ReAction

I had planned to consecutively review all 6 components on the San Diego Comic Con G.I. Joe box set that I got in earlier this week but I’m going to have to stop after 3 (thus far I’ve reviewed AVAC, The Chimera, and Steeler). I’ll get around the second half of the set later but I need to talk about some of the other toys I got in this week. My latest shipment from BigBadToyStore included the brand new Combiner Wars Devastator figure which is an absolute beast of a figure and I was super stoked to get it. But as cool as Devastator is he was overshadowed by a much smaller and simpler toy that arrived in the same shipment. I’m talking about JAWS.

Sharks terrify and fascinate me and the movie Jaws has a lot to do with it. I first saw it when I was very young and I’ve seen it dozens of times since. It’s probably one of the movies I’ve watched most in my life; up there with Indiana Jones, Star Wars and The Crow. I’ve also seen each of the three Jaws sequels a bunch of times too. None are as good as the original but even the worst Jaws movie is better than any other shark movie ever made. I have multiple shark films in my collection (Deep Blue Sea, Sharktopus, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, etc.) and they’re all completely ridiculous whereas the first Jaws is one of the best movies ever made. I never get tired of watching it.

When I was a kid I didn’t really care that there weren’t official Jaws action figures. I liked all the human characters well enough but they were just regular looking guys. The shark is what mattered to me and I had a Fisher Price shark that served as an adequate stand in for Jaws. The shark came with my Adventure People patrol boat. The whole set was pretty great but the shark definitely saw more play time than the dorky diver figures. I used that plastic shark with G.I. Joes, He-Men, Battle Beasts, and anywhere else I could fit him in. He and my Adventure People octopus were very versatile that way. They were essentially the character actors of my figure drawer who managed to steal scenes in every play time scenario.

I had Jaws in mind every time I played with that old shark but the actual toy was nowhere near as menacing as the movie shark. The Adventure People shark had a very docile look about it with a closed mouth and a bored look on his face. I really had to stretch my imagination every time it ferociously attacked someone. But no more!

Funko, the company behind those lovable POP! figures, has produced an actual licensed Jaws toy and it is amazing. Jaws is part of Funko’s line of 80s-style retro action figures called ReAction figures. As with their POP! figurines I intended to only buy one or two of them at first but then I fell in love with ReAction figures and now I have a bunch of them. The line covers a ton of properties and the figures come out faster than I can keep up with them. The 3 human figures in the Jaws wave are what I’ve come to expect from the line, simple but recognizable 3 3/4″ figures with 5-points of articulation. They have an obvious retro vibe to them. As for the shark itself, whom I will continue to refer to as “Jaws”, the figure isn’t as obvious a throwback. It looks like it could be included in any modern toy line. It’s probably one of the best looking shark toys I’ve ever seen.

The packaging, on the other hand, is extremely old-school. Honestly, the packing of ReAction figures is half the appeal of them. Most modern toy packaging sucks but Funko has nailed that classic 80s look that was commonplace when action figures were in their heyday. These Jaws figures are actually the first ReAction figures I’ve opened. If you look at my past ReAction reviews (Wolfman, Invisible Man, Rocketeer) you’ll see I kept them all sealed on their cards because I liked the cardbacks so much. The Jaws cards were beautiful too but I simply couldn’t resist opening this Jaws figure and because I opened him I had to open Quint, Hooper, and Brody too.

The sculpt on Jaws is very nice. The body is sleek with very few sculpted details but the face is rife with cuts and scars. There’s no articulation on the body which is fine but thankfully he has an articulated jaw so you can open and close his mouth. It opens quite wide so you can stuff Quint right in there if you want to recreate the final scenes of the movie (sorry, spoiler-alert). Jaws has two rows of teeth on both the top and bottom of his mouth which is a pretty cool little detail.

The paint work is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: Grey skin, white belly, red mouth, and lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye.

This figure is nearly perfect. The only thing that bothers me is how front heavy he is. When out of the box he falls forward onto his chin and theres nothing you can do about it. It looks kind of silly displayed that way with his tail up in the air. I grabbed a loose transformer piece I had laying around to prop him up for these pictures. A weighted tail would’ve been an easy fix. Oh well, still amazeballs. 10 out of 10.