Welcome to Six Days of 007! I don't know if anyone else remembers the James Bond marathons that so many stations used to run back in the day, but I used to love them. I believe it was TBS that usually had them, but eventually Spike ended up with them. I'm guessing with the proliferation of DVDs, those types of marathons are rare. Regardless, those old specials inspired me to take a look at James Bond and spend a week with the MI6 agent.

You might think that much like when I had Japanese Monster Week, that James Bond is a favorite of mine. To be quite honest I'm not a big Bond fan. In fact outside of the two recent movies with Daniel Craig I can't tell you the last time I actually sat down and watched a Bond movie all the way through. My appreciation of Bond comes more from those TBS marathons where I'd catch 20 minutes here, 15 minutes there, etc.


There have been a fair amount of Bond toys through the years, but not nearly as many as you might think. In recent years Sideshow have done all the Bonds but before them a much smaller, much less known company called "Exclusive Premiere" made a variety of James Bond toys. The company made these figures around 1997-1998 and information on them is quite scarce. Just Google Exclusive Premiere Bond and chances are you'll get 100,000 results and few if any will be about toys.

I remember finding these figures a few years ago on Ebay and thinking even then what a mystery they were. Nobody knows anything about these guys. There's no website for them. A travesty if I ever saw one. So over the next few days, Infinite Hollywood will become the new official home for these Bond misfits. What better place to start than Sean Connery himself!

Packaging:
There's really two famous Bonds. Connery and Roger Moore. Likewise, the Connery and Moore figures are the rarest of these toys. Each figure is based off a particular movie, in this instance it's Goldfinger. A quintessential Bond flick if there ever was one.


The package is really nice. These figures have a bad wrap in the only community they're really known in (The Mego Community) and I'll dissect that in a bit, but it's hard even for the biggest critic to complain about this package. The artwork is sharp, the package is nice and there's some great movie stills on the front.


The back is even more impressive. Not only did they fit in a ton of text about the film, the actors and concept, but they also have all the key elements from the film on it as well. Look at those pictures, the gold girl, Oddjob, the car, you can practically figure out the whole plot of the movie just by those few pictures. Really bang up job if I do say so myself.

Sculpt:
As I said before, there is next to no information about these figures on the internet. You might think that maybe this was a small line, but there were well over a dozen figures. Yet no one knows anything about them. Except the Mego community. As a recent Mego-convert I did notice that these guys are occasionally mentioned in Mego circles... Surprisingly with a lot of disdain!


At 7 inches tall, they're actually quite a bit smaller than Megos. I had to whip out the old measuring tape to make sure, because if you do find these figures listed anywhere they are said to be anywhere from 5 inches to 9 inches. I can confirm that they are officially 7 inches tall. These fit in almost better with 6 inch scale than they do 8 inch. I can't figure out if that's why Mego collectors don't like them or not. The few mentions I heard about these from Megoheads was all negative, which is quite surprising as the likenesses here is way better than Mego's best efforts.


Connery by no means is perfect and there is a tad of an animated stylization to him, but it's a fairly crisp sculpt overall. The paint work is more than accurate with really well painted hair and facial features. With toys like this, the key thing is the head sculpt and there's no denying that this is Connery's sly Bond. In fact if you look at one of the shots on the cover of the package, the two look nearly identical.

Sideshow did this Bond a few years ago and putting the two against each other I'd say that the flaws with this sculpt are less damning than the flaws with that sculpt. The Sideshow sculpt is probably better overall, but it's margin of error is greater in my view in terms of capturing Connery's likeness.


The costume, which I was led to believe would be ill fitting and out of scale is actually quite good. Bond's coat is made out of a pleather material which is an odd choice, but works well. As always these smaller scale proportions aren't perfect but even 1:6 scale clothes suffer from this sometimes. This is easily up to par with most Megos, so again I'm not sure what the complaints were about.

The body underneath isn't cheap. While it's certainly not as durable as a lot of bodies in the Mego scale, it's a heck of a lot more sturdy than others. This isn't a CTVT style body. It's considerably better.

Articulation:
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect on the articulation side of things, but I find that these guys aren't terribly articulated. When you factor in that this Sean Connery Bond came out in 1997, the articulation is pretty astounding. Articulation wasn't very good on many figures back then. Of course there were exceptions to that rule.


Bond has pin/post style ball joints in the shoulders and hips, giving his arms and legs a ton of range. The arm joints could be a bit tighter and it's a bit hard to get him to keep wild poses because of the clothes. His elbows and knees are hinged, as well as a cut waist and neck.


Certainly this figure isn't going to win any awards for articulation, but there are figures coming out today with less articulation than this. Right, Mattel? For 1997, this was pretty good articulation and it's only missing two points from making it just as articulated as a classic Mego.

Accessories:
The one area where these figures really suffer is the accessories. I won't go too much into it now, but as 007 week rolls on I sense that you'll figure it out on your own. Bond's clothes are all removable, except his shoes which are molded on.


Also he has a very basic stand and his Walther pistol. This looks a bit more like a Walther p-38 or a Luger, but it's supposed to be a Walther PKK with silencer. The gun fits in Bond's hands but his firing poses are limited because of the design.


All in all the accessories are pretty boring and rather uninspired. For Bond it's good though, at least you get his gun.

Value:
Value can be quite interesting. These originally retailed for $10. Finding them today is hard, but finding them today for $10 is even more difficult. I was able to get very lucky and found this guy where I was able to cost him out at $10, which brings him right back to what he originally retailed for. To me, this is an excellent value. I'm a fan of Bond, but not a huge one. I'll buy a $10 Bond figure, but an $80 Sideshow Bond is something I'm never going to own. So that makes this worth it to me. Of course this was $10 in 1997, so give or take for inflation, I assume this was like $400 bucks in 1997. Or something... Math never was my strong suit.

Score Recap:
Packaging - 9
Sculpting - 8
Articulation - 7
Accessories - Walther Pistol, Stand
Value - 7
Overall - 8 out of 10


Pretty high score for this guy. By no means is this a perfect toy. In fact the bulk of that score is for the fact that his head sculpt is reasonable and his clothes fit all right. He looks best just standing there. Which is mostly what I bought him for. As toy, he's not terrible, but he's not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these "doll" style toys, but you have to grade them at what they are. This is a good likeness, decent articulation and it's affordably priced and well packaged. This is more of a shelf line than a play line, but I could see some youngsters enjoying these as well as long as they kept their roughness down to a reasonable level. More 007 to come!