Conan Edogawa

Well, the Singles Day purchases have started rolling in. "My name is Jimmy Kudo, high school detective. But to the world, I'm Conan Edogawa, an alias I was forced to assume after an experimental drug reverted me back to childhood. Now I fight crime with Richard Moore and his daughter, Rachel, armed with the knowledge that one truth prevails." My main exposure to anime has always been Cartoon Network - there are some titles I got into via Netflix or other television channels, but [adult swim] has still been the main delivery system. While some things (like Cowboy Bebop) have remained a staple of the channel, others have only appeared briefly before disappearing into the ether. (Do you even remember that Michiko & Hatchin is a thing that exists? It was just five years ago.) Csse Closed premiered in 2004, but was gone by the next year. The show's still going strong - about to hit its 1,000th episode - but not on [as]. It's popular enough to have gotten a few SH Figuarts releases, though! Like the intro we quoted above explained, "Conan Edogawa" is the alias used by a high schooler who was turned into a first-grader. Shinichi Kudo (as he's known in the original Japanese) was a huge fan of mysteries, so chose the name based on two of his favorite authors: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, DDS, and Ranpo Edogawa. Although he's just been reverted to his own youth, he's somehow not recognized by people who have known him since he was that age - must be the glasses he's wearing. As you might expect, Conan wears a schoolboy's uniform: a blue blazer wheld closed by a single yellow button, grey shorts, a collared white shirt with a red bow tie, and red sneakers that look like lawyer-friendly versions of Converse. Looking at him, you'd never expect he's anything other than a fastidious 7-year-old, like Young Sheldon (except even remotely likeable). The sculpt is small and lightly detailed, though they did a really nice job converting his weird anime-hair into three dimensions: spiky bangs, a little tuft sticking off the back of his crown, and a single spike by the base of the skull. It's obviously meant to be seen from one side more than the other, but there's no easy way around that. Figuarts toys have good articulation, a trend Conan keeps alive despite only being about 3¾" tall. He moves at the toes, ankles, knees, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, and head. Nearly everything is at least a swivel/hinge, letting you create pretty much any pose you can think of. The back of the box shows a handful, if you're like me and bad at coming up with your own. Some of the joints pull apart a little too easily, but they're designed to do that, they're not breaking. Detective Conan gets quite a lot of extra parts: we're talking four alternate faces, 11 alternate hands, and even an alternate neck. Alternate neck! The only other figure we can remember doing anything remotely like that is Pyramid Head. Does Conan stab himself in the neck with a spear, too? No, he just takes off his bow tie. Jimmy's friend Professor Agasa invented a bunch of tech gadgets to help the now-young boy continue to pursue his detective work; the first thing he made was a voice-changer so Conan could sound like his old self or any other adult; the device is hidden in Conan's tie, and a dial on the back lets him select who or what he sounds like; he just speaks into the tie and the new voice comes out. To signify this, the alternate neck has the shirt collar but no tie - it's molded into one of the alternate left hands (Hand F), so you can pose it up in front of the toy's mouth, and one of the right hands is in a matching pose (Hand G). Plus, Face B shows his mouth open and his eyes darting slyly to look over his shoulder, so use all those pieces together for a complete scene. The second gadget Professor Agasa made were power-enhancing shoes. Jimmy was a star soccer player as early as middle school, and now that he's a kid his go-to offensive move against criminal threats is to kick something at them. Since a child has weak little legs, the shoes he wears use electricity and magnetic fields to stimulate his muscles, allowing him to really pack a wallop! Naturally, his favorite thing to kick is a soccer ball (though he'll use anything handy in a pinch). You already know the figure is wearing shoes, but the set includes a soccer ball for him to kick. It's perfectly round, has the appropriate tessellated design, all that. To demonstrate the sheer power of his kicks, the art will show the ball being deformed by the unbridled speed at which it's travelling - a plastic toy has absolutely no hope of doing that... so Tamashii included a second one molded in that kind of bent-bean shape! And wow, does the illusion work well! Both balls has a hole in the back where a display stand can plug in; hopefully you've got a spare, because this set doesn't include that. The third gadget was really just a modification to the Clark Kent glasses Conan wore: adding in a microphone he could drop somewhere, then use the glasses to listen in. The toy's glasses are a separate piece, because that's the only way the faces could be swappable. You simply remove the front of his hair (the bangs help hold the specs on), then you can take the glasses off and switch faces. We already mentioned Face B, with the open mouth; Face A, the one he has on in the package, is a bit of a confident smirk; Face C is showing determination, concentration, or worry, like he's carefully lining up a target; Face D appears to be lost in thought; and Face E is totally surprised, with a wide open mouth and tiny pupils. Once you know how the faces trade out, doing so is easy. Professor Agasa's fourth invention was a wristwatch that functions like a stun gun, firing a tranquilizer dart to knock someone out. The most common target is his girlfriend's private detective father - Richard Moore in the English dub, Mōri Kogorō in the original (named after Ranpo's character Akechi Kogorō and Maurice Leblanc, creator of Arsène Lupin the First). He's not a great detective, but since nobody would listen to a dumb kid, Conan will knock him out, then use the voice changer to pretend it's Richard "solving" the case. To show this, left Hand C is wearing the watch, left Hand D has the watch face flipped up to be a targeting reticule, and right Hand E has the thumb and forefinger close together to pretend he's working the controls. The remaining hands are the fists he's got in the package (A + B), open hands (H + I), two for holding items (J + K), a pointing left hand (L) and a thumbs-up right hand (M). I was sad when Case Closed was taken off [adult swim], because I really liked it. I'm glad it's still running, and I'm really glad it's gotten toys. There's a second Figuarts Conan with different accessories, all still compatible with this release; maybe that's something for next Singles Day. -- 01/06/21

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