Friday, December 18, 2009

Pre-Production Gold Belt Stratos



When pictures first started surfacing of Classics Stratos, fans were confused by the color choice on the belt. Instead of the red belt of the original, Stratos was sporting a snazzy gold belt! The figure was changed to the red shortly before production, but some pre-production samples with the gold belt made it out there. I snagged one the other day, and decided to throw up a few quick comparison photos to show the differences in the 2.



The most obvious difference is of course the belt-



The gold version of the belt features a dingy gold base with yellow highlights- pretty similar to Classics Beast Man.



The jet pack harness is also painted differently. The gold belt version lacks the light blue oval paint app at the waist, and the paint used on the shoulder feathers is much darker, almost the same color of the blue plastic used on the harness.



The gold belt version lacks the paint detailing on the finger nails that they red belt Stratos sports. You can also see here on the wrist attachements that the red of the wings on the GB version is much darker-



The dark overspray on the wings is also more prominent on GB Stratos than it is on RB Stratos.

So there ya go... Enough differences to warrant a purchase in my eyes as an "oddity" piece, but not enough that a casual collector needs to go crazy trying to find one.

-James

1 comment:

  1. Interesting. The day Mattycollector starts offering blatant variants will probably be the day that many "casual" collectors will switch to being "avid" collectors - it would mean wider release of the standard figs.

    Right now, it's hard enough to come by a standard release without having to pay through the nose - and a rare variant at this point - I can only imagine what that would go for on ebay...

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