Up until now my toy reviews have had an air of joy about them. Nearly every one of those figures may have been terrible and sometimes strayed into the territory of being knock-offs but rarely went the whole hog and thus kept a certain amount of cheeky charm. The Prince of Fear was clearly a Kane-a-like but still had enough kitsch appeal that I couldn’t stay mad at him and his ilk but after another scrounging trip to my local second hand market I emerged with two brazen hucksters, two contemptible con artists, trying to fool the unaware into believing that these are the genuine articles. These clueless cut price con men really do take the cake though & I refuse to give them a pass as I skewer them over the next couple of hundred words or so.
First up is this awful Not-Batista to show off just how blatant these things are. Instead of original molds press-ganged into copycat gimmicks, Big Dave here is ripped straight from the original Jakks Pacific toys but in the cloning process, Dreck the Destroyed has suffered a staggering number of abnormalities.
I was never a fan of some of the Jakks basic figures but at least they felt solid and had decent articulation. This toy has neither, in true knock off tradition Barista’s plastic in his body and legs feels so light and flimsy that I expect to find a Kinder Surprise in his torso if I dared break him apart. Conversely his arms and head are composed of an entirely different plastic, with a different texture and mismatched skin tone and have very little give which given that he loses the elbow and knee joints of the original toy leaves Dave being very stiff indeed.
To add insult to infirmity, he has a full compliment of Batista’s signature ink all across him with his huge dragon tattoo on his back (spoiled by the huge screw hole in his spine, that’s gotta hurt) and his bicep tats and even a weeny belly button tattoo he got on a hen party in Tenerife. These decals are actually pretty admirable but poor old Dave’s face gets no such love with slap dash painted eyes giving him the haunted thousand yard stare of a veteran of a dozen wars. I half expect him to start howling about long dead comrades as he stands on my desk. It’s okay Dave, they can’t hurt you anymore.
Okay, I’ll admit that Jared Leto does make for a striking Joker in the Suicide Squad movie but I also know that Chris Jericho would make an equally good clown prince of crime. How do I know this, you ask? Well, it’s because I saw this second fake figure here….
Look at it, no really, LOOK at it. Have you ever seen a more terrifying visage in your life? That is supposed to be Chris ‘your dad during his mid-life crisis’ Jericho and I only know this because on his hollow legs are some hastily slapped on Y2J logos without which I’d struggle to think just who this harrowing hominid was trying to be. He does remind me of something though, did you ever get to the end of the first Batman Arkham game, Arkham Asylum? The one that end with a lacklustre boss fight against a muscled-out Joker hopped up on super steroids? Yeah slap a little white paint on the face, colour the hair in green and this could pass for a statue of that boss fight. That’s something it could pass for as it’s doing a horrible job passing as a good toy.
Urgh, I feel dirty for having paid these two so much attention I can only hope that now I’ve got this done and dusted that BaPTSDsta & Jokericho will rot away in the plastic bag I’ll leave them to fester in. One can only hope so.
Thanks for reading and don’t have nightmares.
Martin Dixon (@BunnySuicida)
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