I pre-ordered this one last year before the WoTC kerfuffle and it shipped around the same time things hit the fan. So I do indeed own this Gelatinous Cube figure that stands about 7 4/5-inches high and is basically a box. And not a very good box - you get six panels (with pre-inserted accessories) to pop together with dubious form-fit connections. Getting the lid on and off is a real pain, which is a shame given the toy's only play features are "stick weapons on it" and "open it to have it put figures inside." Based on the early reaction to the toys I assume these are heading for eventual closeout and you'll be able to get this one pretty cheaply, and I'm torn about that. On one hand, there's a lot of plastic here - it's relatively heavy in its box. On the other, the cube itself is unpainted and the joints are somewhat ugly, and at $14 you'd probably shrug and say "eh, good enough."
I cautiously recommend it. You may be able to fabricate a better one yourself, but on clearance it's fun enough to mess with that I'd probably buy some for friends. It's weird enough that we'll probably never see another one again, unless Super7 licenses a 3 3/4-inch one (and the inevitable miniatures), but I doubt action figures will get one with a hinged lid or anything functionally better than this. Just lower your expectations a bit, and you will probably enjoy this a great deal as a weird fantasy object for your desk or shelves.
When you open the toy you are greeted to waxy paper wrappings with the walls inside. You can plug the "stand" in to the "base" and then awkwardly pound the walls in place. The texture is pretty good - it looks wet and shiny, with ripples and such. I'd say it looks more like an ice cube to me, but it's wet and wet is what we want. It doesn't have a lot of squash or stretch, so visually it doesn't seem like some weird undulating creature so much as it is a clear block of stuff that has decorated itself to feel pretty today.
Due to the materials, this figure has quite a presence - with a little light it sings and you can see it across a room. It mostly obfuscates whatever is inside (in this case, Deadpool) and your figure can reach through a hole in the side that is normally plugged by a shield. They did a really good job with this - the waist clip holds a figure in place firmly and the hand goes right in the hole. I've shaken this around a bit and he still looks more or less fine in there. This is more of a statue than a toy, so that's what I wanted to see here.
You can pop accessories off the sides if you like. Each one has holes in it, and the toy has pegs on it. This means they look kind of weird if you want to use them as accessories, and the cube is limited in what you can pop on it. I would have preferred some sort of blue claw that could grip literally anything, but this is what you get. Some of the accessories are a little "flat" on the wall-facing side, so they're not all super impressive. I have no doubt they made use of their paint budget here to ensure everything has a few appropriate deco hits, but I would have liked just a tiny bit more. For example, a skull and a leg, it would have been nice to cobble together a simple skeleton figure out of the parts.
When I showed this to someone, the reaction was "it looks like something off of Etsy" and I can't disagree - I checked. The blue color is not what I would have preferred, and the accessories aren't the best. They're fine, and they fit well, but mostly I'm just annoyed that they didn't make it so it was easier to pop the lid off and on to "feed" your cube. It seems like Hasbro designed this figure with the belief that it will most likely be assembled with a figure inside it and never touched again. And they might be right! I don't plan on collecting the rest of the line, but I still think this was a neat thing to pick up - like the Fortnite Motorboat - because it adds to the existing (and boring) 6-inch toy lines. Figures for the sake of figures stop being fun after a while, and things like these give you something to do to play with them a bit.
While there is a lot of plastic here, there's not a lot of evidence of a ton of work. The seams are very visible and the it's unpleasant to assemble. But I'm a sucker for good creature toys, and sometimes you just have to buy something truly weird to remind you of why you are in this dumb hobby in the first place. I don't regret buying it.
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