Marvel Legends is the name of a toyline initially created by Toy Biz in 2002, before being taken over by Hasbro in 2006.
The line is a 6-inch scale line that features characters from Marvel comics, films, TV shows and video games. A very wide-ranging line, the figures set the standard for 6-inch action figures. Characters both A-list and obscure get figures, and most waves include a "Build-A-Figure" that comes in pieces with figures in a wave, which is also generally how waves are named if there is no reasonable alternative, such as if it is focused on a particular piece of media.
An element of the line that began in 2021 is Haslab, a crowdfunding initiative focused on more expensive figures.
Tropes applying to Marvel Legends include:
- Action Dad: Reed Richards in the Toy Biz Fantastic Four box set, Peter Parker from the Renew Your Vows 2-pack and Peter B. Parker from the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse wave.
- An Ice Person: Iceman has been released several times including the Colossus wave and the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends three-pack.
- Arm Cannon: Deluxe Cyborg Spider-Woman has a huge gatling gun arm.
- Art-Shifted Sequel: The Hasbro figures are more realistically proportioned than the Toy Biz ones. Toy Biz figures were more exaggerated and often had gangly limbs, while Hasbro's are more realistic in terms of physique and faces.
- Artificial Limbs: Mostly limited to Bucky Barnes and Nebula, though Misty Knight has also received a figure.
- Badass Cape: Hasbro likes to really play up the size of a cape when making one. Unfortunately, because they're plastic, this means that while the character looks badass with the cape... it usually means they can't be posed that well, making them look much less badass.
- Battle Couple: Hasbro has invoked this on a few occasions.
- The "Dark Phoenix 2-Pack" has Cyclops and Jean in her Dark Phoenix costume (back when that was Jean, before it was retconned).
- The "Love Triangle 3-Pack" that features Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine in their Jim Lee designs.
- The House of X wave once again played into the X-trio, and also at a time when the comics implied they were in a polyamorous relationship.
- The "Beyond Earth's Mightiest Heroes" subline featured a new Black Widow and Bucky Cap.
- The Ch'od wave includes Cyclops and Emma Frost in their Astonishing X-Men designs, when they were a couple.
- The Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows 2-pack features Spider-Man and Mary Jane as Spinneret.
- The Venompool wave and the Across the Spider-Verse waves feature Miles and Gwen, who are sometimes in a relationship or at least interested in each other.
- BFG: Cable as expected comes with a huge gun that's wider than some figures themselves.
- Brown Bag Mask: The Bombastic Bag-Man got his own figure in 2022.
- Combat Tentacles: A Doctor Octopus figure in the Spider-Man 2 movie line had a gimmick where you push a switch on his back, and the top two tentacles would move downwards, while the claws on the bottom tentacles would close. Later Doc Ock figures would have bendable or static tentacles with poseable or interchangeable claw arms that can grab onto a figure's arm, wrist or leg.
- Early Instalment Weirdness:
- The line wouldn't nail down its engineering formula until after the first few waves. This meant that despite Marvel Legends later becoming famous for its immensely posable figures, some early entries like Toad, Doctor Octopus, the Red Skull, Goliath and movie Daredevil were noticeably lacking in the articulation department. Some of the larger characters like Hulk and The Thing also came with bendable fingers, a gimmick that was quickly discarded.
- The early figures came packaged with detailed, diorama-like display bases, usually depicting some sort of recognizable location or vehicle from the Marvel Universe (such as Ghost Rider's motorcycle, a destroyed Sentinel, or part of Doctor Doom's castle). The display bases were eventually phased out in favour of the Build-A-Figure concept, wherein each toy in a wave would come packaged with a piece needed to complete a special bonus figure.
- The ToyBiz-era figures also usually included a comic book featuring the character in question, something that Hasbro discarded when they took over the license.
- One of the most striking differences was the general lack of movie characters in the early years of the line. While a select few films like Blade II, The Punisher and the aforementioned Daredevil received a single Marvel Legends figure each, the general trend was for ToyBiz to do separate movie lines that featured the same sculpt and articulation style used in Legends, but without actually labelling them as such. This meant that the big Marvel movies of the early 2000s like Spider-Man 2, X2: X-Men United, Hulk and Fantastic Four did not have any presence in Marvel Legends, with the line instead focusing almost exclusively on comic book figures. When Hasbro took over the line in 2007, they did some Marvel Legends figures for X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3 and The Incredible Hulk, but generally stuck to ToyBiz's strategy of focusing on comic figures instead. However, starting with Iron Man 3 in 2013, they completely threw out that idea and began integrating characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with each subsequent MCU movie getting its own dedicated Marvel Legends wave.
- As Marvel Legends was originally a spin-off of the Spider-Man Classics line, characters from the Spider-Man franchise were also noticeably absent from Legends during the ToyBiz days. Only Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Spider-Woman (both Julia and Anya), The Kingpin and Spidey himself were featured in Legends under ToyBiz, while a few other villains like Black Cat, Carnage, Kraven the Hunter, Electro, the Lizard, the Vulture, the Rhino and Venom were included in box sets. Once the license transferred to Hasbro, Spider-Man characters began appearing in the series far more regularly.
- The 2002 Spider-Man movie line had super-articulated figures of Spider-Man and Green Goblin, however other characters, such as Norman Osborn, Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker and J. Jonah Jameson, and some variants of Spidey and Goblin, had very limited articulation. For Spider-Man 2 and 3, all of the figures were super-articulated, including Mary Jane.
- ToyBiz's line included "Chase Variants" of figures, which usually featured a different head, color scheme or some other change. While these were often just the same character with a repainted outfit, these variants were sometimes brand new characters built on the same body, such as Captain Marvel's variant being his son Genis-Vell, or the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman's variant being Julia Carpenter. Hasbro continued this idea for a few years, but dropped it around 2014.
- The early MCU figures up until 2016 had very off-model faces. Notable examples are Electro from the Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy. Hasbro later started using face scan technology on their figures.
- Electric Black Guy: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 version of Electro got a figure. Storm and Miles Morales also have various figures in the line.
- Evil Mask: Green Goblin from Spider-Man: No Way Home comes with his original mask from Spider-Man and the bridge scene in No Way Home.
- Evil Red Head: Zombie Scarlet Witch and Dark Phoenix.
- Flipping the Bird: Marvel Legends has figures that featured individual finger articulation are able to flip the bird, such as The Thing from the Legendary Riders wave, Super-Poseable Spider-Man from Spider-Man 2, the three gigantic Haslab figures (Galactus, Sentinel and the upcoming Giant-Man), Spider-Hulk from Spider-Man Classics, Savage Dragon from Legendary Comic Book Heroes, Rhino from the Fearsome Foes box set, the Blob Build-A-Figure and Icons Wolverine.
- Henshin Hero: The Japanese Spider-Man got a figure in 2022, as part of Spider-Man's 60th anniversary.
- Heroic Dog: Cosmo the Space Dog got a Build-A-Figure in 2023.
- Later Instalment Weirdness: Mainline figures from 2022 to late 2023 feature plastic-free packaging, which also omits windows as part of an initiative to reduce plastic use. Prior to 2022, all of Hasbro's mainline packaging had the same box design. Hasbro later announced they'd do away with this in favour of recyclable plastic due to backlash.
- LEGO Body Parts: The Wrestler Spider-Man from the Spider-Man movie series, Walgreens Exclusive Mr. Fantastic and the Retro Card Mr. Fantastic have swappable parts.
- Mooks: The Hydra Agents, AIM Troopers, Hand Ninjas and Skrulls all got figures. The Ultron figures can also count as these.
- Named by the Adaptation: With movie-based figures, sometimes the figure will use a superhero codename that was not used in the work itself.
- The Clint Barton figure released as part of the Avengers: Endgame wave was called Ronin, a name that wasn't actually used in the movie itself, despite the costume clearly being based on Ronin. Eventually, the name was applied retroactively.
- The Monica Rambeau released as part of the Totally Awesome Hulk wave calls her Photon, a past codename of the comic book Monica's. In The Marvels (2023) itself, she never uses a codename and Photon remains her mother's old codename from her pilot days.
- Not Quite Starring: Some of the movie figures have had rather off-model likenesses of the actors, such as Jean Grey from X-Men: The Last Stand, Mary Jane from Spider-Man 2, Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy, Ms. Marvel from The Marvels, Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy and all versions of Yelena Belova from the MCU.
- Official Cosplay Gear: Also in the line are several replicas of items featured in the Marvel Universe, such as Iron Man's Helmet, Captain America's Shield, Mjolnir, Magneto's helmet, Spider-Man's mask, the Tesseract cube and the Infinity Gauntlet, all at a premium price however they are very high-quality and well made.
- Redhead In Green: Marvel Girl from the Tri-Sentinel Build-A-Figure, and the retro card Gwen Stacy figure comes with an interchangeable Mary Jane Watson head.
- Shoddy Knockoff Product: There are knockoff Legends out in the wild. Notable examples include "Haowan: Union Legend", "Avcngcrs: Union Legend", "Classic Avcngcrs Endgame 4" and "Avengers: Infinity War 5".
- Super-Deformed: The Wolverine figure included in the Mojo 4-pack.
- Superhero Team Uniform:
- The Fantastic Four are always released in the same wave, and always with matching outfits.
- The X-Men have had the original five released as a 5-pack with their matching uniforms, while the famous Uncanny X-Men #275 costumes were also released across two 3-packs and a single release for Wolverine.
- "Super Sentai" Stance: Most figures (with the exceptions of the lesser articulated figures) can easily pull these off
◊. - The Remake: The first wave of Toy Biz figures (Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk and Toad) were remade by Hasbro to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Marvel Legends line, albeit in Hasbro's style with different accessories. They even included backdrops meant to emulate the diorama pieces the Toy Biz figures came with.
- Tamer and Chaster: As a general rule, Hasbro's figures will be less sexualised than other action figure lines and also less than some comic book art featuring the characters in question, even when the figure is implicitly based on one artist's style.
- Wolverine Publicity: Ironically, Wolverine himself is kept to the X-Men-focused waves, so he's actually not a big example of this. No, the big example is Iron Man, who is included as often as possible with endless armour variations. It got to the point that two Iron Man characters (AI Tony and Civil Warrior) were included in the wave for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, while Katy, a key supporting character from the film, was instead made a store exclusivenote
