There’s also the issue of discoloration. On the Fwoosh, Mattycollector, and various Ghostbusters forums, collectors are reporting that their Stay Pufts are yellowing. I haven’t had to deal with this too much yet, my Stay Puft looks mostly yellow-free in person, though it’s clear in the pics that the arms don’t quite match the body anymore. Toy Guru has posted that Mattel is aware of the problem and “hope to have an update soon“.
How crappy is this? Well, it’s pretty crappy, enough so that I haven’t sorted out my feelings on it yet. Mine’s not that yellow yet, but it’s inevitably going to get worse. And let’s face it, Mattel’s not really obligated to do anything about it other than ensuring that we can get our money refunded if we return Stay Puft. I’m not outraged, I don’t feel entitled to anything (other than my money back if I so choose), and I don’t really know what I’d do if Mattel were to make a big public “return your Stay Pufts” statement like they did with the Goddess (which I still need to return…). Honestly, I bet I could call up Digital River (a couple times or more) and get a refund now if I wanted to, so I’m not sure what I even need Mattel to do at this point other than to start making better decisions.
Putting the materials issue aside for a second, most of the rest would’ve been acceptable. The face is a little off, but I can’t quite put my finger on why (just compare it to the DST bank which nailed it in my opinion). There are five points of articulation which is pretty much the most you can ask for on Stay Puft. While the legs don’t do much, you can get him into some stable poses with one foot partially lifted for at least the illusion of walking.
I should also mention the packaging. The packaging is admittedly cool. It’s so massive that I don’t really have the room to assemble it for display (let alone photographing) and I may never use it, but it makes for a great diorama and protective backing for Stay Puft (can’t get wall-burn in there!) if you have the room. Unfortunately, the setup isn’t even close to being in-scale with the 6″ figures (though it might look great with Minimates). I’ve got a partially folded out pic in the Page 2 Gallery, but for proper pics check out VeeBee’s product sample pics of the front and back over at the Fwoosh.
Overall, I don’t regret picking up this Stay Puft. I love the Marshmallow Man and I think he’s a cool piece to own in this size. The problems come in waves after that though. First, is the understanding that this guy just wasn’t worth the $70 to begin with. Mattel tags most of what I buy from them as an adult collectible and I’m cool with that, but I think Stay Puft is taking the notion of an adult collectible a little too far. When they have to protect him from his own packaging and include a note telling buyers to be extra careful when handling him, then it starts to feel like we shouldn’t even be touching the figure. He does looks cool and, no, I’m not really going to play with him, so one might think that the arrangement could suit my needs, but it doesn’t. Not when the figures takes damage from the wall he’s standing next to.
And then there’s the yellowing. Maybe I’ll feel differently when mine gets noticeably more yellow or have a stronger reaction to whatever Mattel’s CPI (“Can’t Prove It!”) Department discovers while they’re looking into it, but for right now… I’m just a bit dumbfounded. I wish there had been someone sensible in the planning stages to say “skip the gimmick and just use plastic” or “just use vinyl”. If Mattel wanted to go for something more authentic than standard materials, then this guy should’ve been made of evil and marshmallows, not some unproven soft foam. Less definitely would’ve been more in this case.
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For more reviews, check out our Ghostbusters Classics Collector’s Guide.
I wanted him so bad but after hearing about the damage and the yellowing I’m sorry to say I decided to skip a few months ago.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes?qt=qt0475978
I’m glad I didn’t skip him, but I certainly can’t recommend him. It seems like every Stay-Puft has to have some drawback. The NECA one is the best but the head sculpt isn’t great. The DST Bank is excellent, but it’s a bank. :/
I’m really not sorry I missed out on this one. And, if I were in matty’s shoes upon learning of the yellowing effect, I would not have said we were “looking into it”. That statement suggests that they can do something to rectify the situation which they cant. The only thing they could conceivably do is to refund people’s money which I do not see happening. They should have just released a statement of apology, explained that it was a qc foul-up and vow to work harder to ensure such an issue doesn’t occur again. “Handling” customers like they’re actually going to do something about this is just going to piss people off even more in the end.
Your mention of the Kenner stay puft reminded me of my own. About a year ago, I sold off my Kenner GB collection in one lot on eBay (including stay puft, ecto 1′ etc). Allegedly, the buyer turned out to be a kid, because about a month after the auction, this ultra-religious woman contacted me to demand a refund. She said that she didn’t want her child playing with “filth” like this and claimed to have thrown the entire collection in the trash. There was a big dust up and eBay ended up refunding the buyer’s money and I kept my fee. One stipulation was that the woman had to send the items back. Guess which figure didn’t make the return journey. I couldn’t do anything about it since I did get paid for the auction. That still burns me up.
That sucks about your Kenner SP. Ebay & Paypal annoy me too sometimes. I had a guy break a figure DAYS after he received it and have left positive feedback. Then he wanted a refund and paypal gave it to him over my objection.
And great point on the Mattel comments. I should just be able to return it to Mattycollector anyway, so I don’t really need Mattel to allow mass returns. I guess that’s what CPI does to an extent, determines the old Fight Club “cost of recall” formula.
Based on your pic in the HML2 thread at the Fwoosh, Terrax is somewhere preparing to make s’mores.
Given IAT’s trademark thankfully reasonable level-headedness when addressing Mattel’s pros and cons, this review is quite scathing, and deservedly so. The yellowing is really unfortunate, and I’ve always wondered if there’s a spray sealant that would protect safely against this kind of effect. The badly yellowed G1 Jetfire in my closet could have used it.
I finally got to Terrax today!
I wanted to convey my annoyance without foaming at the mouth. A sealant might’ve worked, but I wonder how little it would take to disintegrate the foam… I recently saw a video of someone giving their yellowed stormtroopers a bath of some sort (Hydrogen Peroxide?) and it whitening them up. I wonder where I saw that…
I’m not sure why, (I imagine as with most Mattel products it’s cheaper for them) Mattel continues to attempt to use soft material as a “non action feature, action feature.” It almost always ages terribly, and the audience for a $70 Stay Puft Marshmallow man is not some 5 year old who is going to forget about it in 2 months. Reminds me of Clayface and how such a great sculpt was wasted with those gooey arms that attracted all the dirt in my house and started to break down, I had to sell him off when demand was still high on ebay because he was breaking down in front of me.
Makes me think it would almost be worth a DCIE sub spot for a Clayface with sculpted arms!
My Claygace is still doing okay, but I agree – great sculpted arms with attachments would’ve been preferable and longer lasting.
What’s the point of making him squishy if you can’t feel it? I mean, Mattel included the warning, so they know it will take the damage. So if you can’t dent in the foam body at all because it will just stay that way, then I really don’t even understand the decision to use this material.
that’d be the million dollar question, wouldn’t it?
i just don’t get this figure… noisy being noisy, he’s calm and levelheaded about it. kudos to him. me, i react w/ outlandish emotion and to me, that’s just about the shittiest thing i’ve ever heard. they’re admitting they knew the product was defective when they released it. they included the note that basically says “hands off your new toy buddy!” they charged 70 dollars for a product that they never intended you to take out of the box! was the box a 70 dollar box?
maybe that’s the thing, maybe we’re looking at this all wrong, maybe the box was what they were selling y’all and the figure is just glorified set dressing… makes more sense, really.
for me, this is exactly why i’ve backed WAY off mattel product and am spending the bulk of my toy budget on NECA and hasbro products these days. thanks for making that decision easy mattel.
I took two pictures of the warning label before I packed it Puft back up, but they were blurry. I prolly should go pull him back out and get the shot. It’s written to be cute instead of matter of fact.
Great point, Clark! I hadn’t really thought about, but it’s the truth of the matter for sure. In that regard, this is a total failure.
Yet Nerf balls can be squishy for, like, forever and not be imprinted by casual contact.
And for those that only think of the old style Nerf Ball and say “but it’s the wrong texture!” don’t forget they can ‘skin’ the foam, see also Nerf Football.
I think the reason they didn’t go with poured vinyl is because then it would have been a $20 toy and we can’t have THAT now, can we? 🙂
Say, if this thing is so delicate, how the heck was it assembled and painted, let alone put in its box?
That’s the kicker – it’s clearly not impossible to create a Stay Puft that is both squishy and long lasting. I have one of those executive stress toy things on my desk, it’s a squishy pig – that thing has taken daily beatings for years and hardly looks used. Just like it shouldn’t be impossible to make Snout Spout’s trunk flexible and stable, or to make a fully-articulated 12″ MOTUC figure, or to give MOTUC women removable heads that don’t bobble…
nicely said clay… nicely said… not impossible, and i’ll add, not wallet-raping expensive either… what do those stress dolls cost, a 10 spot? for a big one?
Also, I’ll point out that Clay says he’s been using that stress toy for years, and here’s the telling part, It hasn’t fallen apart!
years of being touched and handled with deadly human skin oils and no decay.
What magic material is that made of? How can such a thing be? 🙂
The pig is magic!! 😀
All those stress marks along the seams would be how it was assembled and put in the box! I didn’t do any of that.
even barring the dmage and stuff on this guy…those ugly seems kind of ruin the figure too dont they?
I was thinking the same!
Yeah. I think those just got lost in the other issues.
Knowing Mattel, yeah, this figure probably did cost more to produce. They have a real tendency to spend more money to make weird creative decisions that end up being much worse figures than if they’d just made them the standard way (see also: DCUC Swamp Thing, a figure that had to be made oversized and under-articulated because Mattel just got it in their heads to do that soft rubber over an endoskeleton thing with him, and reports starting coming in almost immediately of the rubber skin starting to tear with minimal posing).
That’s why I passed on Swampy. I still have my DCD w1 to display, I don’t need something that’s going to deteriorate in a year’s time.
altho, my Clayface is still fine…?
My Clayface is doing okay too. Though I have the first one, I wonder if the later cheap TRU 2pks one are made as well? The other figures weren’t.
I’m guessing the same is probably true, but that just makes him a little worse. The Swamp Thing skin has been fine so far, but I really don’t appreciate that figure.
I passed on this figure because of the price tag, but after all the reports of yellowing and denting I feel like we all missed out on having a great Stay Puft figure. You can pretty much bank on this being the last Marshmallow Man figure Mattel will ever release.
Truth be told, I can’t wait for their Ghostbusters license to expire. They’ve released nothing but mediocre to crappy figures from the beginning and that was made painfully obvious to me last Summer. This was just another nail in the coffin for Mattel’s GB line.
I think, ironically, that Mattel has gotten more character depth than we’d get from too many other companies (but no ‘receptionist’ in the cards it seems), but the tradeoff was less than stellar figures.
For some folks, these less than stellar figures are better than no figure at all. I don’t know where I fall on that line, but the GB line tortures me. I have to make sure I don’t buy Dana until she’s eventually on sale later this year. That figure is not worth the money.
This maybe the one time I’m on mattels side the discoloration sucks, but so what? This is a toy , not a museum piece. How long should it stay white, what is the right length of time? There is no good answer, I mean to me 6 months to a year is the amount of time a toy should hold up under reasonable play/display conditions (sure I hope for more). I mean should mattel sit a demo on the self for 5 years to see what happens? Yes they could have made better choices (who need soft) , but I doubt that whoever just said effit who cares. They took a shot, thought it would work, but like most mattel decisions they were wrong. I mean, I’m not the smartest guy (far from the dumbest) and I could tell that stay puft was going to be a big bag of expensive problems. First off whenever they try something “new or different”, you stay away, same way you never but the first model year of a car. So, I really think this is something buyers should have known was likely to happen, and Mattel did a good job with the figure but how long should they test a toy (remember I’m talking about yellowing not the damage foam)? Now should they offer refunds, yeah but I’m opinion that refunds should be the order of the day for ANY reason the customer wants one, within a reasonable time frame. Mattel doesn’t help on this front since the are outrageously pricing their “collectors” toys, people expect more the more they pay.
Of course it easy to take this position cause I didn’t buy one.
more than a year… that’s the right answer.
Agreed, a toy which even states out of the box “Not to be played with” had better last more that 6 months.
Normally, Trib, I’d agree with you (except for the timetable, a year+ minimum), but Stay Puft isn’t a toy. Ignoring the silly adult collector label on the box, that little slip of paper inside indicate he’s not to be played with – so they are essentially a movie replica, a collectible, or a museum piece and didn’t make a quality product that matched what they were selling.
They may have treated it like a toy, that’s what they do and surely the failed attempt to make him squishy would indicate that, but they got their signals crossed and made Stay Puft a poor QC collectible that would be even more awful if considered a toy.
REALLY glad I didn’t pick this one up.
Ah, Staypuft…
This thing has been nothing but trouble (it’s what I get for letting a representation of an ancient Sumerian God into my home).
If you remember he came out at the same time as Swamp Thing.
Sooo, Digital River.
I added Staypuft and Swamp Thing to my basket.
Being that I’m in the U.K, I was a little wary about the shipping costs for this monster.
Of course being Digital River, there’s no way of finding the cost without going through all the stages of ordering to find out.
Foolishly, I did this, found that the shipping was going to be £60 and regretfully declined.
Except DR DIDN’T.
I tried to cancel the order pre-purchase screen and the White Screen of Death arrived.
Thus meaning that even though I hadn’t clicked confirm, DR decided it was a sale anyway.
On top of this, by me not knowing whether I had my items or not, I had to order ANOTHER Swamp Thing, just in case..
£170 later…
But still, I love me some GB’s and when this monster arrived, I was mollified.
The money was spent (no way was I paying another £60 JUST to return him for a refund) and he looked bad-ass.
Except I had nowhere to display him, so into storage he went.
Flash forward a few months to the “Yellow” incident.
Now my StayPuft has been in the box since day one, in a dark cupboard awaiting his time to shine.
Having heard of the yellowing issue, I dug him out and….Yellow abides.
Yeah…even though he’s in the original packaging, in the original box, in the actual shipping carton.
……………..
For the money I spent, I could’ve bought the damn NECA version.
And Mattel wonder why we hate them.
No doubt vinyl was the way to go (and don’t even get me started on slimy, cracked rubber Swamp Thing).
That sucks! My Puft has been out, but he takes up too much space with my current housing arrangements so he went back into the box after the photo shoot.
A 22″ vinyl Stay Puft would surely be kick ass…
Kinda feeling okay this is the one Matty GB product I don’t have. Won’t fit on my shelves anyway.
He is impressively huge. Which is the only thing he’s got going for him and it is kinda of drawback at the same time. Mine ended up back in his pretty box after the shoot.
I knew this would happen but I was still stupid enough to buy one. *Sigh* I keep trusting Mattel and they keep kicking me in the guts. Why Mattel, why?!
Anyway, just thought I’d post to say the whitening thing is called Retr0bright. I’ve used it a couple of times myself: once on a Kenner Ecto-1, once on a Kenner Stay Puft and once on the Trendmaster’s Ecto-1. Worked well on the two Kenner’s but not so well on the Trendmaster’s. Mind you, I did do them in what’s laughingly referred to as the “British Summer” so I suspect better results can be achieved in sunnier climbs or by using a UV lamp. 😀
Hope that helps!
Ex.
Twice I was going to buy Stay Puft… I had him in my basket once during the initial Matty Collector sale date, and again when he was put up for sale. I couldn’t pull the trigger either time. Luckily fortune had smiled upon me when a friend decided to sell his off, which I was happily took off his hands. I didn’t even have to pay for shipping!
Thus far mine has held up fairly well, though living in the Northeast I don’t have to contend with very hot or humid weather, so that may be a factor.