What better day to feature this weird figures than HALLOWEEN?! I’m not sure where Toy Biz got their original inspiration for these super deformed, monstrous versions of wrestlers but this oddball line only had three releases before the series ended altogether:
To me, these figures actually resemble the WWF Maximum Sweat line from 1999 but without the added foulness of your action figures sweating out of their plastic pores. Then again, I guess these WCW ones are kinda lame in comparison to those on the gross-out scale. Goldberg shoots out water through the gap of his teeth, Sid Vicious reveals himself to have a full-brain under his bleached mullet (not a half-brain, surprisingly) and Sting’s eyes poke out of his head; nothing too grotesque about these action features…
Maybe they should’ve gone the other way with these! Maybe a Hollywood Hogan and “Macho Man” Randy Savage two-pack that allows you to bake the toys until they resemble their counterparts’ real-life burnt-orange leathery skin. What if they released a “Nature Boy” Ric Flair with the Stretch Armstrong technology, a figure with a plastic, almost-boneless body you could bounce around the ring all you want but yet it never breaks? Or how about a Mark Madden figure… with… just… Mark Madden.
Overall, these things stand out visually when compared to all of the other strange WCW figures that have been released over the years, so maybe they’re worth having just due to their weirdness. Plus, they’re seemingly hard to come by as boxed versions are always super pricey on eBay. Getting the Sting figure with his bat and his mask is probably only possible this way as I’ve yet to see a loose version of him with all of his accessories.
I’m off now to see if I can somehow convert an old Stretch Armstrong figure into a Ric Flair. I mean, he already has bleached blonde hair and is just wearing blue underwear…
40-year-old World Championship Wrestling fanatic/collector/hoarder. Safety officer by day, scanner of wrestling magazine by night.
He’s got posters on the wall, his favorite rock group’s KISS.
“I’m twice the toy that you are, and I have half the brains that you do!”
Does it come with scissors?
WARNING: Sid Vicious figure not for Children Under 6 or John Laurentis
A broken shin-bone would be a disgusting Gross-Out action feature for a Sid toy…
This was something like the Maximum Sweat or Juiced Up range.
[…] quite exactly sure what they were supposed to be. Their design is bulky and grotesque, similar to the Gross-Out figures, but the Back Talkers name would suggest some sort of speech capability, maybe? Toy Biz already had […]