Another Shot At Greatness…

What did I promise you in the first blog entry of 2023? Like you remember. Well, maybe this will ring a bell – The King is back! No, not Elvis. Our gravel voiced monarch of the WWF in the late ‘80s, King Harley Race. As was announced in a surprising move, Race is back “available” for Mattel to produce as a figure. This was after their original rights to the legend resulted in exactly one figure being produced. Poor distribution, to put it mildly, caused that figure to become one of the most desired in the entire Mattel WWE run. He’s back, albeit with a few changes, and it’s time to bow and kneel before The King.

As he is part of the Greatest Hits series the packaging is fairly standard to how most of the Elite figures come boxed now. As I’ve said before, the packaging is good though I don’t care for it as much as I did the rectangular boxes of a few years ago in which the original Harley release came. In my order I did manage to get two examples in great shape, but the cardboard in this latest generation of boxes just seems flimsier than ever to me. It’s harder than ever to be shipped or find a truly nice box. Two images of The King adorn the box with a standard short bio.

As with the original you receive the rubber cape and crown. The crown may be a tad softer in material but the cape felt very much the same. It’s the look that made me fall in love with this figure long before it was released even the first time. It remains my favorite Mattel WWE release. As the entire line has stepped it up since that figure, we now get a pair of interchangeable fists, as well. For a guy like Harley one of my few complaints about the original release was that neither of his hands were a fist. This is a guy who could bust you open “the hard way” using a perfectly positioned knuckle yet…no fist. It’s fixed here.

That’s not the only upgrade. The face seems to have the “True FX” detail application which many collectors are hit-or-miss on. It seems to have changed the look of his eyes a bit. It isn’t too noticeable unless you’re closely comparing the two. Aside from the fists the other very pleasing upgrades are the additions of double-jointed elbows. Now Harley can REALLY drive that fist in deep! While the feature has been on many figures over the past several years, it didn’t really strike out to me as a huge deal until this one. Likely because I’ve spent so much time on the original figure.

The Greatest Hits series have had an interesting run so far. Figuring that they would stick around, at least for a bit like most modern figures, I didn’t jump on any at first. They’ve actually proven to be very in-demand. The lone figure that I wanted from the first lineup (Rikishi) barely made it past the pre-order stage at online retailers. I ended up finding it at a toy show for a perfectly acceptable price and I have seen pictures of it showing up at retail, but either the figures are truly “hot” or Mattel is playing distribution games again. This second series, especially Race, is proving to follow suit. The pre-orders are gone and retailers aren’t showing any signs of restock. This, like the original one years ago, needs to be grabbed when seen.

It’s also been confirmed that the Greatest Hits line will continue and a separate Greatest Hits line exclusively featuring legends is to come about. The latter, featuring names like Bruno Sammartino and Terry Funk, should be fairly hot. Sammartino and Race both indicate to me that Mattel is working extra hard to secure the legendary names that were said to be unavailable to them for years. My guess would be because PowerTown has shown what a powerhouse that they aim to be. While Mattel says that they cannot negotiate for names on their own, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they are now pushing WWE just a bit more to obtain rights to certain names. After all, Race was initially mentioned by PowerTown as a name available to them.

I would have liked to have seen what PowerTown could’ve done with Race. We could’ve gotten any number of versions from early in his career. Now that he’s back with Mattel, I can’t help but think that we’ll see him in the LJN-inspired Coliseum Collection. That release would no doubt include a soft goods cape. A fun addition would be the cape-jacket hybrid that was sculpted onto the original LJN. Hopefully Mattel realizes the want for pre-WWF versions of Race and gives us some figures in that realm, too. I’m not holding my breath, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me, either.

As a collector who owns the original version of this figure, and even one of the few autographed examples known to exist, I have no dismay about this remake. I’ve long championed the idea that everyone should be able to acquire these toys at the standard price for a reasonable amount of time. That was not the case with the original. There won’t be any signed versions of this one, sadly, nor does it include the Commissioner Shawn Michaels “Build-A-Figure” arms that the original did. Heck, as I said I bought two of these new ones myself. In fact, it’s time to update the meme that I made some time ago. It swept the Internet, or at least a few hundred people who passed it along. Here it is, in its original form, before I added two more for the girls to gossip about…