Octobersbest: Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. SKELETONS!

These aren't your "spooky scary" kind of skeletons!

Well okay, maybe they are.

I mean, who am I to tell a skeleton how it should act?  Besides, these are just skeletons!  That's it!  You do what you want with 'em!

Okay, let's go over this quickly: If you haven't heard of Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S., wh-where were you?  No no, that's okay; not all of you are going to be rabid toys beasts like myself.  The HACKS are G.I. Joe sized figures with super articulation and easily swappable limbs, created by Boss Fight Studio for a Kickstarter campaign (at which I threw a ton of money).  The plan, I assume, is to base a ton of different themes around the basic male and female bodies, but for now they started with Spartans vs Gorgons. 

...I should have gone over them a long time ago.

That's beside the point!  What we're looking at today is Boss Fight's basic skeleton, in various colors.  This is like the basic HACKS bodies - sans flesh!  I can imagine all sorts of awesome ways they're gona use these, but thankfully they released a bunch of plain skeletons, first.

So, without having reviewed the normal HACKS yet...let's just forget about comparison and see how these guys are as skeletons.

S'good.  It's good.  I like it. 

G'night!

Seriously though: They're not perfect, but they would have BLOWN ME AWAY, back in the day.  Nowadays I think people expect a bit more, but what's there works great, and to be honest...I'm not sure what I would do differently.

Goes without saying that these bone bags will serve your every need for something...dead.  Lying around.  The articulation is unrestricted by flesh-meat, so you can twist these boners around to your heart's content! 

They can take on pretty much any pose that the normal flesh-style bones can.  They're also reasonably smaller, as a skeleton should be, since meat tends to bulk up the bones. 

They might be a little big for vintage Joes, but who cares?  This is THE Joe-sized skeleton, period! We shoulda got something like this a loooong time ago!

But we didn't.  So that's why I'm reviewing them.  Are you keeping up? 

Just like the rest of the HACKS, you can pull these bones apart at the seams!  You can also pull out the hands and feet, but there's not much to swap with those. 

Now - aside from just being able to rip apart a skeleton and spreading his bones all over the place - you can also do some mild swapping with the HACKS.  It doesn't work completely, at least, not with the male body, but the female body's shoulder slot fits with the bone arm perfectly! 

And vice versa. 

If you want it to work with the male body, you have to pull the arm off at the elbow and swap there.

Which, honestly, is REALLY cool!  You won't get the legs to work (since they're on pegs and the flesh bodies have ball-jointed hips) but the arms are pretty much all you need!

Oh, and maybe the head.

This one takes a little work, but it does fit!  As you can see: The HACKS neck joint is a double ball joint.  One fits in the neck, and the other is shoved up into the head.  When you pull a head off, the joint is made to stay in the head.  If you want a skull on there, you've got to get some tiny needle-nose pliers and pull out the joint.  Once you do...

Oh yeah, we'll cover other colors soon, but there's a yellow skeleton!  I used it to make Skeletor.

You saw this already in the Super 7 MotU ReAction figures review.  He's a blue HACKS body, some armor, the skull, and a hood from Emperor Palpatine and the staff from the Retro Skeletor.  Not perfect, but it works!

YEAH, I love it!  Works out so good.  I was originally putting this together just to see if I could, but I love it so much that these parts are pretty much permanent now, baring any interesting part developments in the future (like a lighter blue body, which I just checked, and there IS.  Dangit.). 

Anyway: Since we're sort of on the subject of different colored skeletons...

As a special gift to kickstarter backers (and a recent gift to people buying over 150 bucks in products from the Boss Fight store) we got a hot pink skeleton!  IT'S RAD.

This thing is pretty amazing, and since he's not easy to get, I'm gona have to leave him as-is and not spread the parts around.  But why would I?  Totally Skelebones don't need nothin' but his guitar and sunglasses.

OKAY, there was a black skeleton there, I should probably cover that.

...so maybe there isn't much to cover.  It's just a black skeleton.  It's a cool black skeleton!  But his focus will talk more about armor, so we'll skip to the last naked skeleton and come back to this guy when he's wearing a little something-something. 

YES, translucent skeletons!  Purple translucent skeletons, no less (which is my new album name).  This is a good time to talk about....disappointments, however. 

You'll notice the right skeleton is in an interesting crouching pose.  This isn't on purpose: He HAS to be in this pose, because his left leg is warped.  This is kind of common among the skeletons, though this one has it the worst.  I'm assuming that it has a tendency to be warped, since they are so thin.  Everything is fine, for the most part, but when they're warped, it's super annoying.  I haven't tried any heat treatment yet, but until then: I hope it's a problem they're working on.  The warping really makes all the difference between fun posing and annoying little tweaking until you manage an awkward stance. 

Since we're on disappointments:  I should also mention that the hands have a tendency to fall off, on a couple of them.  Not all.  It's only a minor annoyance, since it's only a couple, but it's still a thing that gets in the way of these being absolutely perfect. 

Now, barring any leg annoyances: The translucence is excellent.  My compliments to the plastic chef.  These are straight-up spectral skeletons, just waiting to be summoned by some hellish necromancer.

...ya know, that actually kinda works.  But no.

There we go!  Also: Glow in the dark accessories.  Yes.  Yes please.

They look good in a blacklight, they're freakin' beautiful in terms of color, they're translucent...what's not to love?  Well, except that annoying bum leg. 

Alright, let's talk armor!

The skeletons are too thin to fit in the basic armor, so they gave us some clear plastic thingies to add to the bones to bulk them up.

Two of them are for the feet (since they're too thin to have holes) so they can fit on the stands.

The others clip on the forearms and shins, allowing male armor to slide on.  I didn't display the arm ones, because thankfully, if you use female armor, you don't need to use the extra pieces.

So we've got some male shin guards, armor, and a helmet, but female arm guards.  It all works pretty great, and you can move him around without items falling off - though I suppose the helmet is a little loose.  Not to an annoying degree.

DANGIT TOTALLY SKELEBONES!  Stop hijacking the review!  You're just to goddamn radical!

Back to the subject of armor: Boss Fight Studio stated that the female armor wasn't going to fit on the skeletons.  I assume this was more of a protection for them, so that people wouldn't scream and shout about it not fitting perfectly - but some of the accessories DO fit!

These were pictures I took earlier in the year, when I was swapping things like crazy.  Some of the items have to be stretched a bit, but it'd still call it a win. 

Hey, though: Why stop there?  The sky is the limit, so long as you have anything in Joe-scale!

The great thing about swapping with modern stuff, is that Boss Fight thought ahead and gave the skeletons separate trigger fingers!  Just about any gun will slide right into the hands and look realistic.  Ya know...about as realistic as skeletons with guns.  It's freakin' great. 

Now let's finish up with one final skeleton - a recent one!

This is their first named, packaged and painted skeleton (since the others are bagged and unpainted).  The Cursed Skeleton!

He's got a story, like the rest, but we'll talk more about the greater HACKS storyline when I do a review for the basic figures.  Basic thing is that they're all written as if by future folks or time travelers looking back on the time period.

He's gloriously green with neon green highlights painted in certain places (kinda hard to see in the pics).  The armor is shiny purple with silver highlights, and it looks marvelous. 
I'd show you how he looks without the armor, but it's a BITCH to get on and off, so this is what you'll get (we'll go over that more in a HACKS review).

The shield sports an awesome spooky skull design, not unlike the Spirit of Grayskull, from the old He-Man minicomics. 

This one is a great representation of what Boss Fight can do with the skeletons, beyond just making them exist (which is honestly good enough, for most things).  The paintwork is awesome, and somehow, amazingly, the way he is packaged actually HELPS the warped leg problem.

So I guess, overall, I'd call these a win!  If you can overlook the warping (or get ones without it) then they're just awesome!  They're super posable, can hold anything, and are the first skeletons of this size to work with anything you have, just about.  There may have been skeletons in this size in the past, but I doubt they were anything like this (and I'd love to hear if there were!).  Boss Fight has them up in their shop, so I wouldn't hesitate to grab a couple and try them out, if you're a fan of all things Joe-sized.