Some minor faults can’t spoil my new Captain Britain action figure.

I’m always on the lookout for Captain Britain bargains on eBay, be they cards, art, badges or action figures. So imagine my delight when I not only came across a Captain Britain action figure from 1999 I hadn’t seen before, but then won the item as well.

Here’s the figure.

Instantly there are a couple of things on the figure that leap out at you, firstly it’s labelled Previews exclusive, Previews referring to the monthly comic book catalogue, so I’m imagining the figure might have been scarce or even non-existent outside of comic shops.

The next thing that caught my eye was just who is Captain Britain packaged with?

It’s sort of hard to see from this angle but I’m 99.9% certain it’s Lockheed the companion of Kitty Pryde Caps’ Excalibur team-mate, whose inclusion is suspect, which I will get to later.

Why Lockheed? Well the jury is still out on that one. Anyway the figure also comes with an exclusive trading card which because I won’t open the packet this is about as close as we’re going to get to it.

Now Captain Britain merchandise to me lives or fails on how they describe Cap, so let’s flip the box and see how this one does.

Not to bad though Captain Britain is not powerless without his suit but as this was 1999 that might not have been in Cap continuity at the time so I’m going to ignore it.

Finally I’m always intrigued to see what other superheroes were part of this range. The box lists Wolverine – who I believe Marvel are contractually bound to always release as an action figure – Black Bolt, and Shang-Chi. Interestingly if you study the first picture of the Cap figure you will notice Wolverine and the other heroes figures are all based on comics; whereas Captain Britain is based on a trade paperback which collects his adventures. This collection is the series of adventures from before Cap joined Excalibur and met Kitty Pryde and Lockheed, so as I said earlier the dragon’s inclusion is suspect to say the least.

Despite these two minor errors I’m quite taken with the new addition to my Captain Britain merchandise collection and considering the figure is 15 years old it’s in very good condition and now sits proudly on my shelf – out of direct sunlight don’t worry.

If you want to read about my other odd Captain Britain figure then click here.

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There’s something not quite right with my Captain Britain action figure. Now Updated

So there goes Captain Britain off to fight crime armed with his mighty sword Excalibur and ever ready with his personal rocket launcher to blast villains to kingdom come.

What do you mean you’ve never heard of this version of Captain Britain, he does exist honest look here’s a picture of him.

OK so this Captain Britain is an action figure but he is quite an odd one who came out on the back of the recent Captain America movie, even though I believe he actually isn’t in the film. I’m not sure why Marvel wanted to release this figure ( apart from the hope that it might make a quick buck, ) but I always like to see Captain Britain on toy shop shelves so I’m not going to complain.

However it gets weirder as Marvel not happy with just one unrelated Captain Britain action figure decided to release a variant, to get one you needed to go to KMart where you could pick up an exclusive Captain Britain variant pack, here he is still armed with Excalibur and wearing something that looks like his MI-13 costume.

I like both figures despite the fact they bear little resemblance to the Captain Britain of the comics and I can still remember my feeling of pleasant surprise when I found the standard action figure on the shelves of my local Forbidden Planet. Like I said earlier any Captain Britain product on shelves will always be a win for me, rocket launcher or not.

Update

I’ve found the inspiration for the Kmart Captain Britain, have a look at this panel from Exiles 44 from May 2004.

Check out the alternate timeline Cap he’s almost the exact image of his Kmart counterpart and armed with Excalibur, OK it might not be Cap ( but I’m guessing it is with the alternate Meggan also present,) as the team is called the Invaders which usually saw Union Jack as a member but it’s close enough, now I just need to find out where that rocket launcher came from.