Vinylmation: Disney's Little Mermaid - Max

Last month my family and I traveled down to Orlando, FL on vacation to spend a week at Walt Disney World.  While I didn't find any Transformers while I was away, did you think someone like myself would return home without some sort of toy?  Nope!

Before leaving for vacation my wife and I had brought our daughters to the Disney store are the local mall a few times.  Each time while waiting for my wife to checkout, I had stared at these Vinylmation figures with curiosity near the checkout.  The whole blind packaged toy angle has exploded in the last few years and these Vinylmation figures fall in line here.  It seems no matter the subject the figures are based on (generic Disney, Star Wars, etc) there are 11 figures and 1 elusive chase figure to find.  At $12.95 a pop I wasn't willing to take the chance, but since I was on vacation and hadn't bought much for myself I decided to grab one of the Little Mermaid figures towards the end of our trip.

The figures come packaged in a really nice looking square box, but unlike other blind packaged toys that come bagged it's really hard to figure out which character is in the box.  I don't know if there are any production codes stamped on the box that signifies what is inside, so I just let my oldest daughter grab a random box from the tray.

We ended up buying this figure from the gift shop at our Disney Resort versus buying it from one of the parks.  The advantage of that was the shop had the regular 11 figures on display.  The Ariel, King Triton and Ursula figures were the most impressive in person.  My daughter, Olivia, of course really wanted Ariel.  So who did we end up with?

  

Max!  Prince Eric's faithful companion.  OK, we didn't get Ariel like we were hoping for, but this is still kind of a cool figure.  All of the Vinylmation figures have these translucent Mickey Mouse ears, but they are painted differently depending on the character.  Max here has a storm going on up there, most likely from the last scene of the movie where Eric steers a ship's broken post through the giant Ursula's heart.

I also noticed that Max has different sculpted hands from most of the other figures.  His are curved down and forward as opposed to the more human type hands.  The arms do rotate a full 360 degrees as does the head.

What's most impressive about these little 3 inch vinyl figures are the way they are painted.  The artist did a fantastic job of capturing the likeness of the various characters.  They even look more dimensional with some of the details.

I really dig these Vinylmation figures and I wish I would've grabbed a few more before heading home.  I haven't been back to the local Disney Store yet so I have no idea if these Little Mermaid figures are stocked there.  I've seen several of the lower tiered characters selling for $5$8 each on eBay, but Ariel was going for $20 plus.  Maybe I'll surprise Olivia w/ the Ariel figure for Christmas.  More the reason to get her a little display shelf up on her wall soon.