Peri & Sil

So everyone wants to know WHY PERI? Everyone who collects the Doctor Who toys wants them to make figures based on classic companions, but the first one they make is Peri. She's well known, but certainly not the most popular of the companions. The fandom is pretty split about her, with some enjoying her camp appeal and others hating her for being a poorly accented, shrill, American who wears really tacky spandex clothing and bikinis in an attempt to sex up Doctor Who. I'm the former camp. I think the fact that she's a poorly accented, shrill, American who wears really tacky spandex clothing and bikinis in an attempt to sex up Doctor Who is fricking hilarious, and I will go out of my way to buy any variants they make of this figure in the "tarted up" costumes that John Nathan Turner (the executive producer that all the actors point out had horrible fashion sense, but insisted on choosing the costumes for the main characters) put her in. Seriously, they made a point to put her in a braless spandex costume then have her run down the street.

And they made her the first companion in the Classic Doctor Who line. And they packaged her with Sil from the Vengance on Varos story. Sil's basically a corrupt buisiness man from a race of amphibious lizard-fish things. The sculpt is very good, and it better be, since it has no articulation at all, making it essentially an in-scale statue. This is the kind of crap they did in the 80's with characters like Snarf from Thundercats. As you can see from his expression, Sil's rather a lacivious character. I think this is from the scene when the bad guys are using a transmogrification ray to forcibly turn Peri and another girl into a bird and a lizard respectively. As the girls watch in horror they start growing feathers and scales. Sil was watching and taunting them, making vaguely sexual remarks about how they would look. So yeah, he was that kind of character.

For a static piece of plastic, it's okay. But at the very least I wish he had shoulder joints so you could moves his arms up and down. Is that too much to ask for? I think it says something that I'm far more impressed by the aquatic tank that Sil is mean to rest atop of. It to is a sculpted piece with no moving parts, but the paint application for the water and the sculpted bubbles which give the illussion of a bubbling tank are done really well. Seriously, most impressive part of this set. (Which is sad in so many ways.)

The detail on this tank is just amazing.

So with the acquisition of Peri, I now have four of the Doctor's female companions. (As you can see, Peri looks the worst out of them. Her crotch looks too much like a T-joint and the way her costume is depicted looks horrible. Although that might just be because it's screen accurate. I watched a clip of Vengance on Varos and holy crap that outfit is painful to look at, even if it's meant to display Nicola Bryant's... uh... oh screw innuendo, it's a skin tight shirt meant to show off her boobs. Do you think it's a coincidence that she's the first action figure in this line to have visible cleavage?