Fresh Monkey Fiction’s upcoming six-inch Monster Force figures got a bit of a preview at the recent Joe Fest last month in the form of translucent variants of the Dracula and Forgotten King figures. I’ve been patiently waiting for this line, and patience has never been my strong suit, so I jumped at the chance to order these guys from Big Bad Toy Store after the con ended so I could get my first in-person look at these soon to be The structure of the introduced character. Let’s take a look at Dracula, the Blood Prince and the Forgotten King of Doom!
For someone who works on character packaging, I’m fairly uninterested in preserving it, so I appreciate this lo-fi loose approach to the character. Easier to tear apart and get to the figures themselves. I wonder if this approach could save the company a lot of money on the production side…
Both figures come with a ton of items, including stands, extra hands, explosions, and weapons. Dracula gets an extra portrait, along with two sets of clasped hands, clawed hands, a stand, and a sword. The Forgotten King (TFK for short) comes with a staff, two power effects, four hands (fist, grip, slash, and splay), and a stand. The basic grasping hand looks the same for both characters, but what’s cool to me is that the open hand is different because Drak’s hands are clawed.
Stands usually don’t do much for me, but I like these two, especially Dracula’s pool of blood because he looks like he’s made of blood, which gives me the feeling that he emerged from a sacrificial pool of blood of resurrecting him. The regular stand is neat because it doubles as a tombstone when placed on its side and has a nice Monster Force logo embedded in it.
Both Dracula’s sword and TFK’s wand fit securely in the hand and feature cool designs and sharp sculpted details. I love the dragon theme on Dracula’s sword because it’s so reminiscent of his historical Dragon Knights. TFK’s cane has an ornate skull design on the top and a blade on the bottom. These parts can be easily removed or replaced, so it might be handy to swap these translucent glowing parts onto the regular figure when it arrives.
Extra hands allow for easy opening and closing, yet secure hold. Dracula also has claw grip hands in addition to his standard grip hands, which seem more suited to triggering weapons but can hold a sword and appear to be waving with his fingers. The chops and punches made me think TFK might be more about hand-to-hand combat than I originally thought.
If you let go of TFK’s hand, the energy effect will land on his wrist. This is very reminiscent of many of the Marvel Legends energy effects. I also balanced it on the staff for an interesting effect.
Portrait of Dracula gives you the necessary duality of the character shifting between gentle and savage beast.
The two characters have a lot in common, and it looks like most of the body is the same, with different torso coverings making each character’s suit feel more unique. I like the different textures they applied to the pants, and the body feels like a nice middle ground between 100% realistic human proportions and the Superman feel of Marvel Legends. Right in the wheelhouse of G.I. A lot of work was also done on the heads to differentiate the two, with a very cool Egyptian-themed vibrating helmet for the Forgotten King, and an unusual portrait of a bearded Dracula. The coverings are one piece, so while it looks like Dracula is wearing a jacket over a tie-laced vest, it’s actually all a thin piece of plastic and extremely flexible plastic.
The overlays are very thin so there’s a lot of leg and waist movement, it does make the mid torso articulation points pointless, but the waist ball joints do get a really good amount of tilt so they don’t feel like that to me Very stiff. The thin overlay also combines well with the butterfly joint, allowing for two-handed swinging of the sword, which I honestly wasn’t expecting. This is very rare among super articulated figures these days. The joint quality out of the box was very solid and I didn’t feel like I needed to heat them to move them. I think the hips and ankles could be a little tighter, but they hold their position well. To be fair, California is hotter than hell right now. I did end up loosening the glue on the Dracula vest when I heated it up and took it apart to get a closer look at the joints, so you might want to keep that in mind if you’re a customizer.
The connection is as follows:
- Rotate/articulate shoulders, wrists, hips and ankles
- Ball head, lower neck, mid-torso and waist
- Double hinged knees and elbows
- Articulated thoracosphenoidal joint and neck
- Rotate biceps, thighs, glute pulldowns and boots
There’s very little paint on these two figures as they’re mostly translucent with some prominent eye detail, but the Forgotten King does have some nice bright blue glow-in-the-dark color. The blue is a power boost to me and the red reminds me of Deacon Frost as the Blood God from the first Blade movie, but I also just like the translucent characters in general. It will be interesting to see how these guys scale with the Legends and Classifieds, as they seem to fit well with many 6-inch or so scale lines.
Overall, I really like these figures and they make me even more excited for the regular figures that will be shipping soon. Monster Power combines two of my current obsessions, G.I. Joe Classified and Universal Monsters, so I didn’t think I could be more hyped about it, but these certainly did the trick. These special models are currently sold out on BBTS, but they do have regular order quantities and the first wave is shipping soon.
