Modern Ever-Living Mumm-Ra

Taking a break from Transformers, I though I would rip out a fellow that took me a while to get a hold of.  Mumm-Ra the Ever Living.  Not to be confused with Mumm-Ra the normal living.  As I watched the modern Thundercats show and enjoyed it, I decided that having Lion-O without Mumm-Ra is a bit like Optimus without Megatron, Harry without Voldemort, Drift without hateful angry Transformers fans.

So I pooled some resources and hunted this big boy down.  Actually, come to think of it, I have a feeling I bought this guy from a local Toys R Us when they first showed up on the shelves in Australia.  Not buying something online for once??  Heaven forbid!

I have noticed a trend of the bad guys not getting quite the same amount of love that the good guys get when it comes to toy design, which I suspect is entirely due to discrimination!  Or the fact that bad guys don’t appear to sell as well, which I think is a shame as normally the baddies are much more interesting than Vanilla Hero.  So how does Modern Mumm-Ra stack up?





Better then I expected, except for one GLARING oversight…

Fairly standard blister pack with multilingual blurb on the back.  Remember folks, these were only released for the U.S.A at first, after a year and a half they filtered through to Australia…  As usual there is some fantastic artwork for Mumm-Ra on the package.  The toys have been fairly good, but the artwork for these has been astounding.  I recently got my hands on the Thundertank and Storm Charger vehicles and they have amazing artwork as well.

This guy is in the 6 inch scale (15cm) and actually a little bit larger than that.  He has a few accessories and will require a tiny but of assembly.

He has his blade of Plun-darr in both dangerous and not-so-dangerous modes, a gauntlet and some tassels for that Mumm-Ra look as well as some exchangeable hands.  Oh and a helmet.



Straight out of the box, his helmet will probably fall off but this is OK as you need to plug some tassels into his head and it gives you a good chance to have a gander at his face.





Handliy the tassels are marked L and R.  Actually quite a lot gets plugged into his head, which is interesting, but a tad annoying as it is only held on by his helmet, which on mine has a tendency to come off rather easily.

Tassels plugged, now for his ‘cape’ and helmet.

I think that looks pretty good.  The helmet is positioned accordingly and the way the red tassels are flying out like that looks cool.  I think of them as the remnants of mummy Mumm-Ra’s cloak.  I have heard of some people complaining about the positioning of the red tassels, as they are horizontal and can’t be pushed down at all.  I can understand that but one must remember that when Mumm-Ra turns into this he is overflowing with power.  I like to think that the flowing bandages are doing so because he is so juiced up.  Much like Goku’s hair (from Dragonball) or Super Sonic.







Now that he is kitted up, we can have a full look.

I think this is quite a nice toy.  The sculpting is well done, it is large and powerful looking and articulation is pretty good.  He is not as jointed as Lion-O but what he does have is enough.    He comes with ball jointed neck, hinge elbows that go 90 degrees, limited ball jointed wrists, bicep swivel, U/D/L/R hinged shoulders, double jointed knees, U/D/L/R hinge hips (hindered by his pants) and hinge jointed ankles, with a nice  ankle rocker in there too and a hindered waist.  I think he has a swivel at his boot as well (Checkk).   His balance is surprisingly good though, which I suspect is due to his large feet and overly long arms for counterbalancing. 

The above pictures demonstrate the restrictions his pants place on the legs.  You can’t lift his thigh all that high, but it does have a split so you can spread them apart a fair bit.  His open hands can be changed to fists for weapon holding however these open ones are good for magic wielding, divulging your plans to your enemies, general gesticulation and boasting.

One glaring oversight  (and you may have picked this up already) is his complete lack of wings.  What is doubling annoying is that there are slots in his back for wings that have been sealed.  Obviously it would have been a cost cutting procedure, which I can understand as judging by the way this line was made and handled I suspect they didn’t think it would succeed (partly right and wrong at the same time).

The paint work is ok, nothing special and gets the job done, and nothing horrid either, it does leave a couple of wraps unpainted though (by his elbows, pic above).  I really like his chest mark, it’s very sexy.  I just wish his plastic wasn’t quite so shiny though.  A matte grey would’ve enhanced this toy quite a bit.







The head is nicely sculpted and ball jointed as well.  the only problem is the neck is hindered by his tassel wraps so it is effectively limited to left and right turning only.  On the plus side though, the helmet snake ( ?) horns, crest and helmet itself are nicely detailed and coloured.  They did a good job with the golden plastic that appears to have flakes in it.  Hopefully not to the degradation of the helmet in later years though.

And now for his weapons.  The blade of Plundarr comes in two formats, the smaller dagger version and a MASSIVE version.   It is really nicely coloured and not as squishy as Lion-O’s Sword of Omens.  The sword mode comes in two halves which need to be clipped together and the dagger is just one piece.  The dagger looks much like the same weapon that the Mummy Mumm-Ra has.  Both blades are very nicely sculpted with the jewel in the middle.  Eye of Plundarr?  I forget what it’s called right now.  Now eye markings on this jewel though. 



While the sword mode is suitably arse-kick looking, it is a tad unwieldy and the dagger just looks a bit ridiculous in Mumm-Ra’s huge hands which isn’t helped by the loose grip with which he holds it.

He also has a Gauntlet, which I also assume is ‘Of Plundarr.’  This one differs from his weakened mode versions in that it has skeletal fingers snaking off of it.  Once again, it is a nice golden colour, not as sexy as the helmet but pretty good nonetheless.  As far as I am aware, this one doesn’t hold the dagger.  It just clips onto Mumm-Ra’s forearm via a black clip.

It’s also rather large.



What I quite like about this figure is that he comes in a good size compared to Lion-O and his weakened Mumm-Ra form and is still fairly poseable.

Bow before me Lion-O

So is this the ultimate Mumm-Ra figure?  Nope, I think he can be done a lot better but since the show has been canned, I very much doubt we’ll see many more.  He is a good Mumm-Ra let down by shiny plastic and visible screws and joints, which this line was plagued with and a complete lack of wings, which he seemed to always have in the show.  Sad.  What could have been hey?

But most of his bad points are easily countered by his good points.  I love the floating tassels and his opened hands.  He looks like a bad-ass bad guy and towers over Lion-O even without his wings.  If you dig the 2011 Thundercats then you can do much worse than this guy as he is a very solid figure.  With a few more points of refinement, he could’ve been great.