My museum Big Chap has finally arrived. Damn, I have never been so nervous opening a statue before for two reasons:
1) All the prior breakages that we've seen in the last 6 months to year.
2) The fact that my wife has no idea I ordered this, would kill me if she found out I did, and I had to sneak it into the house and sneak around quietly opening the boxes
. Success though, I beat her!
I'm happy to say that mine arrived completely unscathed and intact. Hooray
! I felt pretty confident it was handled carefully when I picked up the boxes from the shipper today as they both seemed to be in good shape with no holes or major dents. I was also happily surprised that Box A with the figure was actually relatively light. That gave me hope from the start.
Opening Box B with the base was pretty easy. Certainly much heavier than the other box, but actually not as heavy as I was expecting overall. Big base, yea. Bigger wall, yea. Ok, good to go so far.
When I opened Box A I was surprised to find it sitting in the brown shipper upside down. That had me a little worried, but I proceeded to flip it back "right side" up and open the art box. I then saw sort of a "pushed out" portion of the styrofoam, but with nothing poking out. Well, that now had me most worried, but since nothing was protruding I had hope. When I finally opened up the styrofoam my worries were alleviated once I grabbed that body and pulled it out. Phew!
Now, I can totally see how a lot of these arrived with broken feet and heel bones. There is hardly any styrofoam on the bottom of the body below the feet and the actual box (and by bottom I mean when it's standing vertically), so any type of drop on the bottom would give a very jarring impact to the feet. Terrible design there that could have been easily avoidable by just making the styrofoam thicker on the bottom. I'm pretty sure that the reason why my art box was in the shipper box upside down was due to the previous issues of it breaking on the bottom of the feet with that type of impact. So Prime 1 wizened up and flipped it over so the feet would be on top and would not be subjected to impacts.
Anyway, the figure itself went together perfectly, crisply, and easily. Very simple setup, beautiful paint, beautiful sculpt. Best Alien I've ever seen. The only issue I have is my lack of space and where I will end up permanently putting him. He's definitely a large presence. That's still TBD, but for now he's in the bottom of my 50" Besta. Smaug the Terrible miraculously still fits above him, which is nice. I may end up switching the Alien with my Dark Rider of Mordor though which is actually on my desk, but with X-Men vs Sentinel #2 also on the way in the coming weeks I might delay that until that's in hand as well to find out the best possible setup. Christ, I just don't know where the 1/3 Jungle Hunter is going to go either now. That stupid statue has caused ALL of these problems as I was 4-5 years gone from this hobby and then that pulled me back in only to order more Aliens, Predators, Sentinels, and X-Men.
Company on it's way over tonight so not much time to marvel at this piece, but I'm sure I will enjoy it more and more since it sits right next to me when I'm sitting at my desk in my office.
