Random minifig of the day: sh0668

The Clone Troopers of 2020 Lego Marvel sets.

I've seen these guys running around Portland

@Pugs said:
"You know, these AIM minifigures are actually pretty cool once you forget how many Lego spammed in the 2020 Marvel sets"

But that's kind of by necessity, isn't it? Nameless, faceless goons aren't much of a threat if there's only two of them. TMNT did the same thing, with Foot Soldiers, both for the animated series and (to a lesser extent) the live-action film.

Yeah I know this is based on the video game where they’re like a paramilitary group or something (I never actually played it) but damn I wish they’d done something closer to the classic beekeeper look. Is it kinda goofy looking? Sure, but so is MODOK and you made him the main villain of the game. You can’t do a comic book adaption and not embrace at least a little bit of the inherent goofiness or the whole thing falls apart

AIM-scientists and HYDRA-soldiers despise each other, probably because they lead depressingly similar lives - they mostly exist as fodder to sometimes briefly deter rampaging superheroes, or to bicker among themselves which of their uniforms are dumber. Some of them are pretty decent at fighting, because they were trained by Taskmaster - but "being taught how to kick by a guy who's seen a lot of Kung-Fu movies" doesn't count for much when the thing you're trying to kick is a giant green rage-monster.

In recent years, we've seen some individual AIM-operatives breaking out and being mmmmoderately more succesful, suggesting that they work on a variation of the Dr. McNinja Inverse Ninja Theory: one grunt is a (mid-)boss, a dozen grunts count as free XP.

@Brickalili said:
"Yeah I know this is based on the video game where they’re like a paramilitary group or something (I never actually played it) but damn I wish they’d done something closer to the classic beekeeper look. Is it kinda goofy looking? Sure, but so is MODOK and you made him the main villain of the game. You can’t do a comic book adaption and not embrace at least a little bit of the inherent goofiness or the whole thing falls apart "

I agree. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed the 4+ line more than the actual MCU line, because it hugely favoured the classic comic-designs in all of their goofiness. Minifigures are already very stylised, so translating a design from the comic-book pages to live-action realism to tiny noseless claw-dudes feels like one step too many.

@Crux said:"In recent years, we've seen some individual AIM-operatives breaking out and being mmmmoderately more succesful, suggesting that they work on a variation of the Dr. McNinja Inverse Ninja Theory: one grunt is a (mid-)boss, a dozen grunts count as free XP."

Known on TV Tropes as Conservation of Ninjutsu: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu

Looking at this guy... if I didn't know he was from Marvel, I'd assume he was from an in-house theme, and wearing a sleeveless shirt and a mask over his yellow face. Even *knowing* that he's from Marvel, I'm still having trouble reading those yellow parts as anything other than 'normal minifigure skin'. I assume in the actual Marvel context he's wearing a full-body yellow hazard suit or something; but I'm just too accustomed to yellow parts on minifigures being their skin colour that even in this context it doesn't make sense to me as anything else...!

The head piece / print of this guy would work really well for a custom yellow UFO droid, to go along with the existing red and blue ones. Just need to find a fitting torso print.

@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"Looking at this guy... if I didn't know he was from Marvel, I'd assume he was from an in-house theme, and wearing a sleeveless shirt and a mask over his yellow face. Even *knowing* that he's from Marvel, I'm still having trouble reading those yellow parts as anything other than 'normal minifigure skin'. I assume in the actual Marvel context he's wearing a full-body yellow hazard suit or something; but I'm just too accustomed to yellow parts on minifigures being their skin colour that even in this context it doesn't make sense to me as anything else...!"

I think it's even keetorange and not yellow, but I can't not see it as minifigure skin either.