Hasbro Selfie Series: X-Wing Pilot Me

So, yeah. I did this.

When Hasbro first announced the Selfie Series over the summer, saying you could have a 3-D printed copy of your own head on a Hasbro body like a Power Ranger, GI Joe, or Ghostbuster for $60, I was ready to go. A figure runs $25 normally, so the extra $35 for customization seemed pretty reasonable.

Plus, I had plans. I swap heads on Power Rangers and Marvel figs all the time. I have a lot of Hasbro figs. So that one head could do a LOT of work.

And then, a few days before the ordering started, some awkward details came out. Hair would be selected from a list of options, not based on your own hair. Same with facial hair. No glasses. And the price would be $80. So my plans changed. If the hair was good and the facial hair was good I’d consider it.

Ordering day! I spent four attempts getting a good facial scan on the app with my eyes open a reasonable amount and my features generally pointing in the right direction. The hair options were… not fully ideal. One strike. The beard option was fine, though. And the checkout price was showing as $60, not A$80. So I pulled the trigger. Turns out the original price was good for the first two days of ordering, which lined up with Hasbro’s online “PulseCon”.

And I picked an X-Wing Pilot body, because I didn’t have that body, and figured it’d be a good general storage body for the head when I wasn’t using it for other things.

That was my first mistake.

You see, while I own a bunch of SW Black Series toys, I’d never swapped heads with them, because Black Series toys never come with bonus heads the way MMPR and Marvel toys do. And it turns out that not only does the custom head not fit on any of my other figures, the Black Series heads don’t even come off, so I can’t put my head on any of those, either. (Yes, I know about heating up and all the tricks to remove heads that aren’t meant to come off, but I’m looking for minimum hassle.) 

So all I have is this figure. Had I known, I’d have probably gotten the Movie Spidey but I’m not as big a fan of those designs in figure form. 

That was my first mistake. My second mistake is not going one shade darker on the hair. Under a whiter light, it’s fine, and looks like it did in the on-screen render, but in more natural, yellower light, it really picks up the lighter brown and reads too light. We may put a dark wash on it to see what happens.

Overall, the facial likeness is really good. I figured it would be, because Hasbro’s been using a “photo-real” technique for a couple of years now and as a result have been really nailing actor likenesses. I assumed that this was an extension of that. The figure is nice, although a few of the joints are looser than you’d expect from a standard production figure, especially the ankles. The figure shipped from Mexico, which isn’t, I believe, where Hasbro does most of their manufacturing, which may have something to do with it.

So, am I happy with it? Yes. It does what was advertised. Am I as happy with it as I wanted to be? Nope. Some of that’s on me, some of that’s on them. Would I do it again? Probably not. I mean, if they made the price $60 again,or even cheaper, and I could learn from my mistakes, and I was suddenly more flush than usual with disposable income and there weren’t any more interesting toys to spend it on… maybe? Probably not.