- February 25th, 2017, 12:19 pm#4890630The paint apps on my Matty figures were always clean, the accessories always top notch and undamaged, the ghosts were pack ins rather than a separate figure at the same price, the body sculpts were pretty good, I honestly prefer the head sculpts (while not realistic I think they capture the characters better, and for me, the DST heads aren't ever winning any lookalike contests), and Mattel at least had the common sense to mold the figures in their appropriate colors.
Every last one of the DST figures I've gotten has had sloppy paint apps (thanks to their crappy masking my Ray looks like Mr. Spock, pointy ears, arched eyebrow and all), bad molding issues, damaged accessories (at a spot where I've seen other's from them break, so it's likely a matter of time), fused joints (to which their reply was "Just stick it in the freezer!" You can scroll back several pages, believe me it's there), blast streams that have no way of working out of the box and are incredibly brittle (I've had 2 break on me and I never even did anything with them), I honestly could keep going.
The figures joints are also molded in some of the dumbest choices of plastic color I've ever seen, as well as having been designed by people who haven't the slightest clue what they're doing. Hey, Zach, since you work for DST I'll direct this at you. Do you know how you avoid joint rub? As the name implies, you remove the rub. If the arm and joint don't touch, you don't get rub. Another way to avoid it is to mold the joint in a color similar to what you're going to paint it. If you're going to paint it blue? Use a blue plastic instead of flesh tone, like you guys didn't do with Vinz. If it's going to be grey, mold it in grey, not black, etc. If you do it that way, it's a lot harder to tell that the paint's rubbed off.
Then you get the ghosts, of which nearly half at this point are an utter travesty. The Slimer's a joke, Gozer looks pretty goofy, and don't even get me started on the Terror Dogs, which have to be an unsightly mess in order to articulate enough to stand on the platforms designed for figures nearly 2" shorter than they are. Which brings me to the diorama which is horribly out of scale with the figures they come packed with. It's closer to scale with the Mattel figures, but even then it's too small for them. The firehouse diorama, despite Zach's insistence that they strived to have it in scale, looks even more horribly misproportioned than that, being smaller than it should be for even the Matty figures. I understand that a 3' wide facade firehouse wouldn't be feasible. But I'm also not the one who decided upon it, nor the one who decided on the figure scale.
Yeah, these figures are cheaper than the Mattel figures. But to me, they feel cheap, and when you start to actually look at them, the cracks become all to obvious, and they start to look it too.