This is a pretty great figure. One of the last things I need in life is another Mario figure. It's not because I have too many of them - I don't, I only have a couple of PVCs from the NES era - and I didn't snag the higher-end Figma releases because I am cheap. So I had some store credit at the Toys R Us with an expiration date, and I got this. I am glad I did - his decent articulation, surprisingly good weight distribution, and huge feet let you pose him in a number of nice ways despite not being developed to be used with stands or foot pegs of any kind. I liked Link well enough to buy Mario, which I opened after I bought Samus, and Mario's good enough that I want to go get the rest of this line.
Mario stands about 4-inches tall at the highest point of the hat, and he's got 11 points of articulation. There's nothing really hidden here, minus the swivel wrists. Sadly Mario's jointed neck doesn't move much, but his big, non-jointed feet do a lot of good for this design. He has no problems being posed standing, fighting, or running without assistance assuming you get a good one (see below) and the joints aren't too loose. I very rarely can say I bought a figure developed for the American market that can stand on one foot without tons of fiddling, but Mario can with no real problems.
Mario's sculpting is superb, but like Link and Samus the paint could be better. By and large, the plastic colors are perfect. Even the brown paint on Mario's shoes is great, but the white needs help. The white circle around the "M" on his hat is a little pale, as is the white of his eyes - which doesn't quite cover the sculpted orbs in his skull. If the white was whiter and the eye area was completely covered in paint, this may be the best Mario for the money. But it's not.
Rounding out the figure is a cute accessory, the classic Super Mushroom. It's a solid red hunk of plastic with white spots which have some of the same problems as Mario. The plastic is very similar to the thick, rubbery plastic as Mario's hat and has no points of articulation. Link's shield is arguably more impressive, but if Jakks carded this mushroom for three or four bucks, you'd pay for it. It's pretty great. If you aren't a toy collector you probably aren't reading this column, but you'd enjoy this figure. It's a great desk toy that's a problem-free figure that can just hang around on any flat surface. You can find better Mario figures, but for the price you probably can't do much better than this. For about $25, the Figma version of Mario is pretty much the same with more articulation, better paint, a plastic ? block rather than cardboard, plus a coin. So it's better, but I've seen these figures for as little as $7. So get this one.
...a fun aside.
The figure in the comparison shot above and the carded shots below is not the same one as the loose ones. The reason for this is I didn't realize until after I'd opened it that it had a number of problems. These are uncommon problems, but are amusing enough to mention. That Mario had two right arms, two right feet, and a bad right shoulder joint which actually snapped when I took it back to the store to return it because of the bogus QC assembly issues. The rest of the line has, so far, been pretty good to me and while I haven't bought them all, I do find that I'm going back to snag one or two more here and there. This is a good line.
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