Phicen Phail!
Now, I'm the first to admit that the Phicen Seamless Body is an attempt to produce a really, really difficult new technological achievement in Action Figures. It's a whole new area, and it's hard, so the Phicen folks deserve a certain amount of slack. When I broke the elbow on my original "Tiger Brothers League" seamless body within ten minutes of opening the box? Totally my fault. I hadn't figured out how to determine the bend direction of the elbow, and I forced it. Okay. When, a couple of weeks ago, I broke the hip of my first Phicen Seamless Small Bust figure? I'm not quite as ready to cop to the fault for that one; if one leg has that extra "click" in the hip to bring it in toward the center, so should the other. But, still, it's a new technology, it's not easy to do. I'll make allowances.
But today's adventure? No. Not my responsibility, and definitely one that Phicen deserves, and gets, the blame for. I've learned my lesson. I know the directions of turn available to the joints pretty well now, and, no, I absolutely did not force a limb, nor push it in any direction it wasn't meant to go.
So why did this happen?
When swinging the arm out to the side, in the normal direction, there was a Pop!, without a crunch, and suddenly the arm was swinging comically up, and there was an ugly protrusion down on the underside, up near the shoulder. I felt through the skin, and it quickly became clear what had happened. The arm had popped out at the shoulder swivel! I had to roll the skin the whole way up the arm -- a trick I learned experimenting with my broken-elbowed TBL babe -- and then remove the arm armature. No sign of broken plastic, that should, and did, count for something. More feeling around now told me the rest of the story: The two halves of the upper part of the arm armature had simply seperated, the rear clicking out as it was supposed to, and the front staying put, setting the metal peg from the lower part of the armature free!
Once I managed to roll the skin up far enough -- quite a struggle -- it quickly became apparent that the front and back halves of the upper arm armature had never been sealed together. All that held the arm in place was the grip of the rubber "Flesh." Now, as I said above, I'll make allowances for the difficulties of creating new technologies, but guys, this was just a simple, old-fashioned failure of workmanship. Somebody in the assembly process just couldn't be bother to glue together parts that were supposed to be glued! When I buy a "Premium" figure -- and, gang, if I'm paying more than $50.00, including shipping, that's "premium" -- I expect basic, competent workmanship to be done!
Now, my initial intention had been to glue it back together once I managed to re-seat the arm armature, but the difficulty in keeping the flesh rolled up high enough to
The addition of insult to injury is that, as a result of rolling the rubber flesh up far enough to effect a repair, the very thin connect points that attach the skin to the armature have broken, so now that elbow wrinkles when it's bent in a really unnatural-looking way. All in all, I'm really annoyed at this. Can you tell?
