Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar 

       

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Made By:
McFarlane (set #12893)
Type:
Building Blocks
MSRP:
$8.99
 
Steven Universe

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Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar
Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar box Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar figure Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar base Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar statue Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar dark sides Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar light sides

 

With the success of McFarlane's The Walking Dead building block sets, they expanded the concept to include more properties. One of those was Cartoon Network's Steven Universe, the coming-of-age story of a young boy who lives with the Crystal Gems and learns about life, love, family, and saving the world on a regular basis. The smallest sets of the series is #12893, Pearl with Great Diamond Authority Pillar. It contains 40 pieces and a block-style Pearl figure. The box is bright and colorful, with nice graphics that combine the animation and the actual building set and a window to show the actual figure that is included. Instructions are a full-color stapled booklet, with a small sticker sheet tucked between the pages of it. The stickers are paper, so you won't be able to reposition them if you miss when placing them, but the printing is sharp and the edges are cut nearly perfectly to fit the parts.

Unlike many of the sets in the Walking Dead series, the Steven Universe sets use more generic parts and have a simpler aesthetic. The base and pillar are almost entirely made of standard plates and bricks, with just a few tiles used to add texture to the ground and the damaged top of the pillar. Another larger tile has a relief and paint apps to act as the statue placed before the pillar. Paint is also used on two of the four pieces making up the pillar's base. These are used with light and dark cast elements, plus stickers for the sides of the column, to recreate the highlights and shadows of the animation. It's a nice way to add some extra depth to the piece, and the stickers all line up tight to the edges of the parts. Color matching isn't perfect, but the slight variance actually fits the ancient look of Pearl's Arena very well. The parts all fit together tightly and easily, with construction (including sticker placement) taking less than 10 minutes.

Pearl comes in her Season 1 look, and while her design lends itself to the "block" look less than the other Gems McFarlane did a pretty good job here. She moves at the legs, hips, waist, torso, shoulders, wrists, and neck. All of them are simple cut joints, and she can be disassembled along any of the main vertical joints. These joints all use the same sized studs and sockets, which is the same size as the studs used throughout the rest of the set. Her neck joint was extremely stiff out of the package thanks to the painted flesh tone, and needed to be scraped before her head turned without risk of tearing the neck post. She's armed with the combat sword used in "Steven the Sword Fighter," which is appropriate to the pillar.

This is a fun little set, with a little more artistic license used than what's normally seen in block-built sets: rather than taking the whole set literally, look at it at (or just below) Pearl's eye level, and the pillar behind her suddenly becomes larger and further away thanks to the magic of forced perspective. It's a neat touch and a nice inexpensive way to get one of the four main cast members.

 

Our thanks to McFarlane Toys for providing this review sample. Have a question, comment,
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