In 2009, Hasbro made a 19" figure exclusively available at San Diego Comic Con. This one include light-up features as well but was otherwise not appreciably different than the one I had already gotten, so I certainly wasn't about to pay extra for the exclusive nature of it. In fact, when they released a mass-market version the following year, I was still disinclined to pick that up. (I feel compelled, for the sake of completeness to also mention the Galactus figure Toy Biz made in 1995. It only stood 14" tall and you could only move the arms and head. I did have that one at one point, but I never cared much for it.)
But in 2022, Hasbro did a new Galactus figure as one of their "HasLab" offerings. This one clocked in at a massive 32" and also had light-up features, but had the price tag to go with it. I believe the original price for $400 US but if you missed the sale window (which was only about a month, maybe two?) then you were out of luck. You can find them on eBay and other after-market venues now, but they generally float more in the $600-$700 range. I couldn't bring myself to justify the $400 expenditure, much less a $700 ome.
But I still thought it would be cool to have a Galactus figure that could so overwhelmingly tower over my Fantastic Four figures. I have a 3D printer, so I toyed with the notion of downloading a simple Galactus model and trying to tweak it to add a little articulation, but all the ones I could find were barely a couple inches tall and would lose all semblance of detail when scaled up to a reasonable size. Not to mention the sculpts generally looked pretty stiff and awkward to begin with.
But I recently discovered that ToyMakr3D released an articulated Galactus-type 3D model (technically, not actually Galactus to avoid copyright problems) that was able to be printed on your own printer. I had seen their work before, but as they focused almost entirely on Transformers and Transformers-style mechas, I paid little attention to them. But it would seem they branched out a bit more late last year and released "Battlegeus" which, when printed and assembled, comes in at about 30". I figured that, for a considerably cheaper price than the HasLab figure, I could finally have my own Galactus roughly in scale with my figures. And, after about two weeks of printing and assembly, I finished the figure last night...
Even though I built it myself, the cost wasn't nothing, I will admit. The STL files for printing were $22.40 US and I spent another $120 to get enough of the blue and metallic purple filments. But that's obviously considerably cheaper than even the $400 price tag of the original HasLab figure. And it occurs to me that even if you add in another $300 to get a brand new 3D printer on top of the costs of the filament and 3D files, that's still less than the current asking price for one of those HasLab figures on eBay!
Anyway, I wanted to give a shout-out to the fantastic design work on the figure for anyone else who couldn't pull the trigger on the HasLab Galactus. There's also a (legally, not actually a) Sentinel as well. Maybe they'll be encouraged to do other large-scale characters -- some Celestials, the Shaper of Worlds, Eternity..? Lots of possibilities seem open now!
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