I got some awesome stuff in the mail today.
First up, we have the last two characters I needed to complete the
Original San Francisco Toymakers WCW line, Lord Steven Regal and Earl Robert Eaton, the Blue Bloods!
As usual, these figures are what they are, but I will say that they're among the better ones in the line. The likenesses are good, and the detailing on the costumes is also pretty spot-on, right down to the shades of blue and red. I think the Eaton figure is a hair too short compared to Regal, but it's not too far off, and the scale for these figures was notoriously spotty anyway.
This has always been a hard set to get; they were originally released around 1996 or '97 as an exclusive to the Figures, Inc. toy catalog, which has since evolved into Figures Toy Company online, but back in the 90s was just a general toy catalog that carried a bunch of toys you couldn't find in stores anymore and merely specialized in wrestling merchandise. I used to get a TON of stuff from them; they had two separate catalogs, a general one and a wrestling-specific one, and most of it was stuff from the 80s and early-90s that was still pretty reasonably-priced. And their turnaround time was incredible; I'd drop a money order with my checklist in the mail on Monday and sometimes I'd get my stuff by Friday, sometimes even sooner (I once had a package show up TWO DAYS after I sent my order in). Really great way to shop for collectibles in the days when internet shopping wasn't really a thing, yet. They eventually started manufacturing their own wrestling figures in-house, which were kind of crummy, but at the time they were the only way you could have figures of certain wrestlers who were dead or retired or whatever, so it was still kinda cool. They still do that today with various things, and the results are still fairly mixed but I admire their efforts.
Anyways, very rarely companies like OSFTM would pass them some exclusive figures you could only buy through their catalog, and this set was one of those cases. I don't think it sold very well, as these figures were never super-popular anyway and the team was pretty much done by the time this set came out, and given that Figures Inc was not super well-known to begin with I can't imagine they sold a ton of them. Since then it goes for anywhere from $100 to $200, with most prices settling in around $150. I paid just about $100 because the package has some dents in it.
And with that, not counting variant paint jobs I have this entire WCW line COMPLETE.
There's a few variants I still hope to pick up if I find them at reasonable prices, but I'm totally not sweating it. I have all of the characters and that's ultimately all I care about.
-------------
Next up, I took my first plunge into a line I missed out on when it was fresh. For relatively cheap, I picked up this
Mattel "DC Universe Infinite Heroes" Crisis Three-Pack!
These came out around 2008 or so, naturally when I wasn't collecting toys. They were available at around the same time as the 6-inch scale "DC Universe Classics" figures that Mattel was putting out, but in a more collectible 3.75-inch scale. They even ended up doing a few characters and variants that never made it into the larger-scale series, like Bloodwynd, or Guy Gardner with his Sinestro ring and leather jacket attire.
I haven't opened them yet, but they seem pretty cool for figures in this scale. It's one of the largest line-ups of DC characters ever released at this scale, so that's awesome. And the detailing and articulation look pretty good (although I'll have to take them out to really know for sure). The face sculpts could be better, honestly, but they're not "bad" and it's tough to really sculpt faces at this scale. Kenner and Toy Biz were always great with it, but I'm not sure how much experience Mattel had doing figures at 3.75-scale. So the faces are a bit "meh", kind of generic, but the costumes make everyone easy to identify, so I can dig it.
I'm planning on getting a bunch more of these, depending on what I can find on eBay for cheap-ish. Thankfully most of them seem pretty reasonable, and a lot of the same figures that were single-packed were also available in three-packs like this one, which makes is quite easy to start a collection. This set cost about the same as the single-packed Superman figure, which is what I was determined to start my collection with, and since I couldn't tell any noticeable difference between that figure and the one in this set I went for quantity. Someone who knows more can educate me, but to my eyes the three-pack figures look the same as the single-carded ones, except in the cases of a clearly-labelled variant figure which was quite common. So I'll probably focus more on three-packs so as to establish a larger collection of characters more cheaply and quickly.