Does the Fantastic 4 retro wave demonstrate the decline of Marvel Legends?

I just recently got into Legends as a side thing to Transformers and it can be quite baffling at times. Some MLs are pretty cool and on some Hasbro drops the ball so hard, it almost looks like self-sabotage. I cannot imagine collecting everything from Marvel Legends, the part re-use is just obscene and laziness is rampant. Having said that, it seems that this year will have a bunch of interesting releases.

Initially, I was only interested in Psycho-Man and High Evolutionary. However, I just ordered Human Torch, based on your review of the figure. So Hasbro now owes you a cut. Good lookin' out, my friend! Great vid, as always!

You covered everything very well. I'll just add that my biggest problem with this set is that Hasbro went the cheap way out to maximize their profits. These figures had minimum accessories even though they increased the price and don't even include a Build a figure part. Their paint jobs are also minimum, a nice wash would have brought out the great sculpts of the villains and The Thing.

The Retro Human torch uses a different body mold than the Walgreens version. Retro uses the Sunfire mold while the Walgreens used the buck cap mold.

Villains aside, I think this was designed more for people who missed out on the Walgreens Wave, not people who already have it looking to upgrade.

I actually really like this set. As a beginner collector and fan of the FF4, it's pretty spot on not to loud in terms of colors or designs.

I Swear you should be a Hasbro figure evaluator that has to validate these figures before release because you spoke nothing but pure FACTS everything you said was spot on, I got the whole wave too apart from the 2 villains and iv had to do some mods to be satisfied which i'm finding is becoming a regular occurrence with the legends.

Just feels like an odd wave, I thought they had their strongest year ever in 2021. I will never say they do not need to continue to do better though that's for sure.

My local Wal-mart has a lot of this wave still on the shelves and they’ve been there for weeks. Waiting on the clearance bin. I was fortunate to get all of the Walgreens FF figures during their release which included getting Sue on an accidental clearance price of $5. 👍🏻

That Thing voice was really good

David - thank you so very much. I apologize for the length (that's what she said) please skip if too long to read. I am a very serious comic FF fan and you hit all of the points I thought of as well. To have to compromise on a FF wave to just 3 figures (Invisible Sue and Flaming Johnny replaced the Super Skrull BAF ones - new? kinda) makes me believe something is not right here. To answer your title question: I believe so. I substantiate my opinion with two points; 1. Quality; 2. Character Selection processing. 1: From the Marvel Line Manager down to Sales & Advertising, Hasbro convinced this lover of their product to lower my expectations coming from the people responsible for Quality. Until convinced otherwise, I can only attribute this sorry state of Quality to Hasbro's sole focus on their budget and not researching who these characters are (FF) and their clients (us). How many emails with Sue's face travelled around Hasbro with folks accepting it? Did someone in the mothership not think it is a tad pretentions of them to expect comic FF lovers to spend their $ on that face? Both redundant questions that lead to my second point - the process to select which characters to make. 2. For the FF, this makes three teams in four years degrading in quality with each series - wouldn't a wave to commemorate their 60th Anniversary include - a Flame On Johnny, An Invisible Sue, a Ben Grimm in an Astronaut suit (use that Psycho Man mold) and Reed with Stilt Man BAF-like legs - something different then a recycle? Both villains are nice-to-have's, yet I am curious how many of us lovers bought them because we don't have either in our collections and not because we WANTED Hasbro to make them? Hasbro - please start watching Displaying Model Behaviour?

It's a fine wave for those that don't have any Fantastic Four representation, personally I like these colors the most and the timing is just perfect for me. I fixed my Sue Storm by swapping the faces with a previous version and put the hair on that and my god it's such an improvement, they honestly should have just done that instead of a new face sculpt.

just picked up the villains and new torch; you're right about the rest being re-heated leftovers maybe a wash on psycho-man and high evolutionary would bring out the details/make them feel less plasticky? from one Dave to another, cheers, and keep up the good work!

The open mouth head is my favorite Thing head....after I cut part of the inner part out, shaved it down, heated up the head and glued the mouth closed, then put the inner mouth part back in to maintain the sculpt of the head. So the head could have been way better if they thought about it for more than 5 minutes.

Hey DDMB 👋, I just got this FF wave. I'm still waiting to get the Hasbro Pulse Invisible Woman and Johnny Storm. I think the figures are pretty good. I agree the main Invisible Woman face isn't best but could be worse. I'm also getting few figures from new Spiderman wave too.

You could totally kit bash both human torch and both Sue storms and make some pretty dope figs

David ranting about Sue Storm will be entertaining for years to come; "Fantastic snore" lmao. Even Dwight had a distinct apologetic look on his face when he introduced retro Sue Storm on the live stream hehe.

I agree with most of your criticisms, although I think Psycho Man is perfect, other than maybe some silver highlights on his emotion box would have been nice. Reed is absolutely my favorite of the wave, and as a fun bonus, the lab coat and arms work on the recent Leader we got, since he was also built on the Mr. Fantastic buck. The pegs on the new Reed arms are slightly smaller so the arms are a little loose, but you can make it work for Science Time Leader if you want. One disagreement is with your assessment of the three Things on this buck. The paint shading is much better on this one than on the Super Skrull wave one. Neither is anywhere near as good as the perfection of the Walgreens one with the black wash, but this new one looks much better compared to the SS wave one. I can't even bring myself to open up High Evolutionary, because the fun factor appears to register in the negative digits. Great review, Dave! Always love seeing you speaking truth to Hasbro!

I love your insights. Hasbro is on a different kind of frenzy now: issue too may figures, reuse too many parts and now lacking paint and wash. I think what could have worked for the figures that almost nailed it: is to use darker toned plastics and use a wash. 😊

Oh you mentioned my comment! That's nice 😁