The Incredible Shrinking 31 Days of Toy Terror: Assortment #2 from Dr. Malgam's Body Bags by ToadFrog

 

   Halloween is almost here so let's take a look at something pretty spooky and new: Assortment #2 of body parts from Dr. Malgam's Body Bags! Dr. Malgam's Body Bags was launched as a Kickstarter project on May 1 of 2024 and funded within 8 hours. With a cool product of swappable monster parts solid in fabric body bags, a well implemented campaign, and some good stretch goals, the campaign ended with $62,565 dollars. While the past year has been a rather topsy-turvy time for manufacturing and launching a business, ToadFrog kept backers well updated and delivered the quality goods early this fall. Mine arrived right at the end of September. I've been wanting to do a couple video reviews of these as something fun and different so I just jumped in and did one earlier this week while looking at Assortment #3. The general idea of these figures is that each set is sold in a fabric body bag that includes a variety of parts for different monsters. You can build a random monster from a hodgepodge of the parts but you'll need multiple sets to create a full monster. Oddly enough few of the monsters have all of their parts available, though ToadFrog has hinted that the future needed parts will be part of a possible series 2. I'm looking at assortment #1 which contains the Frankenstein (monster) head and a variety of other random parts. Huh. Now, oddly enough, when I look at the campaign page and other folks' pictures, this seems to actually be Assortment #1. Huh. I wonder if mine just got mislabeled? So, this is likely Assortment #2 but my Body Bag says #2. Well, these are meant to be swapped but I haven't done any real swapping yet. So this review might just be a confused mess. Anyways, let's unzip this body bag and join me after the break...

The Facts:

Height: 5 1/8ths inches

Articulation: Swivel shoulders and a swivel neck.

Accessories: Figure is made up of removable pieces (head, torso, 2 arms, 2 legs) and comes with 1 extra arm and a fabric Body Bag.

Non-Scalper Price: $25 dollars (or sold in various bundles with all other sets at a bit of a discount).

The Positives:

* These remind me a lot of vintage lines like Con-Nec-Tors or even Hasbro's various modern Mashers lines where the focus of the line is swapping parts to make your own weird creations. Unlike most lines where you purchase the figure and swap parts to make new creations, these figures already come mixed up. That does give each release a chance to show off a bunch of wild sculpts and textures, though. While these are built simply, the sculpts are really sharp and the paint applications are neat and clean. The Skeleton parts on this figure even have a great two-tone color scheme and there's excellent shading on the Mummy's arm.

* The star of this set is the head of Frankenstein/ Frankenstein's Monster. I really like the look of this guy! It's a great portrait of the Monster with sunken eye sockets, the classic flat top hair (and head), yellow eyes, and a few stitches. While the design isn't the same, the style of the figure reminds me a bit of the animation style of something like DC's Creature Commandos. 

* Here's a look at the back of the figure. I do like how different each piece is and how the detail goes all the way around. The back of the Skeleton torso is really cool with some crazy intense looking vertebrae. 

* The leg parts included here are very cool. The Creature leg has lots of patches of scales and plenty of fins while the Cyber-Gorilla leg is incredibly hairy with a mechanical three toed foot revealed by the missing foot. 

* Each figure can split into six separate parts and a seventh part is included here (an extra right arm) to give you a hint of the mixing and matching you can do with multiple figures. All of the attachment points are the same though the way the legs attach does make it odd to, say, replace one of the legs with an arm or something weird like that. Everything feels very sturdy, made from a solid plastic with a bit of rubbery give, kind of like the vintage LJN Wrestling Superstars. 

* The sales gimmick and packaging of the line is a reusable fabric body bag. This is a pretty cool extra that does store your parts inside or could hold other action figures, too, if you've just wanted a body bag. It's durable and has a zipper so you can easily open and close it. The label is made to look like a toe tag and is attached by a plastic fastener. 

* Here's the body bag unzipped with the Frankenstein Monster mixture creeping out! Very spooky!

* These guys are durable and while the swapping is the main feature, you can also rotate the neck and arms for a little posing/ play value.

The Negatives:

* ToadFrog was certainly upfront about how the legs would be handled but it does seem odd to me that they chose to go with legs that attach to the bottom of the torso rather than the sides of a waist. It's a bit limiting in movement and I'm not sure what the gain is for the loss of the joints being on the side. You could have built four legged creatures and what not. 

   This is a pretty fun concept and I'm excited to check out the rest of these. This is a Great figure: Sturdy, well designed, and with a fun gimmick. I kind of wish that Dr. Malgam's Body bags either came with the full complete figure (like a full Frankenstein Monster) with an extra part or that series one contained the parts for most every monster, but what's here is fun. This is a cool concept and now that the Kickstarter has successfully delivered, I'm hoping that ToadFrog manages to get these to retail or, at the least, to online stores and independent toy stores. I'm planning to review more of these over the next month, so stay tuned!



   Sure, there are a ton of different parts here, but the Frankenstein Monster head is the most recognizable. For more of Frankenstein check out Castle Frankenstein for all of my reviews of the monster. 

   For more of Dr. Malgam's Body Bags check out the following:

Assortment #3.