Topless Toy Chest: WWE Debut Mankind by Mattel (Amazon.com Exclusive)

While “Mankind” scaled his greatest professional heights when he acknowledged his name was Mick Foley and was allowed to do goofy stuff with sweatsocks, he had a pretty good run before that as a monster-type character who lived in a boiler room, tore out his own hair, and needed to be soothed with piano music. The very first figure of him in this guise was made in the second series of Jakks Pacific’s Bone Crunchers, and was by far the best in that line for a long time. Mattel has finally made him as a classic…but he’s only available on Amazon. As you’ll see, there are some pluses and minuses to this.

The biggest minus is that if you like to collect things mint-on-card, Amazon is terrible. Unfortunately for you they’re the only option unless you can find a scalper who bought in bulk and salvaged a few.

If you’re into opening your figures, though, it’s a hell of a deal. Mankind is packaged like a Basic figure, and was priced like one ($14.99) when I bought him, but he has Elite articulation, and even an accessory/action feature!

See those little brown things in the top of the blister? Those are hair chunks. Mankind used to pull his own hair out, and now you have a toy that can duplicate this feature. I’d say Mattel really went above and beyond here.

On the downside – if you are the type to play with your figures, the hair pieces, especially the smaller one, can easily get lost. I already had one scare on that, and I can imagine kids would lose these in a toybox easily. The bigger piece fits pretty securely in.

While Mattel, like most other toy companies, makes heavy use of shared body parts, Mankind has quite a few new pieces, including his head, boots and mandible claw hand. Surprisingly, he shares almost nothing with the prior Elite Mankind, save perhaps the under-torso and crotch.

No detail has been spared – he gets the large leather faux-ankh on the back of his costume too. The scar on his left arm is painted on, and is a single line rather than the “Y” shape it actually is, but even having a scar at all there is pretty good.

Like most Mattel WWE Elites these days, he has tight joints, solid plastic, and takes a beating.

I don’t know if he has an appeal to non-wrestling fans as some sort of demented supervillain type for your DC heroes to battle, but for WWE fans in general, and those of Mick Foley or the “New Generation” era in particular, he’s a must-have at a great price…

…or at least he was. In writing this article, I checked back on Amazon, and found him now priced at $30!!!. The explanation?

“Item Under Review

While this item is available from other marketplace sellers on this page, it is not currently offered by Amazon.com because customers have told us there may be something wrong with our inventory of the item, the way we are shipping it, or the way it’s described here. (Thanks for the tip!)

We’re working to fix the problem as quickly as possible.”

I assume and hope this means they realized the figures were going out on crushed cards, and will remedy that and get more back in at $14.99 later…? So maybe wait on this one.