Toyfare Magazine - Along Came a Spider

After months of frenzied speculation that placed everyone from the Oscar-nominated Brit Jude Law to Wing Commander actor and Buffy’s beau Freddie Prinze, Jr. in the coveted blue-and-red suit, movie producers have finally found their Spider-Man in newcomer Tobey Maguire. But loyal Spider-Man fans won’t have to wait until the film opens for new Spidey toys.

Toy Biz is set to release four figures with the new Classic Spider-Man line. While creating some buzz for the movie seems the likely cause for some new merchandise, Toy Biz insisted it wasn’t the sole reason.

“We haven’t done any new Spider-Man products in a couple years specifically aimed at kids and collectors,” revealed Toy Biz’s Jesse Falcon. Plans for an Ultimate Spider-Man line were shelved in favor of the Classic line.

“We never even designed anything for [Ultimate Spider-Man],” Falcon confirmed. Toy Biz will release a second Classic Spider-Man assortment in lieu of Ultimate Spidey next March.

Rather than create some new toy loaded with lots of nifty gadgets and accessories, Classic Spider-Man focuses more on the actual figures. Each new 6-inch figure has a whopping thirty points of articulation - unprecedented for a North American toy - and will be packaged with its own comic book that tells an important story related to that specific character.

The figures in the new line include Classic Spider-Man in the red-and-blue duds, another Spidey in black (both sculpted by Steve Kiwus), Man-Spider and Venom (by Phil Ramirez). Each figure will also be packaged with a base that can be hooked onto the wall with the figure, to re-create Spidey’s own wall-climbing ability.

So while the Spider-Man movie is still a year away, the new figures should alleviate some of the pain of that long wait when they hit stores at the year’s end.