Arcade

A deadly amusement park? I thought they closed that place down! A brilliant assassin with shadowy origins, Arcade makes up for his lack of physical strength with a keen intellect and a vast personal fortune. I've gone on record saying the best way to introduce the X-Men to the MCU would be to start with a Disney+ series focusing on the orginal five as teens. You do eight episodes, each one representing a single semester of their high school experience, with "monster of the week" style threats, smaller villains who could never carry a movie on their own. Blob or Vanisher might not be interesting enough for two full hours, but 50 minutes? Interspersed with CW-style teen drama? Sure, that could do it. Then the season finale is them getting caught on Krakoa, leading into Giant-Size X-Men #1 as the basis for the eventual movie. Anyway, an episode with a Jigsaw-like Arcade and his Murderworld would fit into that formula perfectly. Arcade's whole shtick is theme parks, so he dresses like a dapper carnival barker: a crisp white suit, green shirt, and yellow bowtie with red polka dots. For this particular figure, they've reused the "Marvel Legacy" Professor X jacket, the one that has a built-in vest, because that's more stylish. The tie is new, obviously, and because Arcade is sensitive about his height, he wears thick platform shoes. It's not that the figure is any shorter than usual, of course - that would have required new legs to be molded, and they weren't doing that. So you'll just have to pretend. To be fair, though, molding new legs might have been a good thing. This figure has all the articulation you would expect this body to have, but the hips on my figure just do not want to move. They go out to the sides just fine, but forward and back? You can forget it! It's a good thing he doesn't have a chair to sit on, because he'd have to just stand behind it forever. I wonder if heat or cold would be the thing to fix it? For most of the character's existence, he's looked like Evil Ron Howard. If Ron Howard had hair, I guess. He's an insufferably smug white boy with an annoying smile and his red hair styled into a wavy 1950s haircut. It really flares out to the sides, and has a ducktail in the back. They could have chosen to show him laughing maniacally at whoever is currently trapped in one of his games, but this works. In recent years, he's begun to look a little more dishevled. It's not nearly as iconic an appearance, but Hasbro has included an alternate head that has longer, shoulder-length hair. This head also features a broader smile, with a few of the teeth showing, so we're really disappointed they didn't do what they did with Drizzt and make the hair swappable between the two. There are already ears sculpted under the hair where you'll never see them, snd the short hair is a separate piece on that head, so why not allow us some variety? When it comes to accessories, the thing Arcade most often uses is "a whole-ass funhouse," so there's no way that would fit inside the standard Marvel Legends packaging. So what we get instead is a simple golden cane with a light blue orb at the top. Sure, that makes sense for him, why not? It adds to his stylized showman personality. The figure also includes the right leg of this series' Build-A-Figure, Xemnu the Titan. Despite being a very simple figure to make, it's never seemed like Arcade was a likely candidate to get a toy - he's just too plain, and his gimmick would never fit in anything short of a full-sized playset. So this may be a glorified repaint, but we're glad he finally found a place in this supervillain-themed ML series. -- 09/19/21

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