Retro Toy Week: Art Asylum Bruce Lee!

Where are my damn Underworld CD's? I found the live one last week...anyway.

Why the hell is this in storage? Must've missed putting him back out when I moved. Art Asylum did a Bruce Lee figure assortment back in...some year. There's no date on Bruce, although one foot is stamped TM & Copyright Bruce Lee Estate, which would be a helluva imprint on some chump's face.

Three things about this figure: the head may be just a smidge oversized, but that may either be accurate, or to better display the incredible head sculpt. Conversely, Bruce's feet seem somewhat tiny, although I'm not a Lee expert, so maybe he did have dainty feet, and they were obviously still big enough to kick the hell out of you. Three, this figure has the weirdest damn action figure crotch I've personally ever seen.

Isn't that weird? It's...oblong. It does get him into a fairly natural looking split, though. The articulation all looks pretty natural, and besides the nunchuks, I think Bruce came with another set of hands, maybe a staff, and a little plastic Art Asylum coin. (A lot of their early Star Trek, Enterprise, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon figures came with those. Rumor was you could trade them for some kind of exclusive, but I don't know if that ever happened.)

This is off memory, but I think some other company might've had the Enter the Dragon license: I remember a Han figure on the pegs of Toys R Us for some time. Besides the yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death, Art Asylum also did a fantasy version of Bruce called Immortal Dragon, a sort of plastic 'what if Bruce Lee had filmed a historical kung-fu movie?'

The yellow jumpsuit might run you a bit. Heck, so might the Immortal Dragon or the others, but there are other Bruce Lee's out there. Shop it around! Meanwhile, I'm positive Bruce is going to fight his way back onto my shelves here. (And he didn't linger in storage too long, I had used him briefly in a tryout strip some time back!)