It’s the end of Christmas day and the wife and baby are in bed (after he proved that he takes after me by literally eating so much Christmas dinner that he puked) and I thought it was a great time to have a chat about the advent calendar which finished yesterday. Whilst there were 3 in 2019 including a Fortnite and Harry Potter one, I went for the 2019 Marvel one.
These calendars are usually available for sale at the following retailers whilst stocks last each year – always consider also getting them during the advent period or shortly after Christmas to enjoy the following year!
I have to say that I’m a pretty big Marvel cinematic universe fan, but to be honest comics aren’t really my thing, but anyone else who is in the same boat as me, might have been a little disappointed with some of the figures which came out of this calendar because they’re based on the comic designs. For example, since when does Loki have a blonde pony tail? Since the comics apparently!
Before going through anything else, it makes sense to go through the full set of figures in order:
- Iron man
- Captain America
- The Hulk
- Thor
- Spider Man
- Loki
- Venom
- Dare Devil
- Black Widow
- Miles Morales
- Doctor Strange
- Black Panther
- Thanos
- Spider Gwen
- Captain Marvel
- The Punisher
- Vision
- Rocket Raccoon
- Groot
- Star Lord
- Ultron
- Iron Fist
- Gamora
- She Hulk
There’s a nice selection of figures in the calendar with a few really popular faces, most of which have been featured in the Avengers movies in some form or another, but then also a couple who are less well known, but I know that a lot of comic book fans were really excited about She Hulk and Iron Fist for example… I on the other hand however had to look a couple of them up to see what they were.
Overall I was pretty happy with them though and have them on display in front of my pop collection (well part of it at least), and there are a few stand out ones which look amazing (such as Doctor Strange, Venom, Hulk, Spider Gwen and Captain America), whilst a couple weren’t quite as nice quality as the others… You can tell that they produced a lot more than last year, which means that the paint quality in particular has suffered a bit.
Speaking of which, these things usually sell out, but this year, with the huge popularity of Funko products, they didn’t sell out, in fact by the start of December I was seeing them for sale as low as £25 on sale in Tesco. I spent £30 on mine through Pop in a Box. But as with everything Funko, they’re certainly not as collectable as usual… It certainly helped me have a good time in the lead up to Christmas, so thanks for that Funko!
I mentioned that the collectors value has gone down as they were so common this year, Funko definately knows hot to reel you in. They also showed this with the GameStop exclusive calendars where they had days 1, 3 and 5 with exclusive figures. This was almost enough for me to buy another calendar hoping for more exclusives, and I bet other people thought the same, but they didn’t have any more in them sadly. These were cool though! The was a black outfit spider man, a red hulk and a gold iron man. @Funkofhov on Instagram had these and kindly allowed me to use his photos.
Let’s just finish by talking about the figures. They’re advertised as pocket pop figures, which is the same name given to the key rings which Funko make. Compared to those, these figures are a much higher quality, and are actually a lot closer to the Funko pint sized heroes range. The bodies of the key rings are weird, small and floppy. These pocket pops are actually about what you want from the key rings… But what they never seem to deliver. Below is one of these guys next to a key ring as well as a pint sized hero:
Even thought the pocket pop from the calendar is by far the best shape for the small figures, I have seen a few photos of the Harry Potter calendar too, and the quality of the sculpt on those is much nicer than these, actually looking like a tiny pop figure rather than something between a pop and a pint size hero.
All in all though – you can see that this was a pretty good advent calendar!
Nerd life 