First4Figures Statues: good news and bad news.

I'm aware I forgot to post the full set of new Metal Sonic statue photos here but if you haven't seen them yet you can check them out at First4Figures website. meanwhile, there's been some news about it. Some good, some bad. See after the jump.

May as well get the bad news out of the way first. I was e-mailed by First4Figures recently with news that there may be issues with metal Sonic statues being ordered from anywhere outside of the USA and Canada. To quote what they said:

"Thank you for your order for the Metal Sonic collectible statue. Unfortunately our license for Sonic the Hedgehog has expired in Europe and the rest of the world apart from USA and Canada. We wish to extend our resin license with SEGA so that we can fulfill your Metal Sonic order and we should get a reply from SEGA in early January. Please kindly bear with us until we have further information, we will keep you posted.

In the meantime, we have your order on file and will keep your product number/statue secure until we have an update from SEGA. If we can extend our license, your order will be fulfilled. If not, we will have to cancel your order. Please note, we have not charged your card and that your order is under pending status for now."

Well poop. The exclusive light-up Metal Sonic statue is only limited to 350 so the chances of me getting one of those now might be slim, but maybe I'll be lucky and they'll hold on to my order with an iron grip. I guess at the worst I could order the cheaper non-light-up one if they let me or if a shop like Forbidden Planet ends up stocking it (where I got the first Sonic one).

The good news this will not affect orders for the Super Sonic statues as they have finished production and will start shipping between the end of January or sometime in February. Of course we know the Super Sonic's have been produced because they posted lots of photos of them over at their facebook account. If you haven't seen these pics yet go have a look: it's a whole army of Super Sonics!

McDonald's Collectibles book Sonic set insights

 

So I found a book lying in the loft about McDonald's Collectibles (this one to be specific) and found a couple pages in there about the Sonic set of toys made in 1994 to promote Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and there is a few interesting bits of info in it along with scans. Above is the American promo art for it and below is the British one.

Check after the jump for scans and info taken from the book about all the different international releases and the toy variants.

 

The set first appeared in America between February 4th till March 3rd of 1994, later showing up in Canada and Puerto Rico later that year. The UK got the set from January 27th to February 24th 1995, Germany and Belgium in March, and in June both New Zealand and Japan finally caught up.

The American set and the European set have some differences. Firstly the US set had a little Sonic ball as an option for younger kids which was only available there. Also the Tails toy was completely different. In America, the toy was in two parts and flew off when you pulled the handle on a string. This version was recalled during the last week of the promotion according to the book due to problems with the pull string.

US Version (left) Euro version (right)

The European Tails toy has the same flat base of Tails himself but the toy itself was changed because they were worried kids would get hurt by a flying lump of plastic. On this one Tails is on base I presume is based on those floaty UFO things from marble Garden zone, and this one has a plastic zip pull thing that when pulled through the little holes makes the Tails (and er...his tails) spin about, but he doesn't fly off the base.

But even more interesting is the Japanese set. They didn't get the tails toy at all, and the Sonic and Knuckles were identical but the Robotnik toy got re-designed to match Japan's original Eggman design as opposed to the Adventures of Sonic cartoon one we got. I haven't seen this variant in particular mentioned or photographed anywhere online though I could be mistaken. EDIT: I was mistaken, there is a photo of it over at the Eggman Empire. If anyone owns this toy we'd love to see some more proper photos of it! Check out this cute artwork of the Eggman toy!

Thanks go to the authors of the book Ray and Ruby Richardson and David and Lesley Irving for these bits of Sonic toy info.