Before I worked at Entertainment Earth, I won this Boris Karloff The Mummy Glow in the Dark action figure at their Comic-Con booth in a trivia contest round 2003 or 2004. I believe it was "Who was the actor that was in the Lord of the Rings radio drama and the recent movies?" I had the painted version of The Mummy, so he stayed in his packaging for over 10 years before I finally opened this one up. It's the same great sculpt as the Sideshow Toy action figure that was sold in Target stores - and truly, those were amazing values in the late 1990s - but it has no paint, no accessories, and clamshell packaging. I like it.
I don't know if it's age or dumb luck, but it's hard to keep him standing - his center of gravity is off. The figure's sculpting foreshadows Sideshow Collectibles' legendary attention to detail with some of the best work in the business of the figure's era, but glow in the dark plastic sucks up the light pretty well. You have to get in close to see the wrappings' texture, the wrinkled skin, the decrepit hair, and the pained, hunched-over pose. The Mummy's glow color lends itself well to mummy wraps, and there are quite a few joints on here too.
This is basically a statue that was sold at toy prices - Sideshow eventually realized their market was higher-end, but in the 1990s these were all consumer products sold at kid prices. This 8 1/2-inch figure was closer to what Kenner and Toy Biz were doing in that era, with 10 points of articulation. Companies like Diamond Select probably liked what they saw, with higher-grade action figures with good, limited articulation and action poses being their preference for quite some time. The future of the toy industry was in this figure, to some extent - we'd see more articulation, more detail, and fancier tools deployed to make figures so mind-blowingly good that it's a pity people dismiss them as "normal" or "average" today. Before "scanning" faces was the norm, people had to get in there and do a lot of hard work - and in a pre-digital era, figures like the Mummy really stand out as being something special.
The glow is fine - it's not great. I kind of wish I got the others in this line, but I got it as a contest prize shortly after college when I was trying to not buy too much more and wasn't focused as much on glow things as of yet. It's a remarkable piece and one I'm glad I own, even if he toppled over as I wrote the previous clause and knocked over a few figures on my desk. That is the mummy's curse. If the price is right, get it and keep it in the packaging for your safety and the safety of the toys you love.
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