Although there are over 8,000 Marvel heroes and villains, less than 500 of them are characters that most people have ever heard of. And so, with hundreds of figures now released, there are very few major omissions left. And this year, perhaps the most prominent missing villain has finally arrived: Thanos! Is it worth buying five of the Marvel Legends Avengers Wave 2 figures to build the Thanos Build-A-Figure…?

The Right:

FINALLY!! I’ve been wondering when in the world Hasbro was going to produce a Thanos action figure ever since they reignited the 6″ Marvel Legends toy line, and after several years of waiting (and bafflingly being left out of the Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel Legends series), the time has come.

Regardless of the quality of the figure itself, the mere existence of an official Marvel Legends Thanos figure is going to fill a lot of gaps in collections and make many collectors happy. Thumbs up.

The Thanos head sculpt is easily the high point of this Build-A-Figure. With a detailed skin texture and a maniacal grin that’s full of charm, the head sculpt on the Thanos Build-A-Figure is fantastic. The paint wash on his face and his imperfect teeth further bring the portrait together and really make the head pop. Great stuff!

Thanos is one big dude, and it was important that this Build-A-Figure reflect that–and it does. Standing at an intimidating 7.5″ tall, Thanos is suitably larger than the standard 6″ Marvel Legends figures, but not so much so as to look out of place. In fact, I’d say the scale on this Thanos is near-perfect for his modern version.

On a sidenote: I know some folks will want a classic or bigger Thanos, and for those collectors, I wholeheartedly recommend the excellent Marvel Select Thanos figure (with Death!).

Thanos has one fisted hand for bashing, and one open hand for grasping. That is absolutely the way to go for figures that won’t get interchangeable hands, and the sculpting on both hands is top-notch.

I know many people are going to balk about the fact that this figure doesn’t include an Infinity Gauntlet, but I don’t have a problem with it: to my knowledge, this modern Thanos has never had the Infinity Gauntlet while looking like this, so I don’t see why his figure would either.

The Wrong:

The biggest letdown with the Avengers Legends Thanos is his articulation scheme, with the most blatant offending element being the hips.

Thanos can move his leg forward enough to simulate kicking a rock on the ground, but side-to-side and back movement on the legs are almost non-existent. Thanos has never been the most lithe go around, but this is just ridiculous.

In addition, while he has ball-jointed shoulders with a great range of motion, raising his arms too high causes Thanos’ collarpiece to pop off incessantly. This collarpiece doesn’t plug in tightly at all, so it flops off constantly. It’s really rather annoying.

Although the costume on this Thanos figure is largely accurate to his appearance in the recent “Infinity” crossover (a story which I thought was downright awful overall, by the way), the look still isn’t perfectly authentic.

The big inaccuracy I see with this figure is that the silver, ridged areas on his legs go down too far and are way too wide. It’s pretty obvious that Hasbro has designs on reusing these legs for an Apocalypse Build-A-Figure in 2016 (potential spoilers), but having so much silver on a Thanos figure simply does not look correct.

Finally, I think that the gold portions of Thanos’ costume could have used extra shading in the form of a darker paint wash. As it is, the gold portions of the costume look toy-like (in a bad way) because of the lack of paint detail on them.

Overall: Hasbro got a lot right with their inaugural Marvel Legends Thanos BAF, as the head, scale and sculpting details are all very nice. But on the flipside, his articulation has a lot of limitations, he could use a bit more paint shading and the silver areas of his legs are inaccurate. Overall, Thanos is a solid figure that I think fans will be glad to have, but I am a bit disappointed that he merely turned out to be “pretty good” and not “excellent”.

GRADE: B-