ACQUIRED: “Tinmeless” Toni Storm (Ringside Exclusive)

Gonna be honest - been DYING to post this since I finished it a week ago.It’s one of the big curses of wrestling action figures, but I don’t think it was ever more obvious than with Toni Storm. Because around the time her first Jazwares figure dropped, Punk Rocker With A Baseball Cap Toni Storm had completed her transformation into “Timeless” Toni Storm, one of the all-time greatest gimmicks in the history of professional wrestling. 

A psychotic break after losing the championship transformed her into the kind of Gloria Swanson style crazed starlet from the black and white picture days, which she tied in with lots of references to classic women’s wrestling like Mildred Burke and Wendi Richter, to create easily my favorite wrasslin’ thing in the past year. But her figure was Old Toni and I didn’t care about Old Toni.

So, fast-forward to the summer, and Ringside announces an exclusive Timeless Toni Storm figure, in black and white, with her entrance frilly thing and a title belt and THE SHOE and I couldn’t have hit the pre-order button faster. I needed this figure. And a couple weeks ago, at long last, I got this figure.

On a Jazwares Effort Scale, it’s a solid 8.5. Maybe a 9. It’s not quite Ringside Exclusive Hook good - a couple more props/accessories would have put it there. But it’s very good. First, the figure is in fact in black and white, except for her lips, which are red. The pic above is the fig, no digital trickery applied. 

The two head-sculpts aren’t very different, but they’re both STUNNING. Really capture the character without veering into the slightly exaggerated/cartoony way a lot of Jazwares heads do. They are, especially by Jazwares standards, elegant.

She also has shoe-throwing hands for the shoe, plus “ready for my closeup” posing hands. Could they have thrown in some standard graps hands to go along with it with minimal expense and effort? They absolutely could have. But I’m expecting there to be a color release of this at some point (which, yes, I will get) and that can have the normal-color grabbing hands and fists since she doesn’t get the black and white filter during matches.

The robe is nice, although meshy enough that it’s tough to green-screen. As you’ll see in a couple days, Jazwares clearly got a certain amount of use out oa certain fabric and ruffling technique, but it works and looks great on her.

The shot is easily one of my most elaborate, especially given I’ve established the “entrance ramp” technique already. 

First, this is the second debut of the new parts of The Crowd I shot a few weeks back. So now the entrance ramp has fans next to it. Hit everything with a black and white filter, dropped in the Toni Storm graphics, dropped in Toni and her reflection (needed a bunch of work because inexplicably she was getting the B&W filter effect in Affinity even though I’d merged the adjustment layer already), then added a film scratch layer and did some general cleanup.