Stinkor by soundofdesign, on Flickr

UPDATE: That discussion got way out of hand way too fast. I welcome free speech and I want people to be able to express their opinion, no matter how I much I disagree with it, but I insist on civility. I will accept any and all criticisms about being a tyrant, bully, bad journalist, head-in-the-sand-ostrich or whatever to enforce it. It’s my site and I won’t accept name-calling or general meanness.

To be fair I wiped out all previous comments, but they’re still open if anyone wants to restart the conversation.

I said I wasn’t going to get too involved in this one, and for now I’m sticking to that, though I’ll probably have my say when I review the actual figure. But I thought I’d highlight two things. First, here is the Four Horsemen’s final word, via their Twitter account:

After seeing a photo, that’s definitely not the way we’d intended the forearms to be positioned. Not sure what happened or why. […]we’ve finished it, they have every right to do so. They’re the ones assuming all of the financial responsibility & risk. The bottom line is that this is Mattel’s property. Not ours. If they decide that it’s best to alter something like that after…

I can appreciate the Horsemen’s diplomatic answer here – no suggestion of a production error. But James Sawyer at MOTUCfigures.com isn’t equivocating in his take on the situation: (more…)