This Gonzo with Bike figure set was one of my absolute favorite toys as a kid - I quite enjoyed the cartoon with its failure-in-the-making comedian bear and self-professed pop culture weirdo. The show was essentially training wheels for a lot of what would be the basis of today's pop culture, integrating footage from big movies on a cartoon for very young people that was basically a spin-off of The Muppets Take Manhattan. Of course I wanted toys - and since there were no action figures, there was McDonald's. That's how the 1980s worked, with the fast food juggernaut serving as a toy store for kids with shrewd appetites.
The toy is satisfying and pretty brilliant. You get a PVC figure on what I think is a HDPE bike. The bike is entirely molded in color with red wheels, yellow spokes, and a green body. The wheels spin freely and it's surprisingly sturdy. This was rattling around in a box for over 30 years! Everything looks good - the paint is sharp, the toy shows no stress marks of any kind, and it still rolls great. I used to send it down makeshift ramps - it was a lot of fun to have a toy with Hot Wheels-like functionality, but with a figural component.
The figure is really sharp - painted shoes, painted eyes, a painted mouth, painted buttons, and a painted set of baby overalls. Everything is pretty clean for a figure that was basically close to free. Obviously if you get a modern mini-figure it'll be sharper, but if you compare Gonzo to other PVC figures of this era I imagine you'd find this to be as good as or better than the likes of Applause! or Comics Spain or other similar items. You can see sculpted feathers on his head and on his body with a smooth nose and generally untextured clothing. He has no problems fitting on the bike, and the removable element is a nice bonus - unlike Fozzie or Kermit, he can't stand freely on his own.
I'm really impressed by how good this figure is today, not even taking into consideration how it was as a freebie in its day. With paint applications cleaner than Battle Beasts and wheels that roll better than most Transformers, they did a wonderful job making a quality figure with decent sculpting and great paint. However, if I keep it it's just going to go in a box until I die. It has to go - and I hope whoever winds up with it enjoys it as much as I do. The wheels don't squeak, the plastic isn't oily with age, it feels and looks exactly as I remembered. It's a gem, and you can get a bagged one on eBay cheaply still.
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