Captain America: The Winter Soldier Toys Roll Out

Hasbro’s Marvel movie style 3.75″ figures continue with a new line of Captain America characters.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is getting support from a number of toy lines, between the awesome Infinite Legends series, role play kids accessories, and a limited but still solid wave of 3.75″ figures, delivering three new toys based on both Cap movies: a new Cap, the Winter Soldier and Red Skull in his Hydra trench coat from the first movie.

This series is very much in line with what we saw from The Avengers— all new, well done sculpts with movie accurate detail and halfway decent articulation.  Each figure sports a ball neck, ball shoulders and hips and injection mold elbows and knees (no waist, wrist or ankle movement here).  Design-wise, this puts them as a slight step back from the Thor: The Dark World toys in terms of articulation, but way ahead of the Iron-Man 3 figures from last Spring.

Captain America is featured in his new “Commander Rogers” costume, complete with blue and silver shield and no mask.  The Chris Evans portrait is all new, with shorter hair, and the likeness is definitely there.  The rest of the figure, while nicely detailed with the texture of the movie uniform, has a weird sense of proportion, with Cap’s chest being too big and bulky compared to his limbs.  It’s not the worst, but he looks a little awkward.

Thankfully, the other two figures fare much better.  Winter Soldier is another all new sculpt, and a great translation of his on screen appearance, based on what we’ve seen of the movie.  His cybernetic arm stands out very well in bright silver against the blacks and browns of his uniform, and his weird mask looks very alien and interesting.  Had the mask been removable, or an alternate head been included, this could be the definitive small scale Winter Soldier, but even without these added features, he’s a very nice figure.

Red Skull rounds out the new figures in the wave, which also includes a recast of The Avengers Cap figure.  I’m assuming Red Skull is based on his First Avenger appearance because he features an outstanding Hugo Weaving face, which looks quite striking atop his movie accurate black Hydra uniform.  This is the Skull figure I’ve been wanting since I saw the first Cap movie, and Hasbro’s team did a great job here.  This Skull looks great with any of the Marvel movie figures, and even has a hand posed to hold the Tesseract, which was released earlier with the first movie Skull.

The Winter Soldier figures feature a gimmick called “Super Soldier Gear,” an over sized missile launching weapons the figure can (sort of) use.  But the twist here is, the missile launched can also attach to the kid-sized Captain America Battle Helmet, adding to the play factor of that toy as well.  It’s a neat concept, and should hopefully provide collectors a place to donate the unwanted cannon pieces.  The only drawback here is the gimmick accessories take the place of any legitimate ones, except for Cap’s shield.  This means Skull doesn’t get his pistol or Tesseract, and Winter Soldier doesn’t get any weapons at all.  Granted, these figures are in scale with GI Joe and his considerable arsenal, so gearing them up won’t be difficult, but adding a small accessory in addition to the gimmick weapons would have been a big help.

Overall, the Captain America: The Winter Soldier toys are another solid entry in Hasbro’s 3.75″ movie collection.  The sculpts are very good, the kid-centric play feature is novel, and we get three important new figures to rounding out Cap’s corner of the cinematic universe.  These figures are showing up now at Toys R Us stores, and should be available everywhere soon, in support of the new movie hitting theaters this April.