Black Lion
Review by JoshB
All hail Voltron, out lord and savior. May his combinable goodness bring light into your darkest days.
At the center of Voltron is the Black Lion. Lately people have been poo-pooing all over this toy, claiming the SOC is superior and "Why would I ever buy this if I already have the SOC?" I'm sorry people do you have a limit on the amount of Voltrons you can have? The answer is no, there is no limit. There is room in your collections for all the Voltrons, be it Matchbox, Panosh Place, Trendmasters, Bandai, LJN or Playmates. Buy them all and shut up about it.
This Black Lion holds all the gimmicks of the combined Voltron. It comes in a "try me" window box, and it makes over 60 sound effects. Batteries are included.
The lion itself is a big, bulky beast. Theres a ton of articulation, but no accessories. He's mostly hard plastic, with some softer plastic for the limbs.
If you open the mouth, the faceplate tends to come down with it, but if you can separate them you will see a missile molded into the lower jaw.
The head rotates, and the neck collapses into the body a little bit.
On the back is the switch to turn off the sound effects. After a few dozen accidental bumps of the sound activation button on the side this was promptly turned to the off position.
They did an interesting thing here with the wings by putting a peg in at the joint where the wings fold. Now your wings will never look out of place in lion mode.
Transformation is essentially the same as every other version of the Black Lion, ever. Straighten out the rear legs, fold up the tail, fold in the arms to the shoulders and unfold the wings. Thats it. We're ready to form Voltron!
But not in this review. That's for another time...
Comments
5 comments postedI kinda hate saying this, but seeing how they were able to get a fairly competent classic Voltron on the modern toy market, I was hoping Playmates would have gotten the new license for Power Rangers toys over Hasbro. They've certainly proven to they can do big chunky plastic toys over the increasingly hollow, quality control issues and overall mediocre Transformers and Star Wars toys Hasbro have been doing for the past years.
Agreed! You can't have too many Voltron toys, and this makes eight total for me as of this post. Took a few weeks to find the black lion at my local Target, the same one I got the other four lions from earlier. It was on an end cap, so I can't help wondering if it'd been there the whole time and I'd just missed it.
Wish I knew this was coming out before I bought Legendary Defender Voltron.
Ah well.
You can't keep us hanging, man!
I'm such an idiot. I never posted it live!
https://www.collectiondx.com/toy_review/2018/voltron