Tong Toy Story Set [Toy Impressions]

So you've seen Woody, now see the rest of the gang. As mentioned before, though, there are only four figures in the set: Woody, Jessie, Buzz, and one of the aliens (feel free to buy two more to complete the trio if you want). Basic pack-ins are a set of cards and some yellow-orange weapons.

Seeing how crappy the Woody minifig is, though, can the rest of the gang redeem this set? Place your bets now, and let's find out.



Jessie

Well, Jessie certainly isn't doing this set any favors. She shares the same soulless stare that Woody had. Definitely creepy. It doesn't help that her mouth is outlined with white paint instead of being filled with white paint (and having a separate reddish paint as outline).

As well, looking at her keister part, you can see some deformities and dents where the leg part was removed from the plastic frame. To be fair, my assembled plastic robots also suffer from the same shoddy piece removal, but then again, I'm not selling the shoddy models I make.

If you look at her hands, you can see clear distinct seams, and while seams in general aren't deal-breakers, here we see huge seams borne out of having misaligned parts. Not good.

If you ever wanted Jessie to be a cold-blooded ninja, weapons are conveniently provided with the minifig.

Alien


The alien minifig is at least an improvement over the Jessie minifig, at least face-wise. Definitely less creepy-looking than Jessie - by a country mile. There's the usual problem with the painted details, though, and with this one, it looks like they passed off production to a 6-year-old.

I'm sorry, that's unfair. I would think there are some 6-year-olds who could actually do a better job than this.

There's also a huge seam running over the head piece. Speaking of the head piece, it definitely feels like it uses a different material than the other parts. I'm not exactly an expert on materials, but I'm guessing it's resin. Whatever it is, it's definitely not the ABS plastic that Lego (and most of its clones) use. It certainly looks and feels rougher than the norm.

Another minor annoyance is how they supplied full-size legs for the minifig, effectively making the alien stand the same height as the others. If I had to guess, it's probably a cost-saving mechanism so the factory won't have to make a separate production run for the shorter legs. I don't have accurate company information on Tong itself, but just looking at their releases, they don't seem to be a big player in the Lego clone space, seeing how they have only this Toy Story set and a Spongebob Squarepants set (we'll get to that later on). That might explain why they seem to be hesitant to create special moulds for leg pieces (Woody also used regular-sized legs).

Understandable business-wise, but a letdown for their customers.

Buzz


So here's the last of the set. Nope, still a letdown, especially how Tong never bothered to add a plastic helmet. Same issues with shoddy paint job applies, and looking at Buzz's face, there seems to be a predilection to use white paint as detail highlighter, which doesn't work so well with the lighter skin tone that Buzz has.

Buzz's jetpack seems to be using the same material (resin?) used in the alien's head piece. Not only that, it also features an absolutely terrible paint job. Not only did the paint miss the target spots, Tong also found it cost-effective to just use that one red paint for all the jetpack details and green for the rest. You can appreciate the world of difference in paint detail with the minifig-card comparison.

At the very least, though, Buzz has the least-creepy-looking face among the three humanoids in this set - not that it helps much.

So there you have it. The Tong Toy Story minifig set. I personally would recommend giving this one a pass unless you want something to tide you over until you're able to buy the original Lego minifigs, or while waiting and hoping that some other clone maker will train their eyes on the Toy Story franchise.