Owning Bill Murray

When I was going through the excitement of my Masters of the Universe Classics fad (let’s face it, that is exactly what it was), I also noticed that Mattel were doing some Ghostbusters figures.  I have always loved Ghostbusters,  I remember seeing it at the cinema and the scene where the librarian ghost gets all scary in the face, well, I got scared and covered my eyes.

I still love the movie and I also love Bill Murray.   Now I have a little plastic Bill Murray in his Ghostbuster outfit!  Let’s take a gander!

The package is much along the same lines as the Masters packaging, with the ‘mailer’ box and the carded figure in the bubble.  Obviously since they are trying to show all the goods, the figure is squashed into a rather awkward looking pose with his proton pack firing away.

I do like the inclusion of a little info card on the back.

As well as the Ghostbusters logo on the top.

Venkman looks pretty good when out of the box, but after my initial excitement of having a Ghostbusters toy, during the course of the photo shoot, I kind of felt my enthusiasm waning somewhat.  It’s a well sculpted toy and the proton pack looks pretty good, as well as it being a great representation of how he looks in the movie. 

That’s where it falls down a bit however, as no matter how good a translation of the movie images one gets, it is still just a guy in a puffy bland suit.  Even though it does look like Bill Murray.

The face sculpt is pretty damn fine.  I love it!

As are the rest of the suit details.  Well of what there are, the GB logo is sharply applied as are the other paint applications.  Suit sculpting is good with pockets, zippers and folds all included.

The articulation on this guy is a lot better than I thought it would be.  Two things I don’t really like though are his elbows and hip joints.  The elbows are semi hidden by the elbow pad, but because of this, if you attempt to straighten the arm it comes out with a freaky looking bump.  The hips on the other hand, due to the way they are formed really break up the sculpted pants when you spread his legs apart.  I have always hated this type of hip joint and it’s the main reason why I didn’t get the Avengers(Ruffalo) version of the Marvel Select Hulk.  The ankles are also hindered by the sculpting of the pants as wel but even with these things it is a pretty poseable toy, even to the point of doing stuff one wouldn’t expect!

Of course, all we really care about is how he looks with his Proton Pack!  Luckily the detail on the pack looks beautiful!  It has a mount for the hand piece and is permanently attached to the pack by a tube!  It’s very cool!!

The hand piece is a little bit squishy and I found because of that it was a bit of a chore to get onto Peter’s hands.  He is of course able to hold it two handed, which one would expect.

It also comes with an effect part which is a nice addition and it actually looks OK. In the box it’s in two parts sadly you need the smaller part to attach to the hand piece, so you don’t get the option of having two lengths.  To be honest though, it wouldn’t look right without being fairly long anyway.

Another part Peter comes with is a rather nice Glow in the dark Ghostbusters logo.  Judging by the way it has a peg on it, I suspect is is meant to be a stand for Peter.  It is a bit small though so he’ll probably have to have one foot off.  Oh well, at least it will stabilise Peter even more.

It doesn’t glow all that impressively however.  I am a sucker for GITD stuff though.

While this is a pretty well sculpted figure, I just don’t find myself being as excited as I thought I would be by it and I suspect that it is entirely due to it being a dude in a jump suit of some sort.  Sure the proton pack is ace, the effect parts are cool, the face sculpt is pretty damn fine and even the articulation is good (aside from the look of the elbows and hips), but it is still just a dude in a baggy suit.  I’ll be keeping it for sure and maybe if I bothered getting the other Ghostbusters in their suits it might increase  the coolness of the figure somewhat, but unless they become super cheap (unlikely since they were Matty Collector only pieces) I doubt I’d bother getting the others, although Ray was my second favourite GB character (and I do love Dan Akroyd as well ).

It’s a tough call really.  One by itself looks a bit drab but is a well done figure.  Maybe I should’ve done what I did with the Ninja Turtles and Kaizoku Rangers, and that was immediately hunt them all, in the thinking that if one is crappy, they would look less crappy if I had the whole team.    Mind you, with the stupid release system that Mattel had set up for these guys, slow postage and initial charges, as well as the high risk of the transaction being cocked up and the fact that I bought Peter here before I was into the Kaizoku rangers and the Nick TMNT, I would put it down to naivety. 

My final thoughts for this toy are: Very well done toy, but get all of them, not just one.