Week of Review - X-Men: Monster Armor

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It is X-Men Week here on the Lido Shuffle, specifically because this is the week Fox’s new series The Gifted premieres.  Even though The Gifted is a Monday premiere I’ll be spending the whole week looking at the history of the X-Men on TV starting with the show that started it all: X-Men, the animated series.  Premiering in 1992, X-Men paved the way for a massively profitable decade of Marvel TV adaptations and set the precedent for the initial run of films that are beloved by people to this day.  

It’s also one of the most popular animated series ever made and more or less a direct transliteration of the comics so I don’t have a lot to say about the show proper, which is why this is an Extended Toy Box entry.  The X-Men animated series tie-in toy line lasted a staggering 7 years passing through a ton of variations and unique threads and today I’m spotlighting one of the coolest ones: Monster Armor.  

Released in 1996, X-Men – Monster Armor was a 6-figure line of toys that was one of the last in the line to tie directly to the animated series.  By this point, the toys had already made standard variations of most of the various X-Men and their foes so the name of the game was experimentation and in this case that translated into the idea of armors.  If you’ve never seen it before, armor pieces were one of the many action figures variations cooked up in the ‘90s to try and keep things fresh.  The idea is that the figure will come with a collection of plastic armor pieces made to lock over their hands, chest, and head.  It’s basically a cost-cutting measure, a way of creating a new variation of an old character without having to create all new plastic molds.  This kind of stuff was actually very popular with Marvel toy lines of the day owing to how easy it made it to produce a ton of Iron Man variations. 

In the case of Monster Armor, the idea is that the armor pieces aren’t meant to be armor within the scripted play but rather mutations of the various characters.  This is all explained in the packaging, as was the custom at the time, but the idea of the line is that the villain Mr. Sinister is “at it again.”  Sinister was actually a pretty common bad guy in the X-Men animated series and dominated the comics in the ‘90s alongside fellow late period big bad Apocalypse so it makes sense he’d be the bad guy here.  

The story is that Mr. Sinister has developed a new means of bending mutation to his will and, with the help of Mystique, has kidnapped several of the X-Men to use in his schemes.  There’s actually more story to it than that, which is pretty rare, but I’ll get to that in due course.  Mr. Sinister’s new mutation is a way of transforming the three assembled X-Men into hideous monster versions of themselves, hence the title Monster Armor.

Let me just say that the monster X-Men look fantastic.  These are honestly some of the creepiest monster designs I’ve seen and a refreshing change of pace for the X-Men toy line, which tended to favor Ninjas and robots.  I think Cyclops is the most unnerving of the bunch, the way his head’s been replaced with a mass of goo around a single eye is just wrong.  Wolverine’s mutation has made him look like one of the living doll monsters from Trilogy of Terror, which I definitely approve.  It’s a good blend of menacing and kind of goofy, which actually fits his plot in the story but I’ll get to that.  

I really love that Wolverine’s hair has turned blue in this iteration for exactly no reason other than he and Beast have the same haircut.  Rogue probably has the strangest mutation of the bunch as she’s described as turning into a leech woman but is clearly some kind of dragon bat.   Incidentally, Rogue is also the only one of the three to not get a monster name as Cyclops is now Cyclaw and Wolverine is Fangor. 

Awesome designs aside, the main reason I chose to spotlight this particular line is that it has way more narrative to it than most of the X-Men toys, which is the whole point of this column.  Mystique’s monster form is like a death metal version of the Beast, which is explained that she shape-shifted into the Beast to trick the X-Men into Sinister’s trap.  Mystique is also given more motivation to her actions here and even listed as one of the good guys.  

It’s revealed she only joined Mr. Sinister because she wanted her foster daughter Rogue back but when Sinister turned Rogue into the leech monster it was too much and Mystique turned on him.   The only other ally that Mystique has in her battle is Fangor as Wolverine’s animal nature caused him to go feral and resist Sinister’s control. 

Speaking of Mr. Sinister, he has a more traditional armor in that it’s actually supposed to be armor.  Actually, it’s a bizarre, giant cybernetic arm that he uses in addition to his two normal arms, which is possibly the most ‘90s thing I’ve ever heard.  I’m not sure why they decided to give Sinister robot armor instead of a mutated form of his own, probably because they’d already used the batwing design for Rogue so there weren’t any obvious routes to go with him.  I do note that the people writing this stuff really did their homework as they mention Sinister’s obsession with the Summer’s family in the packaging details on Cyclaws’ box. 

Honestly, I’m pretty impressed with everything about this figure line, the only real downside is that it’s as short as it was.  The writing is solid to the point I could easily imagine this as an episode of the show or a comic story at the time.  Emphasizing Mystique as a morally ambiguous character was pretty spot on for her character’s ultimate path and the monster design is absolutely top notch.  I would’ve loved to see what they did with Jean Grey or Storm, maybe some kind of giant brain monster or living lightning.  

What’s more, the entire premise is a pretty clever extrapolation from Beast’s origin story of accidentally mutating into a more monstrous form, as the X-Men have always had at least one foot in the horror genre.  I’m honestly surprised no one’s done this in the comics yet given Marvel’s current obsession with character variants but at least we’ll always have these 6 figures and their story. 

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