Toxo-Zombie Returns!
For me, zombies just don’t hold the same sway that the classic monsters command. Guys like Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy, and Creature from the Black Lagoon are true personalities. Each has either a compelling backstory, or a driving purpose to them. Zombies work well as nameless horde type of threat, but there’s only so many times that stor can be told. That’s not to discount the popularity or the importance of the zombie in horror films, it’s just a personal preference. When the undead does show up, and maybe I’m just getting to be a curmudgeon, but I prefer a Romero zombie over the modern speedy type. I will admit however that the Walking Dead TV series has helped to bring back a little of the shuffle to the old brain munchers’ game.
The Toxo-Zombie is the final result of Cobra’s less than strict adherence to proper hazardous materials handling and use of PPE. The figure is a pretty amazing sculpt, both technically and in terms of gruesomeness. The 90s was a kind of golden age for gross-out toys, and the villains from many of the environmentally conscious toy lines fit the barf bill perfectly. The bright colors must have staved off the complaints of parents at the time, and I imagine that the kind of realistic looking zombie toys which populate toy shelves now wouldn’t have gone over quite as well.
I absolutely love the presentation, from the sculpt to the colors and the actiin features. Typical for the Eco Warriors, the Toxo-Zombie is decorated with swaths of color changing paint. Over the years, many of the figures in the series have been subject to the special paint permanently changing, resulting in dark smears across uniforms. In this case, the effect contributes to the rancid look.
In previous coverage of the figure, I’d neglected to get a shot of the Toxo-Zombie holding his water squirting weapon. Some of the 90s launchers and the like are just so large and unwieldy that they’re not conducive to photo shoots, but I can’t imagine this figure now without his gimmickry.
He reminds me of Major Tom from the Venture brothers
Terrific figure and bad colors!
Funny you should mention the classic monsters–Funko’s Re-Action figures might fit in with the small Joes, like say if you were to do a dio-story with a wax museum setting.
Re: classic monsters > zombies…. Me too. While in the internet age the Universal Monsters and their movies can be a little hokey given the way horror evolved towards more dramatic presentation (and the medium has changed from a small, blurry flickering screen or old, flickering projection in a dark theater to big bright HDTVs) but they managed to be compelling characters (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man. Mummy fits more with…) and even now, they still have a coolness to them, evergreen classics. No one really bested their performances in their category (not sure about the Mummy. Last saw one of those newer movies many many years ago). Classic 80s slashers were the biggest horror revival since the 1940s but many of them were silent, stalking brutes (Jason, Michael Myers). Only Freddy Krueger was loquacious from that set. I think things stalled out waaaaaaaaaaaay too long on zombies. They are so freakin’ overdone. It’s time for something new or something old to return, be it aliens/giant sci-fi mutant monsters, robots, internet demons or giant web crawling monsters or whatnot. We don’t even have a human villain who can be terrifying in themselves, like Vincent Price.
Toxo-Zombie conjures up, what was that, the oil man zombie from one of the second-tier 80s zombies movies? It also brings to mind the core laborer raging ‘zombie’ from Star Trek: Voyager “Juggernaut”, though this was 7 years before that. Anyway, I think Toxo-Zombie was a bit unique in it was the only modified mold of an earlier figure (basically taking the original mold and messing with it) and having a zombie was a new, outlandish element, an island of weirdness between the denizens of Cobra-La and the bounty hunters of Lunartix Empire. It is lacking on accessories compared to the 1991 Eco-Warriors but hey, an angry undead brute isn’t gonna be fiddling with a computer panel.
Yeah I’m not a zombie lover either. They’re over saturating the industry now.