While it’s been eclipsed by its modern counterpart, Toy Biz’s original Marvel Legends line is still fondly remembered among long-time action figure collectors. Marvel Legends helped set the standard for collector-oriented toy lines with its universe-spanning character selection, highly detailed and articulated sculpts, and pioneering new concepts like the Build-a-Figure program. Some of Toy Biz’s other choices aren’t as well-remembered. Marvel Legends helped popularize the (largely abandoned) practice of “chase figures,” alternate costumes or redecoed characters short-packed in a case to drive fan engagement.
Sought-after at the time, these “chase figures” are, like most Toy Biz Marvel Legends, today without serious aftermarket value – with one major exception. The blue and white chase variant of Marvel Legends series fifteen’s Wasp is today the single most sought-after figure of the 2,000+ produced by Toy Biz or Hasbro. The figure never saw production, and an estimated ten carded prototypes have come to market since its 2006 cancellation. Right now, one eBay seller is offering the prototype to this legendary unproduced figure, with an asking price of $7.5k.
Toy Biz began including chase variant figures in their late nineties five-inch figures, recognizing the burgeoning collector market. When Toy Biz produced the first wave of four Marvel Legends in 2002, consisting of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Toad, they also included two chase variant figures. Both were repaints of the standard Iron Man: one with gold paint in place of yellow on the faceplate and limbs (also sporting a new head with an alternate faceplate), the other cobalt blue and based on Iron Man’s “Stealth Armor.”
The practice remained standard throughout the line, with somewhere between one and three of the figures in each wave being produced alongside a variant. Although Toy Biz was motivated by a desire to incentivize additional purchases and get mileage out of tooling, the variant figures provided viable alternate display options for collectors and fans of the characters.
The line predated the concept of including swappable headsculpts with figures, so it served as the primary means to give collectors the option to display an “unmasked” version of a hero or villain. For characters like Ghost Rider, it meant variant figures that were in the process of “transforming” into their superhuman selves. In other instances, it skirted the always-controversial problem of which costume/era to depict for a character with multiple iconic looks like Angel and Wonder-Man. It could also provide a dynamic, toyetic depiction of a character’s powers in use, as with the Vision.
Few characters were better-suited to variant figures than Wasp, who has probably worn more costumes than any other super-heroine across her sixty-year history. Changing up her look every few issues was literally baked into the character: Janet Van Dyne is a fashion designer, and an entire blog has been curated documenting her constant tinkering with her Wasp ensemble. Two different costumes were offered when Wasp made her Marvel Legends debut in 2006, but fans always knew there was supposed to be a third.
Toy Biz’s unproduced Marvel Legends are among the best-documented never-released items in toy collecting. The company shared prototypes and even pre-production drawings of figures regularly at conventions and through toy collecting magazines, sometimes leading to a sneak preview of a figure, concept, or accessory that didn’t end up costing out. Fans still wax poetic about the planned “army builder” wave, where each character was supposed to come with a second, less-articulated figure depicting generic foes like Skrulls or Hellfire Club Guards.
Other unused concepts included a wave with unarticulated “X-Babies” pack-in figures, based on an Uncanny X-Men storyline where the villain Mojo literally infantilizes the team, and a Frog-Thor figure. The most esoteric was a pack-in figure of Forbush Man, a sixties joke character who served as the mascot for Marvel’s MAD knock-off Not Brand Echh.
The blue-and-white costume Wasp was advertised and solicited well in advance of her intended release. The costume was a point of contention with fans, who groused about the choice to base it on a short-lived (even for Wasp) design that appeared in two issues of Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s Avengers run. Many contended that there were other Wasp looks they would have preferred. When the variant was pulled at the last minute from the wave, these same fans changed their tune, especially as rumors circulated that the figure had seen extremely limited production before cancellation. As a few of these packaged samples emerged online, they quickly became the holy grail of Marvel Legends collecting, commanding four- or five-digit prices.
In 2018, Hasbro produced a tribute to the unproduced figure, including Wasp in this same costume, with their second wave of “retro carded” figures, inspired by Toy Biz’s first Marvel Super-Heroes figures from 1990. The figure was a middling seller, lingering on store shelves and online retailers’ warehouses. Fans meant it when they said they didn’t need this costume.
The value of the Toy Biz figure is informed exclusively by its rarity, making the prototype on eBay now an even more remarkable find: it’s a one-of-a-kind version of an already vanishingly rare figure. Though built off the same sculpt as the produced series fifteen Wasp, this unpainted “test shot” figure is distinguished as the unproduced version by its white and blue plastic – another testament to how far into production the figure made it before its ultimate cancellation.
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