White Men Can Jump! Enterbay's Luka Dončić and more, updated 9 February 2024 (photo heavy) - Sun Feb 04, 2024 6:46 am
NBA Real Masterpiece Luka Dončić 1/6 Scale Limited Edition Figure Review and more...
Update on tattoos HERE.
Photo Heavy (38 photos)
Introduction
White men can jump … apparently; or at least play basketball very well. I don’t follow Basketball and I rarely get sports-based figures, much less sets, which tend to be an uneven and expensive selection, but I liked this set by Enterbay enough to give it a try, as something different. Luka Dončić is a basketball player of great renown, born 1999 in Slovenia, who played for the Slovenian Union Olimpija and then Real Madrid in Spain, before joining the Dallas Mavericks in 2018. He is already regarded as one of the greatest European basketball players of all time.
Packaging
Enterbay placed the set in a sturdy and spacious box that seems appropriate for this masterpiece (luxury?) product line. The box, which has a sort of posterized colored photograph of the player in action on the front, opens up from the right side, a little like a book cover. Beneath lies a sturdy carboard card color printed on both sides, one side with the Mavericks emblem overprinted over the player’s number (77), the other side displaying the player’s and team’s names. Below that is a sheet of black foam with a recessed rectangle holding Enterbay’s certificate of authenticity for the product. There follow two black foam treys; the top one holds the figure along with six extra swappable hands and a six-scale version of Luka’s NBA Rookie of the Year trophy; the bottom one holds the ball, stand, and two-part base. The package includes Enterbay’s After Sales Services leaflet and a sheet showing how to put together the base.
Accessories
Luka comes with a total of eight hand sculpts: a pair of basketball holding hands with magnets in the palms, a pair of hands with spread out fingers as if to catch the ball, a pair of “ok”-signalling hands, a right pointing hand, and an additional hand with the thumb and index finger nearing each other as if to hold something thin. He also gets a nice Wilson ball, with a magnet allowing it to be held in either of the specially designed magnetic hands. The only other accessory proper is Luka’s NBA Rookie of the Year trophy for 2018-19. The action figure is provided with a two-part base and two-part stand. The stand is made up of a bendable gooseneck stem and a horizontal round clamp that is to be screwed onto one end of the stem. The stem’s other end screws into a threaded hole on the main, rounded part of the base, which features the Mavericks logo and colors. Attaching the optional extension to the base, shaped so as to snap magnetically onto the main round base, produces a raised surface reminiscent of basketball court design.
Outfit
Luka comes wearing his white Dallas Mavericks uniform, number 77, consisting of top, trunks, white tights, socks, molded basketball sneakers, white arm/elbow band, and a narrow white silicone wrist band. He is also provided with a white sleeveless Mavericks hoodie and with a dark blue Mavericks t-shirt. Many of the pieces feature the Nike and NBA logos.
Sculpting
Enterbay promoted the product’s authentic likeness to Luka Dončić and the supposedly accurate height. The likeness is pretty good and the detail is quite fine, although at this point it is probably more specific to Luka’s appearance from about half a decade ago. Moreover, with more youthful heads, there is less that is characteristic and "weathered" to the face, contributing towards a somewhat overly clean appearance. The body is a good basketball body type, but I am not certain it was specifically sized for Luka’s stature. He is 201 cm tall (presumably barefoot), which corresponds to 33.5 cm in sixth scale. However, the Enterbay figure stands only about 32 cm tall, while wearing the basketball sneakers.
Paint
Enterbay’s determination to create a sixth-scale museum-like representation of Luka Dončić extends right down to replicating his tattoos, on the lower left arm, front lower right side of the torso, and the front upper right side of torso. It is a nice attention to detail, although I am dubious that anyone would really display him this way, especially considering this is an open-jointed hard plastic body that does not look particularly realistic unclothed. The eyes are nicely glossed. The painting of the hair, however, features an overstated contrast between darker bulk of the hair with the lighter hairline and facial hair or scruff. The result may throw off the likeness, making the facial hair a little too subdued in color. As a nice attempt toward greater realism, scruff is painted onto the top of the neck at the front.
Articulation
The articulation is as good as the Enterbay basketball player body would allow. As a hard plastic open-jointed body that attempts to look decent even when partly or fully uncovered, this is characterized by compromises. There are double-jointed knees, which work well but don’t look right when bent, although the hose do a decent job of covering them up. There is some limited ankle articulation, with the ankle pegs designed to slide at an angle into the Enterbay basketball sneakers, a peculiarity of certain sports figure sets. The wrist articulation is pretty good, at the price of revealing the wrist joint’s ball. The elbows are single-jointed, apparently for aesthetic purposes, limiting their range of bending to 90 degrees. The shoulders are also kept simple for aesthetic reasons, thereby limiting the motion of the upper arms. Still, by rotating them, one could approximate some greater range of movement, such as raising the arm straight up. The abdomen and chest articulation is so limited by the body’s design, that is it basically worthless.
Manipulating the body into a pose is not particularly smooth or accurate. Perhaps I am spoiled by TBLeague/Phicen seamless bodies, but this seemed like a fairly difficult experience, and I was pleasantly surprised at how decent some of the posing turned out.
Fun Factor
The variety of outfits and the gooseneck stand allow for recreating both different appearances and various action poses with this set, even with its limitations. If I had additional basketball players, I could have done more “interactive” scenes, which would have increased the fun factor further still.
Things to watch out for
Not much. The tall body naturally has a higher center of gravity, making it less stable than otherwise. When changing his shirts, I noticed that the vertical stripes on the front of the white top were damaged by the elastic band of the shorts, in part because they chose to apply them as adhesive strips rather than printing them onto the cloth. I managed to repair them with an application of Singer's Sew No More, but this was a poor decision on Enterbay’s part.
Room for Improvement
I feel that there is a very real missed opportunity here. I think Enterbay would have done better to employ the TBLeague/Phicen M36A body for its portrayal of Luka Dončić and the M36 bodies in general for basketball player figures. The difficulty of applying the tattoos to TPE seamless bodies has been surmounted with reasonable success, for example by Black Box for the “fighting version” of Conor McGregor, which utilized TBLeague/Phicen’s M30 body, if I recall correctly.
Even the stature, which Enterbay misleadingly advertised as accurate, would have been better if Luka had been given the M36A body. With it, barefoot, he stands at 34 cm, closer to his correct sixth-scale height of 33.5 cm, than using the Enterbay body even with footwear. I therefore experimented with one of my M36A bodies, which I had recolored to match paler head sculpts like Luka’s. In several instances, I created identical poses, which reveal how much better the seamless body is in both appearance and articulation/accuracy. I also picked up a third-party Luka head sculpt that is less exquisite and subtle in its paint job (and the eyes have strangely small pupils); by the time I got around to writing the review, I had also picked up a newer variant of the Mavericks uniform, allowing some side-by-side comparisons. Note that due to their unusual design, the Enterbay sneakers did not allow the seamless body to balance well, hence the need to be supported in several instances; barefoot or in the other improvised sneakers, it was perfectly stable.
Overall
Enterbay put together an impressive set, and I imagine that the same is true for their other sets from this series. One cannot have expected much more in the way of accessories. Other uniforms would have been nice, but probably too much to ask. Still, for an expensive set (over $300 in most venues), they could have done much better adopting the appropriate TBLeague/Phicen bodies, as others have done on occasion. I realize this would have been unlikely, given Enterbay’s prior practice and investment in its own bodies, but the advantages of such an alternative ought to be obvious.
As always, what do you think?
Update on tattoos HERE.
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#enterbay #nba #masterpiece #lukadoncic #male #sports #basketball #modern #review
Update on tattoos HERE.
Photo Heavy (38 photos)
Introduction
White men can jump … apparently; or at least play basketball very well. I don’t follow Basketball and I rarely get sports-based figures, much less sets, which tend to be an uneven and expensive selection, but I liked this set by Enterbay enough to give it a try, as something different. Luka Dončić is a basketball player of great renown, born 1999 in Slovenia, who played for the Slovenian Union Olimpija and then Real Madrid in Spain, before joining the Dallas Mavericks in 2018. He is already regarded as one of the greatest European basketball players of all time.
Packaging
Enterbay placed the set in a sturdy and spacious box that seems appropriate for this masterpiece (luxury?) product line. The box, which has a sort of posterized colored photograph of the player in action on the front, opens up from the right side, a little like a book cover. Beneath lies a sturdy carboard card color printed on both sides, one side with the Mavericks emblem overprinted over the player’s number (77), the other side displaying the player’s and team’s names. Below that is a sheet of black foam with a recessed rectangle holding Enterbay’s certificate of authenticity for the product. There follow two black foam treys; the top one holds the figure along with six extra swappable hands and a six-scale version of Luka’s NBA Rookie of the Year trophy; the bottom one holds the ball, stand, and two-part base. The package includes Enterbay’s After Sales Services leaflet and a sheet showing how to put together the base.
Accessories
Luka comes with a total of eight hand sculpts: a pair of basketball holding hands with magnets in the palms, a pair of hands with spread out fingers as if to catch the ball, a pair of “ok”-signalling hands, a right pointing hand, and an additional hand with the thumb and index finger nearing each other as if to hold something thin. He also gets a nice Wilson ball, with a magnet allowing it to be held in either of the specially designed magnetic hands. The only other accessory proper is Luka’s NBA Rookie of the Year trophy for 2018-19. The action figure is provided with a two-part base and two-part stand. The stand is made up of a bendable gooseneck stem and a horizontal round clamp that is to be screwed onto one end of the stem. The stem’s other end screws into a threaded hole on the main, rounded part of the base, which features the Mavericks logo and colors. Attaching the optional extension to the base, shaped so as to snap magnetically onto the main round base, produces a raised surface reminiscent of basketball court design.
Outfit
Luka comes wearing his white Dallas Mavericks uniform, number 77, consisting of top, trunks, white tights, socks, molded basketball sneakers, white arm/elbow band, and a narrow white silicone wrist band. He is also provided with a white sleeveless Mavericks hoodie and with a dark blue Mavericks t-shirt. Many of the pieces feature the Nike and NBA logos.
Sculpting
Enterbay promoted the product’s authentic likeness to Luka Dončić and the supposedly accurate height. The likeness is pretty good and the detail is quite fine, although at this point it is probably more specific to Luka’s appearance from about half a decade ago. Moreover, with more youthful heads, there is less that is characteristic and "weathered" to the face, contributing towards a somewhat overly clean appearance. The body is a good basketball body type, but I am not certain it was specifically sized for Luka’s stature. He is 201 cm tall (presumably barefoot), which corresponds to 33.5 cm in sixth scale. However, the Enterbay figure stands only about 32 cm tall, while wearing the basketball sneakers.
Paint
Enterbay’s determination to create a sixth-scale museum-like representation of Luka Dončić extends right down to replicating his tattoos, on the lower left arm, front lower right side of the torso, and the front upper right side of torso. It is a nice attention to detail, although I am dubious that anyone would really display him this way, especially considering this is an open-jointed hard plastic body that does not look particularly realistic unclothed. The eyes are nicely glossed. The painting of the hair, however, features an overstated contrast between darker bulk of the hair with the lighter hairline and facial hair or scruff. The result may throw off the likeness, making the facial hair a little too subdued in color. As a nice attempt toward greater realism, scruff is painted onto the top of the neck at the front.
Articulation
The articulation is as good as the Enterbay basketball player body would allow. As a hard plastic open-jointed body that attempts to look decent even when partly or fully uncovered, this is characterized by compromises. There are double-jointed knees, which work well but don’t look right when bent, although the hose do a decent job of covering them up. There is some limited ankle articulation, with the ankle pegs designed to slide at an angle into the Enterbay basketball sneakers, a peculiarity of certain sports figure sets. The wrist articulation is pretty good, at the price of revealing the wrist joint’s ball. The elbows are single-jointed, apparently for aesthetic purposes, limiting their range of bending to 90 degrees. The shoulders are also kept simple for aesthetic reasons, thereby limiting the motion of the upper arms. Still, by rotating them, one could approximate some greater range of movement, such as raising the arm straight up. The abdomen and chest articulation is so limited by the body’s design, that is it basically worthless.
Manipulating the body into a pose is not particularly smooth or accurate. Perhaps I am spoiled by TBLeague/Phicen seamless bodies, but this seemed like a fairly difficult experience, and I was pleasantly surprised at how decent some of the posing turned out.
Fun Factor
The variety of outfits and the gooseneck stand allow for recreating both different appearances and various action poses with this set, even with its limitations. If I had additional basketball players, I could have done more “interactive” scenes, which would have increased the fun factor further still.
Things to watch out for
Not much. The tall body naturally has a higher center of gravity, making it less stable than otherwise. When changing his shirts, I noticed that the vertical stripes on the front of the white top were damaged by the elastic band of the shorts, in part because they chose to apply them as adhesive strips rather than printing them onto the cloth. I managed to repair them with an application of Singer's Sew No More, but this was a poor decision on Enterbay’s part.
Room for Improvement
I feel that there is a very real missed opportunity here. I think Enterbay would have done better to employ the TBLeague/Phicen M36A body for its portrayal of Luka Dončić and the M36 bodies in general for basketball player figures. The difficulty of applying the tattoos to TPE seamless bodies has been surmounted with reasonable success, for example by Black Box for the “fighting version” of Conor McGregor, which utilized TBLeague/Phicen’s M30 body, if I recall correctly.
Even the stature, which Enterbay misleadingly advertised as accurate, would have been better if Luka had been given the M36A body. With it, barefoot, he stands at 34 cm, closer to his correct sixth-scale height of 33.5 cm, than using the Enterbay body even with footwear. I therefore experimented with one of my M36A bodies, which I had recolored to match paler head sculpts like Luka’s. In several instances, I created identical poses, which reveal how much better the seamless body is in both appearance and articulation/accuracy. I also picked up a third-party Luka head sculpt that is less exquisite and subtle in its paint job (and the eyes have strangely small pupils); by the time I got around to writing the review, I had also picked up a newer variant of the Mavericks uniform, allowing some side-by-side comparisons. Note that due to their unusual design, the Enterbay sneakers did not allow the seamless body to balance well, hence the need to be supported in several instances; barefoot or in the other improvised sneakers, it was perfectly stable.
Overall
Enterbay put together an impressive set, and I imagine that the same is true for their other sets from this series. One cannot have expected much more in the way of accessories. Other uniforms would have been nice, but probably too much to ask. Still, for an expensive set (over $300 in most venues), they could have done much better adopting the appropriate TBLeague/Phicen bodies, as others have done on occasion. I realize this would have been unlikely, given Enterbay’s prior practice and investment in its own bodies, but the advantages of such an alternative ought to be obvious.
As always, what do you think?
Update on tattoos HERE.
Other recent or relevant reviews
Hot Toys Star Wars Cobb Vanth Review
Hot Toys Star Wars Luke Skywalker Bespin Review and Fun
Hot Toys Star Wars Return of the Jedi Scout Trooper and Speeder Bike
Hot Toys Star Wars Rogue One Assault Tank Commander
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Jiaou Doll Male Bodies
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SooSoo Toys Mr Butcher
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Hot Toys Star Wars Return of the Jedi Stormtrooper
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HH HY Rome Centurion
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JX Toys Peggy Carter
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Hasbro Star Wars Rogue One Imperial Combat Assault Tank
Hasbro Star Wars imperials 2019
Hasbro Star Wars Jabba's Tatooine Skiff
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Sideshow Jack Burton
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TBLeague Spartan Goddess of War
AR Toys Hellman
Dragon Men in Black 3 Agent K 1969
#enterbay #nba #masterpiece #lukadoncic #male #sports #basketball #modern #review
