Spy Troops Wave 4 (Wave 7.75) - Wild Bill
Somewhat surprisingly, Wild Bill was high on my list for favorite figure from Wave 4. He had a great combination of cool mold, nice color scheme and cool/useful accessories to really make him shine. Yeah, he’d gotten a hair cut and traded in his moustache for a goatee, but he still really looked the part of Wild Bill, and I thought he was just a terrific figure.
Several years ago we were originally supposed to be getting a Tiger Force Wild Bill, and it seems like Hasbro is making up for that last oversight, but only halfway. This figure is still interesting and still a very cool one, but it’s migration from regular version to Tiger Force was very minor and almost forced.
His jacket color is very close, although not identical to the original version, with only a slight change in the holster coloring…but it is a slight change for the better. It’s an appealing shade of light green, which adds some very cool splash of color to the mostly brown/tan figure, which I always appreciate. His gloves are a dark black to match his gun-belt and kneepads, and I actually love that darker shade, it adds some cool contrast and neat color differences that bring the figure a little more to life.
This dark color is also transferred over to the camouflage stripes on Wild Bill’s pants, which really make them look even cooler than they did. While not a very realistic camo scheme, black on brown definitely stands out better than dark brown on light brown and makes the figure that much more noticeable.
So, all in all…it’s a tough call. I like this figure a lot. I like this figure more than I like the original…it’s nice because he’s got some tiger motif, but he doesn’t look like the strict “Tiger Force” member that some of the others do, so he could easily be used outside of that capacity, which I like on one hand. On the other hand, they re-released this figure as a Tiger Force figure, but he doesn’t really look the part, and they really did not change a whole lot. So while I do like this figure an awful lot, the fact that he’s nearly unchanged from the previous version means he may not be worth the purchase. So, basically Tiger Force fans probably won’t like him because his tiger motif is very minor…and other folks probably won’t like him because he’s not that changed from the previous version. All in all, it’s a figure I like, and one that I will probably use for my default Wild Bill in the future, although he didn’t get changed enough to really warrant a purchase.
