Dick Tracy Devolution

Here's a Hingees' Dick Tracy figure circa 1945...

It's paper and you have to put it together yourself, but it looks to be a pretty good approximation of the famous character from the comic strip.

Here's the same character realized in plastic form from Playmates circa 1990...

Now, you don't have to put him together yourself, and he'll certainly last a lot longer than the paper version but... would you want him to?

If these were any indication, you'd get the impression that figure licensing -- or at least toys -- got worse over the half century instead of better. I wouldn't at all mind having a set of Hingees figures for all sorts of characters. And if electronic copies of the files, I could print more out any time they fell apart. If I had plastic versions like this one, I'm pretty sure I'd wind up slipping them in a Goodwill bag after an unsuccessful attempt to sell them on ebay!

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