Posted in: Movies | Tagged: collectibles, Comics, Daryl with Chopper, entertainment, lego, McFarlane Toys, The Governor's Rooms, The Walking Dead, tv

Building The Walking Dead 'Daryl With Chopper' Set From MacFarlane Toys Takes Survival Skills

By Joshua Stone

One of the things I was most excited about seeing at San Diego Comic-Con this year were The Walking Dead building sets from McFarlane Toys. This week two of those sets came out and are exclusively available through Toys R' Us. Since I just happened to be in the area of one of their store I decided to go in for a visit. I was quite surprised when the sets jumped into my cart and asked me to take them home. The two sets are Daryl With Chopper, priced at $19.99 with 154 pieces, and The Governor's Room, priced at $29.99 with 292 pieces. The sets are made for ages 12 plus. I decided to build the cheaper set first, since I figured if the set left something to be desired, I could at least return the more expensive one.

Daryl With Chopper comes with what McFarlane has decided are their minifigures. Those familiar with Lego know the Lego minifigures are made to look like people or aliens or whatever the theme of the set is, but they are still Lego building bricks. They are interchangeable and can be used in ways only limited by one's imagination. The McFarlane minifigures are made to be photo realistic and are not interchangeable and allow for no real use of imagination. Their are two minifigures in this set, Daryl Dixon and a Walker. The Walker looks ok, but the Daryl figure looks like someone used a magnifying glass to melt one of his ears. The body pieces on the figures connect using plastic/rubber pegs pushed into holes. At times the pieces required a good amount of force.

The chopper part of the set is made to look like a real motorcycle, as opposed to a motorcycle made out of building bricks. Once you start building the chopper, don't think about taking it apart, especially the wheels. Once they're locked into place there is no reasonable way to take them apart. In putting the chopper together some of the instructions given were a little small. I would like to remind McFarlane Toys that their target audience for these sets are the Adult Collectors and that some of us don't see as well as we used to.

The engine on the chopper was a real PITA (pain in the arse). The engine has a small hole that goes through it at the top to allow pieces to be connected to both sides of the engine. In this case the pieces are the kickstand and the tail pipe. The problem with this is to properly secure one of the pieces yo u have to push it all the way through. This makes it rather difficult to connect the other piece. At one point it felt like I was part of a Three Stooges film. I would get one piece connected and then put the other piece in only to push the first one out. This went on for a little while until I decided the chopper could be without the kickstand as it actually had no functionality to it. To get the chopper to stay standing up there is a hole on one of the tires that connects to a square brick with a peg that you place in the middle of the road.

Trying to place Daryl on the chopper turned into a real adventure. I tried to get Daryl on with his hands on the handlebars as it looks like on the pictures on the box. It seems like Daryl's hands were only meant to be near the handlebars, well in this case only one of the handlebars, as one broke off completely. Every Lego instruction booklet includes a customer service phone number, toll free, that you can call if there is a piece is missing from the set or if a piece were to break. They are very responsive at this number and are quick to send out replacement pieces. There was no such number in the instruction booklet to contact McFarlane Toys. I would suggest to McFarlane Toys if they want to compete with the best (and Lego is the best) you start by learning from Lego on their customer service model. In all it took me 50 minutes to build Daryl and the chopper. This did not make for a happy me.

Next I began to build the road, which was the first time I actually was interacting with the building bricks themselves. These pieces can be used with Lego bricks. My first suggestion for building this set would be to make sure you are 100% certain you know where the interior bricks are going to go before placing them as they are very difficult to take off.

To give the set the look of the television show there are weeds of various sizes included that you are to place around the set. The problem is the entire weed is made of rubber, including the pegs at the bottom. The rubber pegs are supposed to fit into plastic holes at the top of the bricks. This doesn't always work so well. Sometimes the rubber peg isn't perfectly round so It doesn't fit into the hole. Also, if you move a weed sometimes the peg's shape gets changed from squeezing it in, so it no longer fits. The weeds various heights, which adds to the realistic look of the set, however it is a pain in the butt if you decide to add a weed close to another one. I would add one and knock two others out of their holes. In the end I only used a little more than half of the 33 weeds that were included in the set. In all it took 25 minutes to make the highway, which is only 5 square inches, so not too big, which is ok if you don't have much space to display a set like this.

In the end, if we as Adult Collectors want building sets like The Walking Dead, then we know we have to hope that some company other than Lego will produce them, because Lego said, when they decided not make a Firefly set as petitioned as part of their Lego Ideas program, "LEGO produces toys for children. Therefore all LEGO products, regardless of age target, must be content-appropriate for this core audience." So since I think we can all agree that The Walking Dead does not fit into what would be deemed content appropriate for children then we have to rely on companies like McFarlane Toys to make certain sets, and for this I thank McFarlane Toys.

However, while this is not a set Lego would ever make and in that way McFarlane Toys is not competing with Lego, they have to remember that they are still competing with Lego really as Lego is the standard bearer for brick-building sets. Sadly, based on first impressions, McFarlane Toys and the Daryl With Chopper set fall well short of those standards. Now where did I leave that receipt.

Further musings of Joshua Stone can be read on Twitter @1NerdyOne.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!