Avengers: United They Stand was a very short-lived animated series from 1999. It lasted only 13 episodes, but it the first time that the Avengers were featured in their own series. It was essentially the Avengers version of X-Men the Animated Series. They had made previous appearances in X-Men, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, but for the most part the Avengers were unknown to the general public and the show was not a success. With only 13 episodes, I'm totally going to find it on YouTube and binge it all. It will be interesting to see how the earliest non-comic representation of Marvel's super-team was portrayed. The toys they made from the cartoon are pretty awesome. Hawkeye is a dud, but most are pretty sweet. I've always liked this Wasp figure and definitely thought it was way nicer than the first Marvel Legends Wasp from 2006. There is going to be a film titled Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018 so I'm curious to see how popular the character gets. Let's check out this 1999 figure below!
First off, this is a gorgeous figure. The face and body proportions were a huge advancement over the kind of figures released even a few months before. 1999 marked a year when ToyBiz really started breaking out of their design confines. In just a few short years they would start the Marvel Legends line and the rest is history.
Those blaster tubes coming out from behind her back are my least favorite part of the figure. They're stiffer than I would expect. Until I watched some clips from the cartoon, I thought they were "jet pack handles" like you sometimes see. Then I was upset that she couldn't hold them. But in actuality they shoot purple blasts and she never actually holds them. I'm not a big fan, but they are indeed show accurate, so I appreciate them.
Wasp comes with an alternate helmeted head and a larger projectile-launching device. The silvery projectiles shown below are made with a coil of metallic paper that can be collapsed and spring-propelled. You collapse the two coils into the round "eye holes" you can see on the copper contraption. Then the two triangular wedges slide downward and trap the coils inside. Finally the round circle on the top (with the Avengers "A" logo on it) has a magnet inside. When the magnet of Wasp's wrist makes contact with the magnet here, the wedges pop up and the paper coils launch. It's a pretty elaborate little mechanism.
Note the completely different paint job on the prototype pictured on the box.
Here are some images from the cartoon.
This line had some interesting figures. I especially like Kang.
Time for some Group and Comparison Pics!
Here she is with Stinger and the recent Marvel Legends Wasp.
Cheers!
Definitely one of the better looking figures from this era, that face sculpt is shockingly good too, definitely a better representation of the character than the figure from the spiderman line
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. I went on a bit of a wasp hunt after I posted this and ended up ordering the old 2" Wasp from the old 1996 ToyBiz Avengers boxset. I'm excited to review her once she arrives. That mutated Wasp figure was just bizarre.
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