So today we'll be looking at another Spider-Man bootleg toy -- or, rather, three Spider-Man bootleg toys, since these guys came in a three-pack. Behold, the faux Spider brothers!

I could probably say damning things about the figures' body sculpts -- they're far bulkier than ol' Petey should be, and look at those gnarled and bunching muscles on the legs! -- but honestly I've grown so used to them that they don't even look out of place to me anymore. (You'll see why in a bit!) So let's focus on the paint jobs! The color choices are rather interesting, with the two Silver Centurion Spider-Men flanking a more sinister-looking variant in black and gold. Even though there's probably some comic book basis for these colors -- Spidey's worn pretty much every color of the rainbow, hasn't he? I even recall seeing a green Spider-Man at one point... -- something about these guys' schemes just doesn't strike me as very heroic at all. In fact, they look more like a charismatic evil leader and two henchmen bent on conquest and murda than a friendly neighborhood good guy!

Their evil is even more apparent when you look closer, because the faded and incomplete paint suggests their wickedness even more strongly -- like they were so hellbent on committing atrocities that they couldn't even be bothered to sit still for the process. Whereas the web lines on many Spider-Man knockoffs are pretty amazing, they look fuzzy and broken on places with these figures. It's not that they look hand-painted -- they're clearly done by machine, and they'd be crisp under optimal circumstances -- but whatever paint was used, it just didn't take very well to the plastic. The same goes for the metallic areas, where the coverage is poor and slight scratches and imperfections are numerous.

But as for the details themselves, they're kinda neat. Instead of a single spider emblem in the center of the chest, these guys have two spider emblems converging on an embedded LED -- as if the LED symbolizes goodness caught in their web and they're coming to feast and drain it of light. Which I guess happened, since the lights on these figures no longer work! There's also a tiny spider buckle on the belt that Spider-Man doesn't have, and web lines that trail off and vanish in the recess of Spider-Man's crotch. Think of that what you will, but perhaps it's indicative of something highly untoward. Considering the shady look on Spidey's face -- the mask "eyes" are painted off-center, which gives the impression that the knockoffs are slyly glancing to the side -- it'd certainly be in keeping with the overall creepy and sinister feel of the figures.

And now to talk about the paint on the figures' bac... whoops, never mind. But note the construction of the limbs and head! I'd like to call them hollow, but are they really hollow? I mean, they're solid pieces of plastic... they just have big concave spaces in them. But those spaces aren't covered, so they're not really hollow, are they? Argh! Anyway, the arms and legs look more or less like what you'd expect given how these things were probably made, but there are some pronounced stress marks at the huge hole in Spidey's noggin... almost as if the cylinder in his head was moved or expanded at some point after the molding process began. Weird, but I bet the larger size of that hole would make for fun play possibilities! Fun if you like having your villains embed their fists in Spidey's skull, anyway.

Oh yeah, and the reason why I'm hardly bothered by this freakish bootleg sculpt? This is probably the most widely used bootleg body in all of Bootlegger King Boss's operation. I've been seeing this same body sculpt since I was a child, and on everything from superheroes to ninjas to... well, yeah, that's pretty much all it gets used for, the occasional samurai notwithstanding. Basically, imagine DCUC running for another thirty years without Mattel ever changing up the buck body. By the time the company released its 489th version of Batman, we probably wouldn't even bother pointing out the duckbill feet or flat crotch; they would simply be facts of life. This bootleg body -- from its lumpy bowed legs to its alternate grasping and reaching hands to its soft bracelet sculpts to its semi-hollow limbs -- is kinda like that.

Every time I see it, I feel oddly comforted.

__________

Want to see even more bootleg toys? Find past and future editions of Bootleg Tuesday right here.