Misfit Robot Daydream: Bela Lugosi as Dracula 8 Inch Retro Action Figure

Bela Lugosi as Dracula 8 Inch Retro Action Figure - Mego Corporation (2018)

In 2018, new action figures from Mego hit the store shelves for the first time in 35 years! Mego was the king of action figures in the 1970s, but they didn't make the adjustment to the rapidly changing toy market in the '80s, and went out of business in 1983. But now Mego president Marty Abrams has brought his company back, with an exclusive deal with Target stores, and new waves of figures are on sale now. The second wave of figures is hitting Target stores and their website as I write this. The first wave of figures featured characters from Star Trek, DC Comics, and various other characters from TV, movies, and music. The best of that bunch, in my opinion, was this one: Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

"The light!"

This is not the Universal Monsters Dracula, rather, this is a figure licensed from the Bela Lugosi estate, and features a great likeness of the actor. There have been many figures of Dracula made over the years, but hardly any of them have had the rights to Bela Lugosi's likeness. As a result, we've gotten a lot of "generic" Draculas, that look like the character more or less, but lack the distinct facial features that make Lugosi's Dracula so special. I'm a big Bela Lugosi fan, and I'm really excited to finally have a figure that actually looks like him. Mego have really hit it out of the park with this one, too. The facial sculpt is superb, the paint job is great, the costume is really, really nice. This figure is just a much higher quality than what I would normally expect in an 8 inch retro figure.

Bela Lugosi

It's not totally perfect though. One issue that a lot of the Bela Lugosi figures have is mismatched arms or hands. When you buy the figure in the package, his hands and arms are covered by his cape. But when folks have been bringing them home and opening them up, some people have found two right hands, or two left hands, or sometimes even two of the same arm, so that the elbow will bend in the wrong direction. I read about this online at the Mego Museum, and when I opened my figure up, sure enough, I had this problem, too. My figure has two left hands. Weirdly enough, it doesn't bother me, though. It almost makes him seem more of an unnatural or supernatural being, like two left hands is part of his vampire curse.

Two Left Hands!

Wave 2 of the new Mego figures are hitting the stores now, and there is a new Frankenstein figure in that wave, hopefully I will be picking that up soon, and when I do I'll try show it off this month for the Countdown to Halloween. In the past, I've tried to post every day for the Countdown, but that's not happening this month, I just don't have as much spare time to blog as I used to. But I've got a total of 8 Halloween TV show reviews that are already written and uploaded to the blog, which are scheduled to go online about every 4 days or so. And in between, I'll be snapping photos of some of my monster action figures, and posting reviews of them as I go along. So hopefully I'll have something new every couple of days. And in the meantime please click on the link to the Countdown to Halloween and check out all of the other blogs that are participating this year!