Toy Review: Marvel Super Hero Adventures Villain Showdown Venom & Electro Figure with Racer (Playskool)

While this is a Walmart exclusive, I did manage to find a photo of it on their website here which shows Venom holding onto the handle bars with one of his hands, though his butt is up in the air.   Yes, that is my only real problem with this Venom figure and Racer, as with the Electro one as well, as each figure only has one open hand and even if they could reach the handle bars they'd still sit kind of funny.   But what's the kicker is that if you look at the back of the package, they have both Electro and Venom sitting in the seats with their arms not reaching the handles.    Why would you design a toy in such a way?

As of right now, the only Playskool toys we have in this manner for Marvel are Spider-Man (x3), Wolverine, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk,  Green Goblin, Silver Surfer and The Lizard.   Yes, they were all obtained through grab bags at Savers and never have we bought any new before now.    This is my first time writing a review for them not because of that though, but because of how the design flaw in the Racer bothers me but at the same time I'm still glad that these exist because it gave us a chance to add to our Playskool Marvel collection without collecting any more Spider-Man figures.

For those who don't know, this line of Playskool Marvel figures is to scale with the Imaginext line of figures which has DC Super Heroes in them and my son likes to simply refer to them as "Batman toys".   When I first saw them side by side in YouTube videos my son watched I thought they were somehow both made by Imaginext but of course that is not true.   So for all of our toys in this same sort of scale we have maybe 75-80% of them as part of the DC line and then maybe only 15-20% as part of Marvel.    I know that there are other Marvel characters out there that we needed but it was just a matter of finding them in stores or grab bags and so far we've been doing pretty well at building our Avengers without having to pay mass retail price.

My biggest problem with the Playskool line in this form is that the majority of villains which come in it are simply available in two packs with Spider-Man.    So up until I found these, if we wanted Venom or Electro, it'd mean two more Spider-Man figures for us.   We already have three Spider-Mans of this size just from grab bags at Savers so I'm not really looking into intentionally buying any more at mass retail.   But if you want Doc Ock, Rhino and some other villains, yeah, you'll probably have to get another Spider-Man.     Why didn't Playskool put some of these villains together I'll never understand because if you followed their series and supposed guidelines you'd have a Spider-Man for every villain you have.

For some reason, the body and size of Electro really reminds me of Wolverine, but Venom as true to form is a bit bigger than the rest of the figures.   I've always wondered why Playskool seemingly abandoned this line when they could be making any number of other figures (Especially characters to go with the X-Men, Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and soon to be Fantastic Four movies), but in all fairness Imaginext has just been re-releasing the same figures over and over with only slightly new figures appearing primarily in the blind bag series.

Another shining point of this figure set- which is about the same price as buying two figures together except instead of another Spider-Man you get what is essentially a motorcycle for your bad guy- is that as far the Racers go they seem pretty sturdy.  I've pushed them across the entire living room floor to my son (Mainly in an effort to clean) and they don't fall over unless they hit something hard enough.   I know that there have been toys in the past that you'd send maybe a foot at the most and it'd fall over but I'm glad to say these do not.  (Imaginext motorcycles are pretty sturdy too, but they still don't quite feel as heavy as these somehow)

So I do feel really lucky to have found these at a random Walmart in Norwalk, Connecticut and if you should happen to see them and are in the business of building your collection of "Batman toys", as my son would say, then do grab these over the multiple Spider-Mans you really don't need.