If I were to judge the Funko ReAction figures purely on the basis by which I judge other action figures–articulation, sculpt, paint–I’d find them to be poor at best. If I did that though, I’d be doing them, myself, and my readers a disservice.

In my first creative writing class, my professor taught us how to critique someone else’s work with this analogy. Imagine you walk into a house and in the middle of one of the rooms is a piece of furniture with four legs and a wooden surface. You go over and try to sit down, but it’s too high. The bottom isn’t curved so it’s uncomfortable and there’s nothing to support your back. The carpenter comes in, and you tell her that she’s made a terrible chair and you list all the things that’re wrong with it. She frowns and tells you that you’re sitting on a table.

The moral is that you’ve got to figure out what something is trying to be before you can judge its merits, and the Funko ReAction figures aren’t typical action figures, and they’re not intended to be.

That leaves the question, what are the Funko ReAction figures supposed to be? If you go to their website, which I did trying to find a quote so I could talk about their figures in their own words, you’ll find that there’s almost no text. Instead, you navigate the site by clicking on mostly textless images of the products themselves. Even on the blog, the descriptions are about the characters, not the products themselves.

Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that I see that Funko is going for a nostalgic shout out to the Kenner Star Wars action figures. They’ve got the same five points of articulation and same passing resemblance to the characters they’re based on.

And it is cool from that perspective. It also leads to a lot of figures, say the entire crew of the Nostromo from Alien (including Kane with the facehugger and chestburster, and more impressive: members of the crew other than Ripley) that probably wouldn’t get made otherwise.

While that is awesome, in my mind, they’re cheap figures that prey on nostalgia, producing quantity over quality. The descriptions on the website (when they have them) focus on the character over the product because with five points of articulation there isn’t anything good beyond that they could talk about.

I got the Hellraiser 3 Pinhead and the Terminator shiny T-800 Endoskeleton to research this, and they’re two of my favorite characters (if you remember back to my first Halloween column, I talked about wanting a Pinhead a couple of weeks ago) and I wasn’t impressed. Pinhead didn’t have the nails in his face, but rather a grid of where they should be on his face. Although, credit given where credit due, he did come with the puzzle box that summoned him and his cohorts as an accessory.

The Terminator’s left foot is not on securely. (I’m going to glue it. That’s not the issue. It’s a question of who should be putting pieces securely onto new action figures, and that burden should fall onto the producer, not the consumer).

My advice, if you’re going to buy the Funko ReAction Figures, stick to the characters that you truly love and don’t think you could find elsewhere. The crew of Firefly would probably be a good bet, but not the Halloween line where it’s a good bet that NECA or McFarlane already has a better version. What makes these figures fun is the call back to the old style Kenner figures, and it’s a cool aesthetic but not a fun toy. If you like that, these will be great for you, but they’re definitely not my cup of tea.

A Call to Action (Figures) is a weekly column published every Wednesday, chronicling my rants and raves about all things action figure. Next week, I’ll be talking about the toys I’m most thankful for.

Did I get it right? Are you still going to buy Funko ReAction figures? Let me know in the comments!