As people may have realized from my previous few reviews of figures from Hong Kong collectible toy company Hot Toys, I have been slowly gathering the Avengers team (among other cool figures). I suppose I'll get to my reasons as to why eventually. Anyhow, I received an email shortly after my Joker 2.0 review informing me that the Avengers Thor figure I had preordered last year was in the mail, so here it is for all to see.
So, standard Hot Toys praise: The face has an amazing likeness to the original actor, Chris Hemsworth, and the attention to detail is superb. That aside, yeah, it's a really nice figure. The Avengers version of the God of Thunder is greatly improved compared to the original Thor version. Firstly, since the figure does not have a helmet, you don't have to worry about the plastic helmet hair. Also, even though the basic design is the same, Thor's costume looks overall more realistic and believable as something you might see in real life.
In terms of accessories, Thor comes with very little. Which isn't to take away from what the figure does come with. Mjolnir, in all its miniature glory, is actually made out of metal, giving it a hefty and almost impressive weight despite its size.
Thor also comes with the Tesseract-powered transport device that is used at the end of the movie as a little bonus (or to make up for lack of accessories). The device looks cool, but sadly does not actually fit in Thor's hands all that well. I thought they might be going for visual and scale accuracy, but upon watching the movie again and comparing, that turned out not to be the case, so I guess it really is just a bonus item. It'll probably still look cool together with Loki, though (when that figure is released).
Thor suffers from some of the general flaws inherent with scaled-down figures, like the lack of mobility in his arms and head due to the material of his clothing and hard plastic hair. The cape can't be removed either, which is somewhat disappointing, but a minor complaint.
Overall, The Avengers Thor is a pretty damn cool figure and a proud addition to my slowly growing collection of Avengers characters. I just got an email telling me that the Black Widow figure has been released and is in the mail, so I guess I know what I'll be talking about next...
The Avengers Thor figure is on pre-order in the West through Sideshow Collectibles.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.