The Figs! (aka the Grateful Dead Bears) (Patreon)

I’ll be honest, the heads and headpieces are what really sold me! It’s becoming a rare thing (for me personally anyway) to find custom figs with decent Lego-ifiyed head prints and Mobricks/Ace really knocked it out of the park with these guys! They look exactly like John Wesley Shipp!

The helmet molds for all three of these are just stunning! The shaping is absolutely perfect! Those winglets are big, bright, and shiny! Not to mention that the addition of the nose doesn’t distract from the rest of the mold or make it look less Lego-like

My only “complaint” if you could call it that, is that these figs aren’t perfectly interpreted from their source material.

Where those two original TV Red/Blue costumes relied a lot on shading from the studio set lighting, these figs are much harsher, and have some extra detailing that was never there in those old suits. Particularly the linework (pipeing) around the entire fig. From the torso, through the legs and arms, plus all these extra lightning bolts as a design choice gives it more of a New 52 sort of vibe for me and makes the fig look quite a bit busy. But I think that just might be my personal taste. Clearly those design choices come from AceBurningBrick’s influence.

While this completed fig still looks great in its own way, it’s hard to separate the original influence from the final product. It’s like they cranked the TV design up to eleven and added so many new bells and whistles that it just feels like noise on the final fig.

Additionally, I really would have loved if these figs had any kind of reflective print. The flat yellow and grey where your brain thinks it should be gold and silver to match the helmets can be a little jarring.

Of course I couldn’t help but also compare my two Pollux Figs. Where Christo’s falls short of printing legs entirely, MoBricks/Ace excel with that head and headpiece. Now if Lego was to make blue/dark blue dual molded legs, we’d have a perfect figure! :P

All in all, they’re really great! While not perfect, they are certainly waaaay up there in quality for being one of MoBricks first collaborative projects with Ace.

I know it sounded like I completely dragged these three, I only say that because I really do enjoy that old costume and to have it tweaked so much while at the same time having the absolute perfect head/headpiece to go with it… it’s tough man. It’s almost like the body was for one fig and all the head stuff was for another.

But that critique comes from a nostalgic lens. For what they are as they are, they’re really really great! My final verdict is a positive one! They’re weird and they’re cool and I like em a lot! But I’m gonna stop rambling now! :)

Let me know what you guys also think of it! I’d love to know that my opinions are validated in some way :P

Also if you genuinely read all of that, I’m impressed because I had a lot of thoughts to get out :P