“Wolverine and the X-Men” starting today in Singapore!

The premiere of “Wolverine and the X-Men” animated series is finally starting today on our local Okto Channel!  It shall be shown on weekdays on 7.30pm, a good time slot for most people to get home from school or work to watch!  Today’s first episode will be “Hindsight - Part 1″.

Here is my collection of “Wolverine and the X-Men” action figures that I harvested from the departmental stores and Sunday toy market in April.  The photo also shows another use for the (Type 1a & 1b) figurine display boxes from Daiso.  Luckily for the My Little Pony ‘toy drought’ in the same month, if not I won’t have enough ‘Play’ funds to splurge on these.  Plus I was also chasing after some sought after Marvel Universe action figures last month too (That will be in another future blog post).

Many of the popular characters like Magneto, Colossus, Beast and Iceman were initially harder to find, but the stores have began to stock up on all the characters again in the past 2 weeks.  It’s not difficult to find this toyline in the stores now, but the paintwork on every one of them has some defects.  For every 20 pieces of the same figure you come across, only 1 can barely make some reasonable pass grade.  Even the ones I have are not perfect, but I gave up looking for the never-appearing pieces with perfect paintwork, and just settled for the best I could find.

Black costume Wolverine and Nightcrawler were acquired loose from the Sunday toy market at China Square Central.  They came as a 2-pack for SGD 15.00.  Nightcrawler comes with his sword but Wolverine doesn’t have his ‘hand-carried’ claws.  I believe these 2 figures will eventually hit the departmental stores soon as part of the Wave 2 of  “Wolverine and the X-Men” action figures.  I chose to pick up these 2 figures loose mainly because their paintwork was perfect, which is a rarity for this toyline!

However if you are planning to get the Nightcrawler figure, do note that he doesn’t stand flat on his feet.  His soles are angled such that his heels are tilted upwards, plus with his articulated angles, he topples over easily.  It’s not that easy getting him in a standing pose for long.  I had to use blue tack to stabilize him for the group photo above.  So what happens when you have action figures like Nightcrawler that do not stand properly?

Well, he’ll need some form of support from his fellow action figures.  In this case, hostile ’support’ came from Magneto and Avalanche.  They were upset with Nightcrawler for making them wait so long to take the above group photo because the latter kept falling down.  Hence they wasted no time in pouncing on him after the photo session.  Actually Magneto’s chain was sufficient to support Nightcrawler, Avalanche’s ’shockwave bugles’ didn’t even touch him!

Fortunately for Nightcrawler, he has some chivalous friends to help him out of his predicament.  Actually even if it’s 3 against 2, Magneto will still be able to take down all his opponents.  But I broke up the ‘fight’ before some of them get their paintwork scratched.  And I dislike that if it happens!

“Wolverine and the X-Men” animated series is expected to be showing for the whole of this month and perhaps even longer.  So that’s when the kids and more toy collectors become interested in its action figures.  Aside from price (retail at SGD 18.90 each) and limited articulation, the main problem with this toyline is the ultra shoddy paintwork, the worst I’ve seen in an action figures toyline so far. 

Hence if you plan to collect these figures, be very choosy and don’t fret if you can’t complete your collection.  The same characters in the same poses will be released over and over again in the future waves.  Be more patient, unlike me.  Oh, perhaps it’s due to feedback about poor paint quality in wave 1 that the same figures are getting released again!  Yeah, maybe that’s why…