Day of the Dead Bub

For the longest time, it seemed like George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead got a bad rap. It was often regarded as the worst of his “Dead Trilogy”, while I always considered it the best! I remember seeing it when it came out and I was a just a wee lad of 10 years old. It’s impression on me was long lasting. The tagline read “The Darkest Day of Horror The World Has Ever Known” and it wasn’t fooling. There is very little about this movie that detracts from it’s grim reality. The budget constraints do not show and there is no misplaced slapstick zombie comedy here. Although the final product was chopped down from a much larger vision, I still feel that the end result was the quintessential zombie movie.

I don’t know if it was a result of the disappointing Land Of The Dead, followed by the downright dreadful Diary Of The Dead, but somewhere along the line, this movie seems to have taken it’s rightful place among the zombie classics and gotten the respect it deserves. And of course, with respect comes…action figures!

And of course, if you’re going to make action figures from a zombie movie, you’d better make zombies and the pivotal zombie character of Day of the Dead was “Bub”, a sort of hero zombie who was somewhat “domesticated” by the crazy Dr. Logan. I never minded this as it actually makes a bit of sense, whereas I can’t stand the “I just got smart for no good reason” zombies of Land of the Dead. Check out the scene below that someone uploaded to see what I mean.

So when Amok Time decided to make some figures from the movie, Bub was the obvious place to start. This figure stands 7″ tall and comes with it’s own display base and a variety of accessories (the origins of which you just watched). The sculpt and paint on it is great. His clothing looks very worn and authentic. The outer jacket is actually a separately molded piece of rubber. It looks like you could actually remove it if you snapped out the arms. It would look awful if you did, but it’s a nice touch that adds detail and depth to the figure.

The two part plastic base consists of a floor and wall that nicely replicates Bub’s environment in the movie. The only thing missing is a table. Two plastic chains keep Bub in check and connect to a latch on the back of his neck. Unfortunately, only one side of the chains can be removed from the wall, so Bub is permanently hooked up. I’m not sure why both sides weren’t made to be removed as it would have made handling the figure a little easier.

Bub comes with several of the items he is given in the movie, but not all. Included are the pistol, a razor blade and a cassette deck with headphones. He does not get a toothbrush or a paperback copy of Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”.

But he does get what he really wants….a “reward bucket”!

Earlier, I mentioned popping our the arms. I’m not sure if the left arm will come out, but the right definitely will. The reason being is that the figure also comes with a spare arm that allows you to assume the “saluting” pose. It would be nice if there were a place to store the extra arm, but I think I have a solution for that, that I’ll tell you about some other time.

The first couple of times you swap it out, it’s really tight, but after a short while it becomes much easier. Each arm is double jointed allowing for movement both up and down as well as inside and out. But unfortunately, there is no elbow joint, nor are the knees jointed. I can live without knee joints but I do wish there were some in the elbows. However, you do also get joints at the wrists, waist, neck and upper torso, the last of which allows you to position Bub so that he is either standing at attention of slouched forward.

Lastly, I’ll touch on the packaging. Bub comes encased in plastic with twisty ties holding him in place. You pretty much will need to destroy the packaging to get him out, but that doesn’t bother me much in this case. Bub here really isn’t being marketed as a high end collectible. For that, there will be a 12″ version at a later date. So the only thing that annoys me a little bit about the packaging is that the case has a tendency to lean forward when sitting on a surface. This seems like a minor thing, but I must not be the only one who didn’t like it as it was fixed for the next figure in the line, Dr. Tongue, which is cool because if youD DO want to treat this as a collectible and leave it in the package, they look pretty good side by side.

Verdict? I think it’s a winner if you are a zombie or horror fan and like this size figure. You can get yours at Amok Time Toys.