If you’re a movie fan, you’ll no doubt love movie merchandise too. Entertainment sites like Zavvi are full of various licensed merch from our favourite TV shows, such as Breaking Bad, as well as our favourite movies. For fans of film, TV and pop culture, Zavvi offer a limited edition monthly mystery box called ZBOX.
ZBOX is a themed box of goodies containing merchandise relating to the theme of the month. Priced at £19.99, the customer is guaranteed the box will contain goods of at least £20 worth and more often than not, more, but the contents are a mystery until the ZBOX arrives on your doorstep towards the end of the month.
In this review, I’ll be taking a look at the May 2015’s themed mystery box, the Marvel ZBOX.
The Marvel ZBOX arrived by courier in your usual style of plastic-based shipping packet for large items. The ZBOX iteself resembles a shoebox in both look and size, but is completely black except for the ZBOX logo and Twitter hashtag and handle printed on the side. Let’s open it and find out what’s inside!
Wow, the ZBOX is chuck full of Marvel goodies as promised featuring various Marvel outputs such as Black Widow, Spiderman and Avengers. The ZBOX itself is decorated on the inside lid with Zavvi’s own superhero creation “Zavviman” (well…I’ve just made this name up!), holding a Captain America style shield, backdropped by a city skyline. This will make a great shoebox when empty! 🙂
There seems plenty of different products in the box, so let’s have a proper look at each item.
The first item in the Marvel ZBOX to catch my attention is the Funko Pop! Vinyl figurine. These things have been around for a few years now and are really catching on with many gaming, television, film and comic book characters brought to life as these vinyl bobble-head collectable figurines. The one in my ZBOX is number 42 in the series: Black Widow (woo, a female character!) from Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Others in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier collection include Captain America himself, Winter Soldier, Winter Soldier with goggles on and Black Widow. Her body is quite detailed with her wearing a pewter grey jumpsuit complete with little black kneepads and boots, whilst Black Widow herself is armed with a gun in each hand. She means business! The heads of the Funko Pop! Vinyls are really oversized but to my amazement, the figurine stands up sturdy, without a problem, with the bobble-head nodding. She would look great in the car or or on top of the stereo, nodding to the beat.
Next up is the Neca Scalers silver and black Spider-Man. This little chappy clings to whatever type of cable you have lying about, so your ear-bud/headphones cable, videogame cable and any other cables you can think of. And shoe laces apparently. I have a few surround sound cables draped across various shelves around the room so Spidey can swing from one of them and make sure to keep the room safe from any Green Goblins and the like.
Here we have a Marvel Avengers tin, with embossed writing and images of The Hulk, Hawkeye, Captain America, Black Widow, Iron Man and Thor on the top lid, from Topps. It’s meant to be a tin to store collectable Hero Attax cards which are part of a trading game. Of course, you don’t have to put cards inside it, it can be used for anything really, but it’s a nice looking tin. Open it up and there’s a little box of edible white candy sticks and a little sticker inside.
The Marvel ZBOX comes with 6 Topps exclusive Hero Attax Trading cards featuring the characters from Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron to kickstart your collecting journey and to pop them inside the collectable tin. Whether or not you decide to collect them is entirely up to you, but they are available from newsagents. These cards given in the ZBOX feature a limited edition Captain America card. I’m not sure if all Marvel ZBOX’s will come with the same cards or not, but these are good to start off a potential collection.
Remember those transfer tattoos as a kid? Well, the Marvel ZBOX comes with two sheets of temporary tattoos featuring The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America, The Thing from Fantastic Four and Hawkeye. Just cut out, apply to chosen area on skin, wet the back and peel off to be adorned in your favourite superhero. These will be a good treat for the kids, unless I feel in a fun mood and stick them all over myself. 😀
If temporary tattoos aren’t your thing, then sit back and watch the 2 disc DVD of Stan Lee’s Superhumans, where Stan Lee, creator of X-Men, Spider-Man and the Hulk, and Daniel Browning Smith meet real people with incredible abilities – the nearest thing to superheroes. Stan and Daniel meet a variety of people with tremendous genetic traits over 8 episodes on this DVD and it really is an intriguing insight into the powers of the human body which some people have. This is definitely worth checking out regardless if you’re into superheroes or not.
Finally, there are three magazines to complete the ZBOX. The smallest is a little ZBOX magazine that features some articles relating to this month’s theme, Marvel, as well as referencing the contents of the ZBOX. There’s some cool trivia in the magazine and also a list of the movies already released from Marvel and those in the pipeline. This is a nice little magazine, 19 pages in total, to give a bit of background and fun information on Marvel.
The second magazine is a copy of June 2015 edition of Total Film. It’s been a while since I bought Total Film but it appears to have shrunk in size. You may need your specs to read the small text in the mag but as usual, Total Film bring some terrific articles such as an interview with Ben Kingsley, a feature on real life vs injuries in movies, and for Marvel fans, an on set report of Avengers: Age of Ultron. The cover even features Hulk smashing it up as always. For a movie fan, the 146 page magazine is a fantastic inclusion in the ZBOX and features loads of articles to get stuck into, including new/upcoming theatrical and DVD/Blu-Ray releases.
Completing the magazine line-up is a ZBOX exclusive first issue of Marvel’s new comic, Secret Wars, from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic. The colourful comic is centred around the end of two universes, Marvel and Ultimate, and features a surprising amount of Marvel superheroes including Avengers, Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man and more.
That completes the Marvel ZBOX and I’m pretty impressed by the contents. There’s enough variation and decent items in the box that warrants the price, particularly with the exclusives. Of course, you never know what’s inside each ZBOX until you receive them and that’s part of the fun. It almost feels like Christmas as a kid again!
There’s plenty in the ZBOX to keep both film and pop culture fans happy and with next month’s ZBOX teased as being ‘cop’ themed, I suspect there may be some Dredd and Robocop content in there. I’d say these boxes make a great gift too, especially for those pop culture fans that are so hard to buy for. I’ll definitely be checking out the future themes to see what tickles my fancy.
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