Zanzibar

For the most part I've been quite impressed with what Hasbro was able to do with existing tooling and only a modicum of new tooling. There is such a rich library of parts and pieces that the sky is almost the limit. Almost.

If 90% of this set is fantastic, or at least decent, Zanzibar is in that unfortunate 10% that really misses the mark. I'm not sure what they were going for with the head sculpt, but it seems likely to me that this head wasn't sculpted just for Zanzibar. It's not a close enough match, and when you look at the other heads in this set, this one clearly stands out. The head is certainly servicable, but the patch is on the wrong eye, the facial hair isn't accurate, and his hair isn't right either.

All of this leads me to believe that this head sculpt was perhaps intended for something else and was repurposed for this Dreadnok set. It is close enough to work in that regard, but compared to some of the new heads in this set sculpted just for that particular character, you can tell the difference.

Base tooling from the waist up seems to be some elements of various Storm Shadow figures, giving him a bare chest rather the unique brown tunic that the original figure had. Now we do get some new webgear which is at least somewhat indicative of what Zanzibar wore in 1987 but by and large the figure looks quite a bit different. It seems as if Hasbro focused a lot of their time and tooling on the rest of the set and kind of overlooked Zanzibar. This begs the question...would you rather have several figures with a cut corner or two, or one figure that has drastically cut corners and most other figures look spectacular?

That's a tough one. Ultimately I think the awesomeness of the rest of the Dreadnoks set makes up for the lackluster efforts for Zanzibar, but this figure still leaves a lot to be desired.

Zanzibar comes with a number of different accessories, and some of them look to be newly tooled. His removable webgear is definitely new and different, as is the holster and pirate pistol on his chest. He's got a nice thin sheath at the small of his back with a removable knife. He also uses the same sword that came with the Iron Grenadier Destro, which is a nice touch.

While I have to bite my tongue to keep from gushing about most of these figures, but I definitely do not have that issue with Zanzibar. This figure is an obvious "frankenstein" and is considerably less effective than some others that they've done. They went pretty whole hog with the pirate concept, which is true to the character, but the chosen parts just don't knock my socks off.

GRADE:

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