Review > Giant Bootleg Spin-Blade He-Man

My pal Popeonabomb sent me an usual item he found at a flea market. When he told me it was a He-Man bootleg figure, I assumed it was something like these monstrosities profiled by Weirdo Toys. However, when I opened the box, I found something quite different.

Poesters, meet the Giant Bootleg Spin-Blade He-Man.

Yes–not content with the legendary suck of the regular Spin-Blade He-Man, some enterprising bootlegger decided to increase his size by about a third and reduce his articulation (though they ironically added what amounts to a ball jointed head, which I would have killed for on the original MOTU 200X figures).

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Packaging: GBSBHM comes in (and with?) a proportionately oversized package, which seems to be based on the original packaging the figure came with. It’s been digitally reproduced and looks like crap, of course, but the bootleggers really seem to have tried to pass this off as a legit product. They even got his name right.

Design & Sculpt: Unless there was some Mattel-produced larger figure I’m unaware of, I’m assuming this figure was produced by creating a mold out of an existing SPHM figure and enlarging it. As you would assume, this process softens the sculpt, though not as much as you might expect. I guess the bootleggers are getting better equipped every day.

Also, since his various parts were presumably enlarged separately, I don’t think his arms evidently were enlarged by the same ratio. They appear to be larger, compared to his torso, than the regular figure–which, oddly enough, makes him look a bit more He-Man-esque than the regular version. But he giant hands are kind of scary.

Plastic & Paint: Ah, the good stuff. GBSBHM is made from cheap plastic, as you might expect. His arms and legs are made from a rubbery, pale plastic that reminds one of a corpse, while his torso has a much darker tan and is made from PVC. It also has a touch of translucence, which makes him look like boiled pork.

The paint, on the other hand, is about as good as it was on the original toy. They followed the original Spin-Blade paint work fairly closely, and even bothered to fill in the little wedges on his belt buckle and use two types of brown on his boots. That’s a lot of attention paid for a bootleg.

Articulation: Here’s where the figure departs the most from its legitimate ancestor. GBSBHM’s arms and legs are just the standard back-and-forth swivels, hearkening back to 1980s-era articulation technology.

But the head is odd. The neck is just a mushroom peg, but the way the socket in the head is designed, it has the same basic range of motion as a ball joint. The result is a feature I fervently wish had been a part of the 200X line.

Accessories: GBSBHM comes with the spin-blade thingamabob and the Power Sword, which, as you can see, is humorously huge.

Quality Control: Despite being a bootleg toy, this thing is solid.

Overall: There are three things I find appealing about this figure: its size, the ball joint head and the huge Power Sword. The cheap plastic, the crappy leg and arm articulation and the fact that it’s basically just a big Spin Blade He-Man prevent it from being delightfully crappy enough to merit a place in the Hall of Fame alongside the likes of 339/1.

I’m not going to give it a raven rating because it seems unfair to the other toys, but I do want to thank PopeonaBomb for sending me this truly unique piece (of crap)!