It’s been a long wait, but the Heels and Faces Wrestling Retros figures are finally here! The figures from Zombie Sailor Toys which in the first series include Matt Cardona, Brian Myers, Dino Bravo, Sabu and referee Earl Hebner are finally in the hands of collectors.
It’s been well over a year that we’ve been covering these and a year since they went up on pre-order, but now we have the series 1 figures it’s time to work out if the wait was worth it!
The Earl Hebner figure was perhaps the figure in series 1 that most caught my attention and topped the list of essential figure to get. Wrestling fans who grew up with the Hasbro WWF figures will know that unless the matches they were putting on in the ring featured a special guest referee, the only referee we’d have would be in our imagination.
I mean sure, it may have seemed a wild gamble to create a wrestling referee figure when there were only so many figures released each year and we didn’t even ever get the like of Dino Bravo back in the day. That said, it’s also the case that we got multiple Hulk Hogans, Ultimate Warriors and Randy Savage figures, so why not just sacrifice one of those to give the kids an actual referee figure to add to the matches.
Finally big kids can have that ref bump or recreate the Montreal Screw Job finish with their Bret and Shawn figures because the official Earl Hebner retro figure is here.
Design
The design of this figure is brilliant. The detail on the face really looks like Earl, and the classic style referee uniform of light blue shirt, black trousers and bow tie means this is perfect for the 1980s action. It wouldn’t surprise me if we eventually get a stiped shirt variant come out for the Attitude Era fans. This is somewhat teased on the back of the card where it shows the original design illustration for the figure in both Attitude Era and classic blue referee attire.
The expression is fairly neutral which works for a referee who should be there in the ring, but not steal focus from the superstars wrestling the match. One cool feature of the Earl Hebner figure is that unlike any of the original Hasbro WWF figures, this figure comes with a swappable body part. You get two options for Earl’s left hand, with one of them showing a single finger raised, and the other showing two. This is to show if he had counts a one or two count.
Real Wrestling Action
In terms of the figures having action poses, the Zombie Sailor line of figures match the Wrestling MegaStars figures from Chella Toys in that these do not have spring activated actions. It is typical for this new wave of indie retros to present the figures as if they would have a spring loaded action, although in the case of Earl here, him being a referee and his hands showing the count, there isn’t actually an obvious action pose from the Hasbro figures that Earl is mimicking.
It’s good to see that the Zombie Sailor Toys have holes in their feet so they can be placed on stands the same as the Hasbro WWF figures and the Mattel WWE Retros.
Packaging
The packaging is really nicely designed. As with all the retros from WWE, Chella and Hasbro, the card matches in size to others and has the positioning of the logo, image of the wrestler and layout basically the same as the Hasbro figures from back in the day. There is no illustration or photo demonstrating the spring loaded action, which to be fair is fair as it doesn’t have one. The back of the card features a clippable info card on Earl. Amusingly, one of the facts it lists includes that Earl is actually an evil twin. This being a reference to Earl and the late Dave Hebner being identical brothers who once had a storyline of Earl being the bad one.
Conclusion
The Eearl Hebner Heels and Faces figure is one of the best retro style wrestling figures to come out for a long time. As noted on the back of the card, Hebner is the most famous referee of all time and it’s long overdue for him to be immortalised in figure form. The design is great, and will finally fill the gap in many wrestling figure fan’s collection to have a ref.
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