You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more iconic giant villain than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It's been three decades since Ghostbusters was released, but the adorable yet terrifying monster remains in the public consciousness.
If it weren't for Slimer's popularity, Stay Puft would almost certainly be the brand's mascot. To that end, a new Stay Puft is one of the first of Hasbro's original Ghostbusters figures, released as part of the Playskool Heroes line, a figure which Hasbro sent to CBR to take a look at.
I've owned my share of Stay Puft merch in my life; hell, I've still got a pretty beaten up plush Stay Puft from the original Kenner line. But there's always something exciting about seeing a new take on the character show up, and the Playskool Heroes variant may be one of the slickest updates we've seen in a while.
Playskool Heroes is intended as an all-ages line, so this Stay Puft is squarely aimed at the 3 to 5-year-old range. As a result, he's mostly a fairly solid chunk of plastic. There are only four points of articulation; the arms are on ball joints at the shoulder, which gives them a fair bit of range, and the wrists are on simple swivel joints. The legs and upper body are two separate pieces, and they're joined with sort of a rocker swivel. You can tilt Stay Puft to the side, simulating his stilted walk from the film fairly well. It's not a lot of articulation, but for this figure and the intended age range, it gets the job done.
The big feature here is a changing face, similar to the vintage Man-E-Faces He-Man figure. There's a button in the top of Stay Puft's head which switches between the faces; one with a cherubic, innocent smile and a second with a menacing, angry scowl. The button is just big enough for a child to press in and doesn't seem like it could pinch little fingers, but my much larger digits did have some trouble moving the face, as you may have noticed in our recent unboxing of the figure.
Most notable about the figure's design is the size. Stay Puft has a much slimmer profile than usual, which works well; not only does it allow for lower-profile packaging (and thus, more figures on shelves), but it makes the figure just the right size for a young child to manipulate. The packaging is open face, so you'll be able to get a good look at the figure before you buy. Paint application here is restricted to Stay Puft's bib, tassel and faces, with the rest of the body molded in white plastic. Paint apps seem pretty consistent here, with just a little run around the shoulder joints' edges.
Hasbro's Ghostbusters line has some pretty great all-ages offering, and Stay Puft looks to be another slam dunk representation of the character. He's not quite the right size to scale properly with other figures (even Hasbro's own renditions of the Ghostbusters would come up to his waist), but he'll still look good in any play scenario your kids may have or as a collectible on your shelf if you're a die-hard who has to own every piece of Stay Puft merchandise you come across.
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