Earth would be my first stops, as Amazon prices are
already averaging around $75, which you do not want to pay.
Here’s
a new thing:
DICK
MOVE
This
is assuming that you were getting samples that nothing was broken on
and that worked exactly as intended.
I’d
have to go with Godzilla. Not only is it a massive toy for twenty
bucks cheaper, it isn’t going to break on you. ED might if you’re
not careful. Yeah, it would be nice if Godzilla had sound, but I’ve
played with him a lot more than I have with ED. And Godzilla isn’t
even as articulated.
SIZE
MATTERS.
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