Ardeth Bey and the Uncanny Valley of NECA Quality

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.Calling the NEZCA Ardeth Bey (Boris Karloff in the 30’s The Mummy) a lemon is kind of an exaggeration, but there’s a thing Neca does and it’s burned me a few times.I call it the Uncanny Valley of Quality.

It’s when you get a NECZA figure thinking it’s gonna be a solid 8/10. You get it and for reasons you couldn’t have known, it’s really a 6.5/10. Which makes it FEEL like it’s a 2/10. You’re extra mad because it just misses the mark.

When I first saw this, I was riding the high off of preordering Vincent Price, who looked great. And in the SDCC footage from the NECA Booth, the Ardeth Bey had that same quality - an “I’m not a fan of this but something about this figure is striking me aesthetically ooooooooo.”

And when I preordered Ardeth Bey, I was riding high off of GETTING Vincent Price, who is one of the all-time great action figures of recent memory. 

And then I got him. And he’s… fine. Well, he’s fine if you get your kicks above the waistline, sunshine, because you definitely won’t be getting any kicks below. On account of he got no legs.

He got FEET, but they did that traffic cone bullshit where his lower half is just a molded robe-skirt with ankles sticking out the bottom. It’s one of my least favorite things you can do to an action figure. I don’t care if the legs are under a plastic skirt in such a way that they’re functionally useless (well, I do care, but you’ll see where the sentence is going) but GIVE ME FUCKING LEGS. For thirty seven goddamned dollars I want thighs even if I’ll never see them. I want knee joints even if it looks dumb as shit when I bend them.

So, yeah. 

There’s a thing the best action figures do where you see them in pictures and you see them on a con shelf and then you get one and open it up and it comes to life in your hand. Vincent Price does that. The Four Horsemen stuff I’ve been getting does that. Pretty much everything Jada Toys puts out does that. 

And then sometimes you get a toy and you open it up and it dies in your hand. You just know it’s a lump of plastic and will always and forever be a lump of plastic. And that’s Ardeth Bey. Does he come with heads and hands that very nicely simulate the human form, the mummy form, and the in-between form? He does! Are his accessories nice, if a bit small and slight and the “scroll” is a flimsy piece of paper? Yes! Is he nicely sculpted and painted where appropriate? Yes! Should I have bought him? Absolutely fucking not. Whatever magic I saw earlier vanished/disappeared along with the rest of his legs.

So I went to find my two most recent examples of Traffic Cones, although both Agatha Harkness and Venger get a pass for having legs even if you can’t really use them for anything, and I took a movie poster from a Technicolor Joan Collins Egyptian spectacle, and I went hunting for some free fonts, and I made this, and this? This I love. This cracks me up. This for days. Lemonade!