Thursday 2 October 2014

Review: MOTUC Club Etheria Q1

Club Etheria has begun, hoping to increase the amount of Princess of Power figures in Masters Classics before it's demise/reincarnation at the end of next year. It's a line that just happened, missing the minimum subscriptions sold for it to go forward, but close enough that Mattel pushed it through.



Madam Razz & Broom
This is the biggie of this (sub)line. Despite being a major character in the cartoon and featuring in the opening titles, Madam Razz has never had a toy. At least with Shadow Weaver, you could sort of understand why since she very much would have belonged in the Horde line with Hordak, Mantenna et al (as opposed to Catra who had long hair and thus was a bit more 'girly' and thus appeared in the POP line), but Razz demanded a figure...even if you found her a bit annoying.


So eventually she's here and she looks exactly like she does in the cartoon. Whether this is a good thing or not is down to you. There have been comments that she's too cartoony and thus doesn't blend with many of the other figures, but, as I've pointed out before, there are already many figures in the line which don't fit too well with others.


My issue with Razz are her ankles: they're tiny. Actually, it's not that they're tiny so much as they're tiny and very loose. Getting Razz to stand up is an art and her high centre of gravity ensures she topples very easily.

The same goes for Broom. It certainly doesn't help that the handle and brush sections of mine aren't glued together exactly right so he has a slight backwards lean.

But otherwise, these are the perfect figures for those who've waited a very long time for them and those particular fans will not be disappointed with these.

Double Trouble
...or Double Mischief, if you prefer. The spy for She-Ra in the Horde camp, making deciding with which faction to display her with very difficult. 

Let's get straight to the point everyone's talking about: the head.


Double Trouble has a gimmick very similar to Man-E-Faces, where she you turn the knob at the top and it changes her face from 'good' to 'evil'. Unlike Man-E-Faces, this is tricky to pull off on a slender female body. The photos of the faces that appeared online weren't good. In person, It isn't quite so bad. The ugly fat neck/chin combination is hidden somewhat by the shadows created by the helmet.

The green choker, again, doesn't look as bad in person. Yes, it's a bit thick and, yes, it could have been done better but it's not so over-powering as it seemed.

Entrapta
And the award for the most brightly coloured Evil Horde member goes to... Considering the vast majority of the Horde are dressed in a drag black/red combination, the pink/purple of Entrapta really stands out.


Her gimmick, as was, was having extraordinarily long hair that she used to entrap her enemies. Since rooted hair is out for Classics, Mattel have done their best to simulate this feature by...um... Okay, so adding a couple of articulation points doesn't really allow for any hair-trapping in any way, shape or form. It would have been nice if there'd been a swivel joint at every point along the purple bands in her hair, but that still wouldn't have gotten around the fact that large amounts of hair leads to heaviness.

But I do love this figure and I'm not sure entirely why. I like it a lot more than Flutterina, despite having a complete lack of nostalgic connection to either of them.


Thrown in with Entrapta, for no particular reason, is the Shaping Staff from the Masters of the Universe cartoon episode (surprise surprise) 'The Shaping Staff'. I reiterate something here I've said time and time again: why can't Mattel mention someone on the packaging what exactly this bonus item is? It's not like it has anything at all to do with Entrapta, or even the Princess of Power cartoon.

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