Rick Rude LJN Figure

[jammer311]

Just curious, but does anyone know why the Rick Rude LJN figure was created with that horrible pose?? It made it impossible to use as a young child playing with it. All he could do is drop kicks and a headbutt. I figured the pose they would have gave him is the same one they gave to Savage cause then Rude could do the Rude Awakening at least.

But does anyone know why Rude was given such a horrible pose??

[hawkwarrior]

Well, I can only speculate. Many of the last LJN figures were odd in one way or another. Maybe it is similar neglect to what we are seeing with Jakks now that they are at the end of their run.

Not only was the Rick Rude posed badly and poorly sculpted (he had virtually no muscle tone) but it was too tall.

Big Bossman was also tall. He was as tall as Andre The Giant actually.

The Warlord was not fully painted. He had short trunks where it should have been tights.

Add to that, the figures that were advertised but never produced and it looks a lot like today's Jakks.

[greenmist]

It was the end of the line so maybe LJN had just ran out of ideas. At least it was a unique pose that no other LJN wrestling figure had. Another speculation is since Rude did have the Intercontinental title for a few months, maybe his fingers are posed that way because he is supposed to be gripping the belt.

[GoldenHulk]

The Rick Rude figure was the biggest LJN letdown for me. The pose was bad for play, and a Rick Rude figure without ripped abs and muscle definition is no Rick Rude figure at all! They picked the most boring tights design they could, too! I was really looking forward to that thing when I saw it was coming out, then I was so disappointed when I got it.
(This was when they were at the end of the line and LJN figures were impossible to find in stores in the United States. I had to order it from a magazine ad sight unseen and pay way through the nose to get it.)

[greenmist]

Oct 31, 2009 1:05:45 GMT -5 GoldenHulk said:

They picked the most boring tights design they could, too!

Look at the bright side. At least they did not keep the design of the prototype: plain green tights with plain white boots. That would have been much worse.

[romafan87]

Oct 31, 2009 9:36:54 GMT -5 greenmist said:

Oct 31, 2009 1:05:45 GMT -5 GoldenHulk said:

They picked the most boring tights design they could, too!

Look at the bright side. At least they did not keep the design of the prototype: plain green tights with plain white boots. That would have been much worse.

I agree. That would have been even worse. Although, my Rude, and many others that I have seen, has a pinkish skin tone that does not show up on the prototype.

[greenmist]

Mine also has that pinkish skin tone. Maybe that was their (ill fated) attempt at giving Rude a bit of a tan.

[GoldenHulk]

I've got two of them: one loose and one MOC (signed by Rude himself), and they both have that weird skin tone, too.

Can you imagine the outcry against LJN if toy collector's had the internet back in the 80s? Rude was as tall as Andre, Savage had the wrong color knee pads, Muraco was in red trunks that he never wore, and there was a Ted Arcidi figure but we never got a Lanny Poffo! They would've been trashed worse than Jakks!

[redypiper]

Nov 3, 2009 9:29:26 GMT -5 GoldenHulk said:

I've got two of them: one loose and one MOC (signed by Rude himself), and they both have that weird skin tone, too.

Can you imagine the outcry against LJN if toy collector's had the internet back in the 80s? Rude was as tall as Andre, Savage had the wrong color knee pads, Muraco was in red trunks that he never wore, and there was a Ted Arcidi figure but we never got a Lanny Poffo! They would've been trashed worse than Jakks!

yep, not to mention piper in red wtf???

[greenmist]

The Rude LJN was as tall as Andre only because the Andre figure was made with his knees bent while Rude was standing up straight. Savage did wear pink kneepads a few times early in his WWF career. By the time his LJN was released, he only wore yellow kneepads. The problem with LJN is that they used random stock photos of the wrestlers to make the figures. These photos were taken of the wrestlers about a year and a half before the figures were made so some wrestlers used different ring attire briefly. By the time the figures got released a year or so later, the wrestlers had changed their ring attire. Another example is Muraco. He mostly wore black or blue trunks. Very rarely but once in a while, he would wear red trunks. LJN probably had a random stock photo of that and they made his figure based on it. Piper is another example. We all remember Piper wearing blue trunks. However, in early 1984 he did wear red trunks a few times. Piper wore red trunks in his match against Ivan Putski, which took place on 5/21/84 at MSG. The match was shown the following month on the June 12th episode of TNT.

[GoldenHulk]

Yes, I know they did wear those colors a time or two. The thing is, as you mentioned, it was rare and the fact that LJN used those colors on the figures shows they didn't put a lot of research into the process. My post was an example of the "fun" today's Jakks collectors would have had with the LJN line. Rick Rude is out of scale, whether Andre is in a knees bent position or not. Paul Orndorff is even worse. Compare those figures to One Man Gang and it's not even funny how out-of-scale the LJN figures could be. I still loved them when I was a kid and it didn't bother me AS much then (although I sure did notice, and the paints did come out to "fix" some of the color choices, fortunately not on any of the more valuable figures), but in hindsight I sure would have liked some more accuracy.

[greenmist]

I agree with you about Orndorff. They made his boots so HUGE they looked odd. They gave him no kneepads, but that is excuseable because in '84 there were times he did not wear them. But by the time his figure got released in '86 he wore them all the time so the figure looked outdated. Again they most certainly used a stock photo of him from '84. Some LJN mistakes that were just completely wrong include giving Cowboy Bob Orton green kneepads when he only wore black ones and the regular skin tone they gave King Kong Bundy & Nikolai Volkoff when both really should have been given a pale skin tone. They would have looked a lot better pale. I'm surprised that the WWF did not have a rep or quality control to veto some of the mistakes LJN went with.

[mad2009]

How much is Rude worth loose??

[WCWA Online]

My favorite LJN screw up was Brutus Beefcake, who looked NOTHING like Beefcake, at all.

Miss Elizabeth also had a pretty bad facial resemblance, and for whatever reason had a cloth skirt when NO ONE in the line got cloth anything except Piper's kilt (which ruined figures like Terry Funk that were perminantly wearing their entrance attire)

[ICHIBAN 一番]

Nov 5, 2009 15:59:59 GMT -5 mad2009 said:

How much is Rude worth loose??

about £15