Masterverse Scareglow text review.

I like a bit of He-man and the Masters of the Universe figuration every now and then, and one I really love is Scareglow.  I had no idea about this dude until I managed to find out about the MOTU Classics Version and managed to score on back in the heady days of 2011.  It really showed me how cool a GITD figure could be!  I'll freely admit that I've always thought GITD is great, but Scareglow really extended the possibilities!

Now with the new, but now old Masterverse cartoon which came out on er, Netflix? they made a new version of Scareglow too.  So, I managed to get one of them too!  Woot! Let's check him out.

The box is quite nice and simple and has some pretty cool art work on it.  I think MOTU toys need awesome artwork on them.  It really completes the look of swords, sorcery and tech that make He-Man Special.

It almost looks like the back of the box would join with others to form some kind of action scene.  Scareglow VS Orko perhaps?

It comes with the Also available thing down the bottom, but those are obviously prototypes, because Scareglow's head looks terrible.  Also, I don't care for any of the other characters at all.  Even Stinkor doesn't do it for me. He doesn't even stink anymore.  What a waste!

I thought the Revelations season of Masterverse was kinda naff, they did have a few cool ideas(Bat-Lyn and Muscle-Lyn).  One of them being that Scareglow was essentially the king of the Underworld.  Having been his first foray into a cartoon, they really gave him cool, ghostly awesome powers.

While the Original, Classics and Origins Scareglows all had completely awesome glowing bodies, Revelations has only given him a glowing head.  That makes me sad...  There was a special version that came in a box with black lights in it, which when turned on reacted with the paint on his body, to make it look like it glows.  But sadly this ain't that one (also, that's a bit of a copout!!).  You can see his glowy head through the pack luckily though.

Although blasting the package with a black light doesn't quite have a cool effect.

Outta the box, you can see he looks pretty cool.  I was impressed with the cloth goods cape, and they way they have the neck/shoulder cover thing manages to make it attach pretty cooly.

The bone paint work is done pretty well.  as is the paint on his skull.  One thing that isn't done well is the "always following you" eyeballs that Classics Scareglow (and the Origins Skeleton Warriors) have.  Here it just seems that his eye sockets are too shallow.  He does have very piercing red irises as a form of compensation.  More on that head later.

You can pop off the shoulder mantle and his head, and take off the cape if you so wish.  That way you can enjoy the glorious nature of the muscle body!

He also comes with a nice variety of hands in various gestures, so let's have a look at them shall we?

Pointing action!!

Holding action!!

Fisting action!

(also punching action)

er..? Backhanding action?

Bloviating action - (just the other side of backhanding action hand)

As a bonus, to bloviate is "Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous, political speech."

While you'll discover this Scareglow is not entirely made of glowing plastic, I was surprised to discover that he is made of a variety of plastics.  Discovered through my newly purchased blacklight torch.

This makes logical sense, since joints need a more flexible plastic and stuff.  HOWEVER, I also discovered that much of his black plastic body is actually translucent black AND I think there are little specks of glitter mixed in there somewhere too. Very hard to photograph.

The hands are the most obvious section where you can see it, but the chest while hard to check is as well.  Adds to his ghostliness in some respects.  I think it makes him more like the night and the scary things hidden within the darkness.

Aside from extra hands, he also comes with a halberd weapon, which looks pretty nice, but unlike the Classics version, does not GITD.

Articulation is pretty good and fairly solid.  His hipskirt thing has a slit in it, but is pretty strong, so the hip joints are very hindered by it.  The rest of the body is pretty free though and has standard MOTU articulation.

Now, since his head is the only thing that glows, we should pay special attention to it.  The sculpting is very good and it's a nice skull.  It has the as expected crack in the top and lacks the follow-you-around the-room pupils.  A light black wash manages to highlight details, while not blocking glow.  Also the collar to his cape is pretty nicely done too.

Very nice indeed.  Of course this ain't much if the glow effect looks like ass, so I'll get into that very soon.

The annoying thing about GITD toys is conveying what the figure looks like to the naked eye.  Usually one has to turn off all the lights, and then set the camera for a long exposed shot.  Which makes the glow part look awesome, but that is not usually what it looks like in the dark.  Well, it might, for like 20 seconds or so. For example.

Looks damn good., but inaccurate.  One would be unable to see the green reflected off the collar for example.  So I've tried various things to try to come up with a photo close to what it looks like like and really, the most accurate one would be:

And so I tried a few things, to get a better feel for the figure as a whole.

I left the lens open to capture the glow and light painted, using a red filter over some light.

I started getting some good looking options with layering multiple exposures, as you can see on the image below where I used two different photo sizes.

Regardless though, you can see the glow and the clever use of the wash manage to show up the finer details of the head sculpt.

Once picture that I quite like is this one:

The cheating is intense though, I had two exposures and masked out the face, essentially erasing the face from the image in which you can see the body and replaced the face with the glow images face.  I do really dig that the eyes could be seen though, by no erasing that part of the face.

Then since Scareglow was called "The evil ghost of Skeletor" back in the day, I decided to try and have my GITD Skeletor face included, so a bit more compositing of images with some green-skull-face-painting.

Which is how I got my header image there. Very nice.  

Now, you may be wondering how he looks with other Masterverse figures.  Sadly I can't tell you that, because I only have Scareglow.  But here he is with other Scareglows and relatable skeletons.

There we go, that is Masterverse Scareglow from the Revelation show.  Even though I was disappointed that only his head glows, I will admit I really like the guy. Scareglow and GITD bias heavily at work.  If this figure had no glow,  I would not have bothered.  Its a fun toy and the cape and articulation work pretty well.

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This toy has also fired me up for getting to know my camera a bit better.  I bought a nice one a bunch of years ago, and have just generally used the "modes" settings on it.  However, when a friend was thinking about getting their own, we got talking camera shenanigans and he inspired me to try out some different things on mine that it can do.  So, I've tried various things and with GITD being a bit tricky to capture the feeling of how awesome it can be, I have attempted to up my photo skills and will continue to do so.