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Edward Scissorhands | ||||||||||
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rom his early film Frankenweenie to his very latest, Corpse Bride, it's quite obvious writer/director Tim Burton has a thing for the classical Frankenstein story. High up on a hill in his lonely mansion, a kind-hearted inventor (the much-adored Vincent Price) creates for himself the son he never had. Made from spare parts, the boy is the apple of his eye. And while the inventor is creating the last, most important parts to finish the puzzle—his hands—he temporarily substitutes sharp multibladed scissors. And as the finished hands are ready for installation, the kind old man dies, leaving poor Edward permanently with hands of sharp steel.
Burton's beloved 1990 film (still considered by many to be his masterwork) features Johnny Depp as the title character, a misfit left to live his life alone in the now-empty mansion until a sugary-sweet door-to-door cosmetics saleslady named Peg finds him and takes him home to take care of him, with mixed results.
Mezco, known in recent times for creating those Mez-Itz LEGO-like action figures, now introduces a unique 9-inch action figure based on Edward Scissorhands.
His oversized head, with its shock of matted hair, shows scars all over its pale purple-blue face, due to frequent mishaps with his awkward hands.
Packaged in a semi-cylindrical clear plastic bubble card, Edward is a highly distorted, or stylized, figure, with articulated scissor hands and a freshly shorn dog. The exaggerated proportions lend a very cartoonish look to this cartoony character.
The stark background card shows a wonderful image of Depp as Edward, with his scissor hands, montaged with his mansion on a snowy blue background, which portrays quite well the melancholy and desperate loneliness of the character. The back shows images of the finished distorted action figure, also on a monochrome blue background of the interior of the mansion, with its gears and machinery.
Daringly distorted
This is perhaps one of Burton's most beloved characters, and Mezco does the character's quirky personality justice with this freakishly deformed figure. His head is far too large for his thin, spindly body, the feet too long, the arms too bony, the hair a frizzle of rubber. Still, this somehow fits in with Scissorhands' quirkiness.
His face is as exaggerated as the rest of him. The head and neck are both on ball joints, allowing for a fairly wide range of movement at the head, but not so much where the neck joins the torso.
The two hands are mounted on ball joints and resemble the copper coverings of Freddy Kreuger's blade gloves. Each hand has four independently moving scissor blades. In keeping with the figure's proportions, the hands and blades are much larger than they would be on a normal figure.
His outfit is lined with leather belts and buckles and even a bolt at the shoulder with a wing nut—an interesting cross between a fetishist and the epitomal image of young prince Hamlet.
One shoulder is ball-jointed, but with extremely restricted movement. The other simply stands at a right angle to the body and rotates only along its axis. Each elbow pivots on an angle to allow for various arm positions, but some make the figure look as though the elbow has been broken.
The waist rotates, and each leg has only one joint at the hip and one at the boot-top to allow the feet to rotate along the leg's axis.
Basically, this is not a very posable figure. Despite the use of ball joints on the neck, shoulder and wrists, the lack of good leg joints means he can realistically only stand in one position, though his arms can take several positions.
Despite the strange distortion of the figure, the actual molding and execution of the materials is quite good. Excellent detail abounds all over the figure, from the rear zippers on his pants legs to the differently patterned boots. It's clear this boy is made up of various spare parts.
I'm not a huge fan of distorted or deformed figures, but I can appreciate the quirkiness of this figure. Despite the lack of true proportions, the figure is molded rather well; it just falls short on useful articulation. — Sean
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