[Trivial Psychic]

Straying a little from the Fakepools, but still keeping on the K.O. figure theme, I recently pulled the trigger on a different K.O. figure that I saw posted on Viperkingdom's Ebay store, this one being a K.O. of Bandai's Movie Realization Black Spider-Man/Venom from Spider-Man 3. This figure came out back in 2007 when the movie hit the theaters, and was available only as a two pack overseas. Now-a-days, I've seen this same box set retail for as much as 150 bucks, so imagine my surprise when I saw the Black Spider-man featured as a single figure for only 18 dollars shipped. Having wanted a decent movie-verse black Spidey for years after the colossal disappointment that was the Marvel Legend SM3 line, I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger. I mean, how bad could it be right?

Well...he arrived in the mail today...


...and I must say...I'm in love.


The figure is based off of Sam Raimi's original designs for dark Spidey/Venom, with a more anatomical "skinless flesh" look (the "flesh" if you will...is taught and is being pulled in all directions,) with a symbiotic mask that's far creepier than what we eventually got in the movie. Like Raimi's original vision for the Green Goblin, he battled with studio heads at Marvel and Sony over a Venom design that they felt was too terrifying and scary for children, a battle that forced several scenes to either be cut from the movie (the infamous symbiotic scream boo moment in the trailer,) or changed altogether during production (compare the scene from the movie in which Brock becomes Venom, to the one that was previewed at SDCC that year, and you will see a huge difference.) The head sculpt on this guy is amazing, with organic teeth that's not unlike his comic book son, Carnage.


The quality of the bootleg really impressed me though. All the joints were tight, the paint apps were right on (including translucent symbiote eyes...very creepy as you can see through them) and the figure was sturdy and well constructed. He has come apart on occasion a few times, but being that it's a KO of a pvc Bandai figure, and not a Hasbro figure, it was to be expected, and he was easily put back together. He's also slightly bigger than the average Marvel Legend, but he's far better proportioned than the movie Venom that we got from the SM3 line, and honestly, I kinda like the towering size he has over my movie-verse Spideys. It kinda reminds me of a symbiotic Jason Voorhees.


With the crappy Black Spider-Man and the ridiculously proportioned movie-verse Venom (which is still a good figure) from the ML: SM3 wave...


Doing battle with Movie Spidey (which happens to be my favorite Spidey figure of all time overall.) As you can see, the joints on the figure were nice and tight, which really surprised me considering it's a bootleg. K.O. Venom/Spidey was able to maintain all poses with little to no assistance.






Sorry if I went into too much detail on this, but being that some of you have actually had some positive experiences with your Fakepools and other bootlegs, I figured I'd share one of my own as well.