So apparently I collect die-cast vehicles.  If someone had asked me a week ago if I collected Hot Wheels I could have easily said "no" without any hesitation.  There's no malice in that statement either; it's not that I dislike these little die-cast metal vehicles.  I just never thought of myself as a connoisseur of the medium I guess.  I know that I had a handful of cars as a kid, but by and large I was an action figure guy and whenever I found myself in a toy store, I was never drawn to that aisle.  I'm not even sure where I came across the handful of cars and trucks I did have, though if I had to bet I'd say they were most likely stocking stuffers.

Over the past couple of years I've found myself picking up a Hot Wheels car here and there, mostly due to some awesome pop culture vehicles popping up unexpectedly on the pegs.  I happened to see an Ecto-1 Ghostbusters ambulance one day in Toys 'R Us and thought to myself, "Neat, wouldn't it be cool if a few more die-cast cars like this started showing up?!?"  Within six months I was alerted to the fact that the Back to the Future DeLorean was released, and then shortly after the A-Team van.  At that point I was downright craving more miniature pop culture rides, and even though I found myself gravitating to the Hot Wheels section more and more it always seemed like a pretty fruitless endeavor.  There just weren't enough of these to really keep my interest in continuing the search…

But then here and there I'd find something that caught my eye.  Whether it was some of the Tron Legacy vehicles, or a retro Hot Wheels Hot Ones release (like Spoiler Sport) that reminded me of a very similar Incredible Hulk-themed version of the car I had as a kid, I couldn't help myself and before I knew it I was checking out at the register with two or three cars…

      

Shortly after Halloween was over last year I stumbled upon a set of Monster Cereal branded cars, which I felt obligated to own as I don't have any MC merch and this was a fine way of keeping that Halloween-y feeling alive for another week or so.  Honestly though, even at this point I didn't consider myself a collector of little toy cars.  But after picking up a slightly expensive new Hot Wheels K.I.T.T. (I didn't want to wait the eternity it seems for this little guy to hit the pegs), and splurging on a few more of the retro Hot Ones cars last week I think I now have to reconsider my stance on collecting.

     

I think the final nail in the coffin is that I found myself scouring Hot Wheels wikis and eBay looking for specific cars I had as a kid.  After placing a bid on one of them (keeping my fingers crossed) I think it's pretty clear that I've passed a line of demarcation.  I apparently collect Hot Wheels.

So, in honor of this realization, I thought it would be fun to do a giveaway of some of the extra Hot Wheels pop culture cars I've picked up over the last year.  I have two sets to give away, one featuring the 2010 Ecto-1, the 2011 Back to the Future Time Machine, and the 2011 A-Team van, and a second with just has the A-Team van and the BTTF Time Machine.  So what do you have to do to win one of these sets?  Well, you can send me an e-mail with the subject line "Pop Culture Hot Wheels" and list your favorite Hot Wheels toy or experience.  Be sure to include your name and mailing address.  I'll be picking the winners at Midnight on Thursday, May 31st, 2012.  Good luck!

**UPDATE**  Consider the giveaway pot sweetened!  I found two 2012 Knight Rider K.I.T.T. Hot Wheels today, so I'm adding one to each prize pack!

Now, I'm just going to sit back and hope that there will be a Hot Wheels release of some of my other favorite vehicles soon (including the General Lee, Airwolf, and Street Hawk)…

Of all the toy projects I've come into contact with this past year, OMFG! (Outlandish Mini Figure Guys) has to be one of the coolest.  Not only is it independent and artist driven, but riffs on some of the cool toy lines from the 80s like M.U.S.C.L.E.s, Battle Beasts, and Monster in my Pocket.  I've written about series one before, but I wanted to make a note that voting has just begun for the second series.  You can participate by hopping over to the October Toys forums, registering and voting for 5 of the 461 new designs for series 2.

I'm pretty excited to see this project moving forward, so much so that I've thrown a couple of my own designs in the ring, Boombox (#55) and Killscreen (#57).  Just saying, my wife would kill for a Boombox figure.  Regardless if you dig my designs, if you have a moment, head on over and check out the other entries.  There's a whole range of stuff, and there is some really killer ones in there.  I know I'm partial to the Puke Knight (#357), Thatman (#429), and Deadbeet (#144)…

  

Also, to tide us minifig collectors over until the 2nd series of the OMFG! get picked and hopefully produced, Jakks Pacific has just released a line of really neat collectable Zombie Minifigs called S.L.U.G.s (Scary Little Ugly Guys)…

Series one has just been released and so far there are 16 different little zombie figures available (though I've heard that there are 99 in the series.)  They come in packs of 3 (where you can see the figures you’re getting), as well as a larger 12-pack that comes in a really cool looking coffin…

    

In order to get all 16 you'll either have to buy all four different 3 packs and the 12 pack coffin (there are 4 figures only in the 3-packs, and 4 exclusive to the coffin set), or hope you can find someone willing to trade their doubles.  The 3-packs are $4, and the 12-Pack coffin was $10.  As far as the quality of the concepts and sculpts, this set is pretty good.  There are a few duds in the set that either don't really read as zombies (the boxer), don't stand well (King Tut) or are kind of boring (again, boxer), but most of the figures are pretty darn fun.  My favorites have to be Rigamortis Lourdes, the cheerleading zombie (with severed head pom poms), Neil Armgone, the zombie astronaut, and the clever homage to Daniel from the Karate Kid, The Corroding Kid (who has had his leg swept but good.)

   

I'm sure these will pop up in a few stores, but right now I've only seen them at my local Toys R Us.  Unlike the Trash Pack, all these new minifigs are really doing a great job of riffing on the whole M.U.S.C.L.E. and Monster in my Pocket toy lines.  What a great time to be collecting toys again!

As a kid I completely missed out on the whole M.U.S.C.L.E. men craze as I was concentrating all my playtime and allowance money on Garbage Pail Kids stickers and G.I. Joe & Transformers figures.  It's not that I wasn't aware of them, or how cool the little rubber guys looked packaged in their clear trashcans and bright blue blister cards; it's just that I was spread a bit thin collecting-wise.  "A kid can’t have everything…", is a statement I heard my mom say a lot at the time.  So I satiated my young mini-figure cravings with Transformers Decoys, Smurfs, figural erasers, and the old Blackstar demon or Trobit.

Years later, after the majority of my toy collecting cravings have more or less subsided, I find that the one thing that I can't bring myself to stop collecting are little mini-figures.  Whether it's Hasbro’s mini Heroes lines (aka the Star Wars, Transformers, and G.I. Joe chub figures), vending machine toys (like Little Homies), or Lego Minifigs, I just can't help myself if I find something particularly cool.  This past June I stumbled across the October Toys OMFG! (Outlandish Mini Figure Guys) project on Kickstarter and I was immediately hooked on the idea.  A bunch of artists and sculptors in the October Toys forum came together to hash out some ideas for a line of mini-figures riffing off of the nostalgia for old toy lines like Battle Beasts, M.U.S.C.L.E.s, and Monster In My Pocket.  Enough folks backed the project for it to be successfully funded, which was cool, but then began the wait for the figures to actually be produced...

I finally received my two initial sets from the Kickstarter project last month, and I couldn't be happier with the outcome!

    

There are five figures in this first series, Multiskull, King Castor, The Phantom Shithouse, Crawdad Kid, and Stroll, all of which have some excellent sculpting and detail work.  Again, though I never had any M.U.S.C.L.E.s growing up, I've seen enough of them to know that they weren't rendered in this much detail.  The main set comes in a "flesh" colored PVC, but there was also a Kickstarter exclusive black set that I picked up as well.  The wife called dibs on King Castor and Stroll, but she doesn't have any of the nostalgia or fondness for the pink fleshy figures, so black seemed the way to go.

Part of the Kickstarter campaign was the ability to help fund at a high level to secure a thousand minifigs in your very own color-way.  This was a great idea to get other small toy companies and stores in on the fun with the ability to sell exclusive color variants of the figures as an incentive for investing in the project.  There were four groups that chose this option resulting in a few exclusive colors including a mustard yellow (University of Muscle), a lime green (Little Rubber Guys), a true blue (Rotofugi), and a lighter "Glyos" blue (Onell Design).  There was also a sixth exclusive color-way/artist-proof, hot pink, that was split between the artists and sculptors that worked on the project.

Before Christmas, while waiting for the base and Kickstarter sets to be shipped, I noticed that the Onell Design light blue color-way was available for purchase.  Since I was champing at the bit to get my hands on these, I went ahead and splurged on this variant set.  Besides, I thought it would be fun to give a couple of the figures to my nephews for the holiday.  The Onell variants were my first taste of OMFG!, and I had a sneaking suspicion that even after I received the pink and black that it wouldn't be my last.

Ripping open the light blue set I realized that the variant color-ways that the various companies chose didn't seem to have too much thought behind them at first blush.  Granted, no one color would easily represent the figures, so this is hardly a complaint, just an observation.  Onell chose the light blue as it's the first color they used when creating their own toys a while back, but for this set it really doesn't fit with the design of the actual figures.  King Castor looks the best, as it has a cold icy feel that works decently with stones that make up the figure, and an argument can be made for Stroll being a "yeti" variation, but it's a little off.  The flesh being an homage to M.U.S.C.L.E.s makes sense, but again it doesn't really fit any of the figures.  The black exclusives, though cool, are almost too dark to really fully appreciate the detailed sculpting, and I began to wonder why each variant color was chosen.

After receiving the two additional sets from October Toys, it occurred to me that there might be some thought behind these choices after all.  The logo design of the series, the Rolling Stones-esque open mouth and tongue design is comprised of five colors (green teeth, pink tongue, yellow lettering, blue lips, and black outlines and fill in the mouth.)  Could it be that the colors were chosen to reflect the overall scheme of the packaging?  What with the two blues (the lips being offset by the blue of the background) and the two pinks (the tongue and the OMFG banner below the title), all of these colors were present and accounted for.  Could be a coincidence, but I thought it was interesting to point out.

Though I thought I would stop at the three sets, I soon found that I was really loving all the color choices (whether they made design sense or not), and I ended up picking up the green set, as well as the yellow and artist proof exclusive hot pink of the Multiskull figure (which is my favorite of the bunch.)  I even snagged a custom painted version of Multiskull that the artist (Charles Marsh) put up for sale a couple of weeks ago.  I had really wanted a version of the figure in white or grey, the traditional skull colors, and managed to score the NightFright custom which fills this gap in my collection quite nicely.  He even glows in the dark!

All in all I really love these figures and I can't even being to put into words would cool it's been to watch this project from design to fruition.  Seeing an independent artistic community come together for a project like this is rare, and seeing it come out so well done is even rarer.  October Toys and their forum are doing the initial prep work on a second series, and submissions for figures ideas are still open until the 29th of this month.  I have a few designs submitted (Boombox, Miss Pucker, and Killscreen), but there are all sorts of cool figures in the forum thread that would make an awesome second series for the OMFG! line.  Can't wait to see how far the community will take this thing!

I mentioned recently that I tend not to review much modern stuff that influenced by the 80s era stuff that I loved growing up.  Part of this is because of how I feel about the current 80s regurgitation, but another part is more about spending.  I just don't buy all that many toys or doodads because the wife and I have no idea where to put this stuff.  We have a bunch of stuff as it is and we hesitate to keep adding to the pile for fear that we'll become buried in some sort of cool-stuff avalanche.  So when we do pick something up we try to be pretty judicious about what we buy.  Following this train of thought I've been limiting a lot of my toy purchases to stuff that is small, literally.  Blind pack Lego minifigs, minimates, the various tiny "Heroes" figures from Hasbro, Hotwheels, etc.  It's more about display than playability at my age anyway, so why not try to condense the size of a collection with 1.5" figures instead of the more normal 3.75"-8" lines.

Then there is the world of independent and small run toys, stuff like vinyl figures from outlets like Kid Robot and a million other indie molders, casters, and painters that work with everything from resin and vinyl to word and PVC.  There's all sorts of awesome stuff out there, but I've kept myself pretty sheltered from it because they're typically some pretty darn expensive art toys.  I mean if I'm grumbling in the toy aisles of my local Target because G.I. Joe figures are at the crazy inflated price of almost $10 a figure, then you know I won't be jumping at the chance to pick up independent toys at $40-$100 apiece (not that I don't want to.)  I'm not saying that there aren't any cheaper options for these sorts of art toys, I've just been hit with sticker-shock so often that I tend to filter them out.

Well, that changed recently after Phillip Reed over at Battlegrip.com spent an entire week looking at a particular independent toy-line.  It's called the Glyos System and is produced by a group called Onell Design.  I'm not 100% versed in the fiction, but the general idea is that these are a set of futuristic humanoids and robots in space.  The figures range in size from 1.5" to around 3" tall and are all comprised of modular pieces of hand painted PVC.  So this system is combining the concept of the action figure with that of a building block set like Lego bricks, that encourages customization…

What really grabbed me at first was the overall design aesthetic of the toys, in particular the color schemes and the odd juxtaposition of simplicity and complex design.  I also loved the design of the various character head sculpts, especially on this little orange guy they call Pheyden (specifically this one is known as the Gears Edge Pheyden.)  The dome shape to the helmet with the skull accents is really cool…

    

I think this design aesthetic is so powerful because it has been expertly culled from all sorts of existing pop culture while retaining a simplicity that completely separates itself from its many influences.  When I look at these figures I can see aspects of films, videogames and cartoons like Robocop, Tron, Alien & Aliens, Metroid, Megaman, Section Z, Robotech (in particular the series three Invid Invasion episodes), Inhumanoids, and the Centurians just to name a few.  At the same time, there isn't enough of any one of these homages that the Glyos System still feels completely like its own unique design.  That's a really tough thing to accomplish.

    

There's also a lot of aspects to these figures that I really dig that are playing off of some of the more modern toy designs like the chibi, or super deformed body design; large hands and feet with slightly disproportionate leg and arm lengths.  Also, I find it very interesting to see this sort of modularity in an action figure line.  Sure, there were a bunch of original Star Wars and He-Man figures that you could pop the heads and arms off of and switch around, but not really since the Micronauts have we seen this sort of concept.  For awhile in the early to mid 2000s there were those Stikfa figures, but their modularity was more about articulation than customization.  I'm sure there are some action figure lines I'm forgetting, but I still think this is a rare concept for the genre.

Though this might be a little greedy and crass, I have to say that what ultimately won me over to buying a bunch of these figures is the really low price point.  There are a handful of older legacy figures in the Onell Design shop that are as low as $4 a piece.  Considering that these are hand cast, assembled and painted, that's a steal.  Even the newer figures range from $6-$10, which is still more than reasonable when compared to other independent toys.

    

    

What's also really cool is that this system has infected the indie toy market to such an extent that there are a lot of other people making attachments and figures that are completely interchangeable with the originals.  Onell Design has a sister site called Callgrim that has their own variations on the system that add a whole new level to the collection.  I also love that there are some standard "characters" too; Onell has a couple of main characters, Pheyden and Exellis, Callgrim has their own, The Order (seen below as a standard figure with the robotic blank faceplate) and Callgrim (which has the more hockey mask/skull influenced faceplate.)

    

Callgrim has also taken the modularity to a whole new level by sculpting some of the pieces to be really multi-purpose.  he set I picked up is based around the character called the Warp Dome Terra Mite…

…that figure's head can be positioned in two ways, one like above that makes it come off as an android sort of robot, or if you twist it around it becomes a variation on the Callgrim faceplate, only a bit more alien.  These head pieces also double for a very cool-looking base piece for a backpack or jet pack…

All in all, though I'm still really new to these toys, I'm becoming addicted to them.  I missed out on the last rollout of figures, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled on the Onell Design and Callgrim blogs for any information on new stuff.  I feel like I'm 8 years-old again!

    

Though I tend not to cover much of the modern merchandising that plays off of 80s nostalgia, from time to time I do see some stuff that I just have to share.  While walking around Toys R Us the other day looking at their new Halloween displays I stumbled upon some little toys that really caught my eye.  They're called the Trash Pack…

In a nutshell, these little guys are the equivalent of the cheap-o vending toys you tend to find at the entrances to grocery stores and as prizes in arcades.  They're a collection of 1" monsters, critters, spoiled food items and bugs (both micro-biotic and insectile in nature) that are a cross between a pencil topper and a charm toy.  Normally I probably would have passed these up as the available packages (containing either 5 or 12 figures) were pretty pricey ($6 for 5 and $10 for 12), but the sheer amount of 80s era influeces packed into these little guys was just too attractive…

First off, the figures are packaged in little plastic garbage cans that immediately evoke the M.U.S.C.L.E. men phenomenon, but there's also an obvious Garbage Pail Kids vibe with the all the gross gags and collectability.  On top of that these are also riffing off of the current resurgence of figural eraser collecting that's really gripped kids for the first time in 25 years.  If these had also come with stickers I think my mind would have melted…

  

All in all I have to say that even though the thought that went into the merchandising was pretty cool, the price-point is just way too out of whack.  All told there are almost 200 different figures (including color variations on around 55 different molds) and the chances of scoring a complete set for under $100 seems pretty slim.  When you consider that these are just glorified vending toys, that makes these guys pretty darn expensive.  Also, though some of the molds are pretty cool (I highlighted my favorites in the photos), there are a lot that just don't read well (in terms of coming across as what they are.)  These are available in 2, 5, and 12 packs, and I think that if the price was reduced by half they might catch on, but I have a hard time seeing parents plunking down the kind of cash it would take to get there kids started out on a decent collection.

  

I have no idea where this week has gone too!  Well, I figured I'd through up a quite post to update on the progress of the below OMFG! Kickstarter project which just this morning crossed over the funding mark.  There's still a good month and a half to go until the campaign is over so if you're interested in helping fun a possible Series 2 and would like to get your hands on some cool toys in the process, head on over and make a pledge.  I've been pretty inspired by this whole community toy project that I threw my hat in the ring with a couple of designs for the 2nd series.  First up is a little guy I call Boom Box…

The drawing is a little wonky, but the concept hopefully gets across.  He's a little bit hip hop, a little Soundwave/Megatron mash-up, and a whole lot of Boom!  I'm thinking he also has an evil twin named Ghetto Blaster...

Next up is more of a silly idea that I had to draw once it popped into my head.  It's Stripe the Gremlin wearing a Mogwai (read Gizmo) hoodie.  Probably a little too "brand" specific for the OMFG! minifigures, but I had a lot of fun drawing him.  Think I might take a crack at coloring him this weekend (And now I did, though only some basic colors)…

 

Anyway, if you're at all interested in the OMFG! project, head on over to the Kickstarter page or the October Toys forums and get in on the fun and speak up about your favorite designs!

If there's one aspect of this site that I tend to neglect, it's a lot of the more current news and interesting tidbits that are heavily influenced by the 80s era craziness I typically expound upon.  It's no secret that in the past five or six years there's been a huge resurgence in the popularity of the toys, movies, and music of the eighties, but for the most part I've always felt that there are plenty of other sites that address this stuff better than I'd be able to, particularly with keeping timely updates and such.  Lately though there have been a handful of things hitting my radar that are so cool, I've had to flip my perspective and look forward.  With that in mind I thought I'd take a second today to point towards a really awesome independent toy project I stumbled upon yesterday (thanks to Jason at Open Your Toys) that should be exciting to all those kids who grew up collecting and trading M.U.S.C.L.E.s and Monster in My Pocket mini figures…

Created by a community of toy enthusiasts and artists, and spearheaded by the fine folks over at October Toys, these OMFG! (Outlandish Mini Figure Guys) are preparing to descend upon nostalgic toy collectors everywhere.  The first series features five outstanding creatures including the king of bone-daddys, Multiskull, a swampy southern man monster known as the Crawdad Kid, the frontier's worst nightmare, the Phantom Outhouse, a master of his own castle, King Castor, and a cryptid that would give the purple people eater a run for his money, Stroll.

This community toy jam has been gestating on the October Toys forums for the past four months or so and has culminated with the launch of a Kickstarter fundraising project to make these little guys a reality.  If you're the type of guy or gal that's interested in collectable vinyl figures, nostalgic relaunches (like the Transformers Classics and the 25th anniversary G.I. Joes), or you're still teary-eyed because your parents gave away all your M.U.S.C.L.E.s to the little brat down the street when you were off at college, then you might want to head on over to the OMFG! Kickstarter campaign and make a pledge today!

Well, as I've hinted at in the past month, the house of Branded was visited by none other than that crazy stone-faced, logical Vulcan Spock!  I recently played host to Eclectorama's traveling Spock Mego figure on it way around North America, and it was my duty to show him a good time around Duluth, Atlanta, and Athens, Georgia.  Well, the pictures are back from the photomat and they're up over at Charles' site!  So click on the picture of Spock below to skate on over to see his vacation photos!

I had a lot of fun with Spock and was a little sad to see him go, but on the bright side, I handed him off to the wonderfully talented Liz Vitale of Puppatoons fame, so I know he's in good hands.

While flipping though a bunch of old Boy's Life magazines recently I came across a couple Toys 'R' Us circulars that had some interesting stuff. In the 80s toy companies had a leeway with products that you just won't ever see again.

In particular there was a full-page ad for an awesome 1989 TRU exclusive Back to the Future II battery-powered DeLorean…

Much in the same vein as the Return of the Jedi jungle gym that I talked about last April, this child-sized motorized DeLorean is pretty damn cool and another example of one of my childhood fantasies come to life.  I never had the opportunity to own or even ride one of the plethora of Power Wheels toys cars and trucks that were so huge in the 80s, but you can bet I dreamed of having my own DeLorean so that I could tool around the neighborhood before jacking it up to 88pmh and blasting into the future (most likely to see if the Transformers really did have an Autobot base on Earth in 2005.)  It's weird, I keep stumbling across these awesome relics of the past that I never knew existed, and always wished were available.  What's next?  Were there child-sized motorized AT-ATs?  Was there an Airwolf themed swing set with ride-able helicopter seats?

Seriously though, how cool is that advertising artwork?!?  I love the exaggerated flames coming out from behind that little Power Wheels car.  It's almost as if it has rocket powered thrust or something.  Also, that kid's shades are the best.  They remind me of the Pizza Hut Back to the Future II promotion in '89 that featured cheap plastic sunglasses in all sorts of wacky shapes…

Next up is a 1988 ad for Galoob's Army GEAR dual action toys…

Army GEAR was Galoob's attempt at bridging the gap between their Micro Machines and Hasbro's G.I. Joe and Transformers toys.  The idea is actually kind of cool where on the one hand you've made some serviceable toy army weapons, but the fact hat they transform into battle stations with all sorts of little soldiers and vehicles inside is just genius.  Some of the sets were kind of ludicrous though, in particular a machete, which is just a weird item to be molded into a child's toy.  Maybe Galoob teamed up with the Army after hearing about how video games where increasing soldier's eye-hand coordination and making them better helicopter and jet pilots.  This was possibly their secret way of getting kids used to field-stripping M-16s and .45 caliber pistols…

The craziest item in the circulars was the most insane "board game" ever, Milton Bradley's Tuba Ruba…

Tuba Ruba was Milton Bradley's second attempt at selling sex in a box (22 years after introducing the slightly controversial Twister in 1966.)  This time around, not content with just introducing adults and children to the wonders of inappropriate touching in strange positions, MB upped the ante by adding bondage to the mix.  The idea is pretty simple, wrap the Tuba Ruba tubes around your (and an opponents) body and insert a ball at the top end.  Then you just wiggle and shake until the ball drops out the bottom.  I'm sure this became standard issue party equipment in 7-Minutes-in-Heaven closets all over the country.

If nothing else, I can say that toys have never been as exciting as they were in the 80s…

I never had the patience to build models when I was younger.  Heck, I've had a complete set of the Aurora Monster Dragster models sitting on the office shelf for years now that I haven't even opened.  Even so, as a kid there was a an allure to the world on model kits, if only because there were so many sets available for cool vehicles that never had standard toy counterparts.  I remember a friend had a super cool model of Airwolf from Ertl that I always wanted to play with, but rightly so he never let me near it.  I'm sure he spent hours meticulously cutting out the pieces from the plastic trees and gluing them together.  He'd even managed to paint it in show-accurate colors.  I was reminded of this as I ran across this crazy MPC Dukes of Hazzard model car ad from a 1981 issue of Boy's Life magazine…

It's kind of strange that there was a whole line of models in the series including Cooter's Tow Truck and Daisy's Jeep.  I'd be willing to bet cash money that there were also models for Boss Hog's ride as well as Roscoe's police cruiser.  The General Lee I understand, but why would a kid want a 1/25th scale replica of Cooter's Tow Truck?  I mean if it were a toy, like a Hot Wheel or Matchbox car, okay, but as a display model?  I guess you'd have to be one heck of a Ben Jones super-fan.  Or a nine year-old tow truck enthusiast I guess.  Weird.

The ad is pretty neat though, not only because of the fun artwork on the Duke Boys, but because the copy is written in-character with regional speech issues and all.  Personally I think this ad could have approached genius levels of awesome if the copy writer had managed to get across that the text was narrated by the one and only Balladeer, Waylon Jennings, but that's just me…

It's kind of strange sensation, but there are a lot of toys that should scream "80s" for me, but don't.  Stuff like G.I Joe and the Transformers are in that group, most likely because I never really stopped living with their branding over the years.  But there's also stuff like the Thundercats or the Smurfs that also don't really "bring me back" all that much even though they haven't been in the forefront of my mind in awhile.  I think this stuff is just too popular and therefore it never seems dated.  More and more I'm finding that the stuff that really epitomizes the 80s for me are the obscure toy lines that I had some familiarity with at the time.  The Robo Force toys do this for me, as do Kronoform watches, and the Visionaries toys.  But one of the most "It's from the 80s..." inducing is the Starriors line of robot action figures from Tomy (pronounced toe-me), which really send me right back to 1984…

I saw this guy sitting in a display case at HD Comics and Toys in the N. Georgia Pendergrass flea market and for a second I felt like I was 7 years-old again. 

As a quick aside, if you're in the Atlanta area, or if you're traveling through Georgia and have a chance to stop at the Pendergrass flea market, do youself a favor and check in on Steve and Billy at HD Comics and Toys.  The place is a wonderland of stuff (Bravestarr, Tundercats, Silverhawks, G.I. Joe, Go Bots, Starriors, Food Fighters, Supernaturals, Lone Ranger, Super Powers, tons of Marvel and DC figures, Masters of the Universe, the original Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, original Indiana Jones and Star Wars figures, and six million other obscure and interesting toys from the last 40-odd years.)  If you stop in, tell 'em Shawn from Branded in the 80s sent you, they and I will appreciate it!

Anyway, when it comes to the nostaliga factor of these guys, it's all in the head/cockpit (because as a kid that's all I had.)  I have no memory of where I came across it, but at some point I ended up with a little Starriors cockpit/head that just fascinated the crap out of me.   First of all I had a weird thing for clear plastic cockpits on toys when I was young, in particular the larger triangular, clear blue Lego window pieces from the Space Police series.   I almost always started construction of a new Lego creation around these hinged window pieces, but I also loved this functionality in all of my toys.  Between the translucent yellow chest-flaps of the Insecticons, the plethora of canopies and cockpits in the G.I. Joe vehicles, and the awesome pink cockpit of Miles Mayhem's Switchblade vehicle from M.A.S.K.  I was enthralled by this idea in design and it carried forth to the detachable heads of the Starriors (and Zoids, it's sister toy line) toys from 1984…

  

I think part of my fascination was the included little silver and gold pilot figures, what I understand now is actually a bunch of circuits made in the image of men that forms the brain of the Starriors characters.   First off, these little chrome figures reminded me of Twiki from Buck Rogers, and second, it just looked so damn cool to have these tiny, little, shiny guys in a small cockpit.  Keep in mind that this was before Micro Machines.

Overall the design of the Starriors figures is just really fun.  Sure, they maynot have a ton of articulation, and no paint, but there's a lot of molded detail that I really dig.  My wife made fun of me a bit for buying a robot with chrome laser boobs, but I didn't even see that until she pointed it out...

 

This particular figure is named Hot Shot, and he's the leader of the Protectors faction of the Starriors robots.  I'm still digging into the back story behind the toys and comics, but the general gist of the story revolves around the human race going into a self-enforced hibernation.  Before hiding away the humans built a couple armies of robots, one called the Destructors to fight against their enemies in their absence, and the Protectors to rebuild the Earth and keep it running smoothly for their eventual return.  Very biblically epic in scope, the story of the Starriors unfolded in six different mini comics that were packaged with the figures, as well as a four-issue series from Marvel comics.

  

Again, the toys themselves are actually kind of cool even though they're limited in movement.  They're built to be taken apart and reassembled into different combinations, a feature that works very well in conjunction with the Starriors fiction which has characters "killed off" and then reborn (by having their circuits/consciousness transferred to new bodies.)  It also provided a similar play feature to the transforming function of the Go Bots and Transformers.   In addition, all of the figures had some sort of wind-up functionality.  Hot shot could be wound up causing his chest lasers to rock back and forth in their housing as if they were firing repeatedly.  Unfortunately, even though this guy was still card-fresh when I got him, his simple motor abilities didn't survive the last 26 years intact.

Also, very much like the transformers (and a lot of other toy lines from the 80s), there were a limited number of molds for the figures, so the heroes and villains were essentially mirror images of each other in different color schemes and with slightly different accoutrements…

If you're into collecting expensive geeky fine art, the iconic artist Bill Sienkiewicz, has a couple of his Marvel comics Starriors covers for sale on his website (both of which heavily feature the Hot Shot toy I just bought…)

 

So I meant to post about this a week ago, but I finally found an insanely well-stocked vintage toy shop in the (more or less) Atlanta area.  It's called HD Comics and Toys run by a couple of swell gentlemen, Billy and Steve.  They're located about an hour north of Atlanta in the Pendergrass Flea Market (a kind of neat place where you can get anything from rebel flag bikinis and nun-chucks to bootleg toys and candy cigarettes by the carton.)   I hadn't been by the flea market in a couple years and I was always sort of bummed by the fact that there weren't any decent places selling vintage 80s era toys and stuff, but on a trip a couple weeks back I stumbled into Billy & Steve's shop (it's actually a store inside the huge flea market building) and my jaw literally hit the floor.  Filling three pretty decent sized rooms from floor to ceiling were hundreds upon hundreds of pegs filled with in-original-packing toys from the last 30 or so years.

At first I thought it was mainly superhero figures (they had all sorts of DC and Marvel stuff dating back to the late 80s, early 90s), but as I started looking closer I realized that these guys have almost every decently popular toy line that I could remember.  Just some of the lines I spotted included the original Batman movie figures, Robotech, Voltron, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, the Tick, The Shadow, Indiana Jones, G.I. Joe, Bravestarr, Doctor Who, Go Bots, Star Wars, Supernaturals, Food fighters, Starriors, M.A.S.K., Lone Ranger, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Masters of the Universe, and even Welcome Back Kotter dolls in the original boxes.

It's everything that I've been looking for in a vintage toy store.  They currently don't have a website, but if you're in the Atlanta, or North Georgia area I highly suggest you stop by and check out their store.  The prices are reasonable (e.g. lower than eBay), and you can’t beat the experience of finding vintage toys on the pegs.

While I was there I picked up a couple of toys, and the one I was happiest to find was an in-box Robo Force figure…

 

They had four or five different robots in their original packaging, but the one that caught my eye was Enemy, the Dictator, a villain from the Robo Force line.

 

A couple years ago I did an episode of the Saturday Supercast podcast with Jerzy Drozd and our friend HooveR, and we got on the subject of Maxx Steele's Robo Force.  We'd all had the toys and were both nostalgic and perplexed by their built-in robot-arm-crushing mechanism, which we all sort of agreed was more of a cute hugging action.  When I saw this guy I had to have him…

 

You can see on the packing above that the hugging action of these guys in intense.  Robo Force was released in 1984 by Ideal, most likely to horn in on the coming plastic robot craziness in America.  Tonka's Go Bots had hit the shelves at the end of the previous year and were selling like hot cakes, and Hasbro's Transformers line was gearing up as well, and even those these guys didn’t transform, my guess is that Ideal saw the trend and wanted on-board.   I'm not sure if the figures were just re-issues of a Japanese toy line or if they were born and bread in America, but in playing with the figures, it sure feels like the latter. 

Honestly, though these guys look cool, and I actually dig the concept behind the story, I'm less than thrilled by the playability factor.  Seriously, aside from a chest plate that drops open to reveal some awesome lasers, all these guys can really do is lightly hug your finger or another small toy.   They're also kind of fragile, in particular the mechanism that moves the arms, as noted by my experiences with my original figure (I stretched out my old toy's arms past the point of hugging), and the warning note that was slipped into the packaging…

All in all the fact that you could find these guys for about $4 back in '84 (a huge thanks and shout out to Steve at the Roboplastic Apocalypse for putting in the hard time to collect all the great vintage toy robot ads from the 70s and 80s) must have been awesome considering that Go Bots sold for around the same price and the Robo Force figures are litterally huge in comparison.  The figure in the box looks pretty darn impressive too, so Ideal managed to get that right.

Getting back to the story for a second, did you read that flavor text on the back of the box?  Enemy can decimate an entire world with the laser sticking out of the back of his head!  That's stupid awesome.  He doesn't even have to look back to see the carnage he leaves in his wake, that's how evil he is...

The figures also came with a mini-comic in the vein of the Masters of the Universe (which I hope to get scanned in and posted sometime this week.)

 

Long live Maxx Steele!

Last week was a pretty hectic one in the house of Branded, but hopefully the hard part has passed.  Anyway, I thought I'd take a moment to point to a fun interactive bloggery event that Branded in the 80s is going to be taking part in, the 2009 Spockcation road trip hosted by Charles over at his great Eclectorama!



Basically Charles is looking to find people in various states in America (and countries round the world) to play host to a Spock action figure, taking him out and snapping some pics around town.  Take Spock as a part of your own little away-team to your favorite hangouts or any places of note where he can get some choice tricorder readings, and then package him back up in his shuttle to be whisked off to another exotic local.   If you're interested in playing host, drop Charles a line via his site to work out the details…

Though I don't think I've mentioned it here on the site all that much, I'm sort of going through a period of being utterly obsessed with buying toys again.  I wish I could say they were vintage, but I haven't quite gotten over that hump yet (of owning other kids once cherished action figures and vehicles.)  No I've been totally sucked into the hysteria that is the 25th Anniversary line of G.I. Joe figures that Hasbro has been releasing.  It started about a year ago around this time when the first waves of figures were hitting toy shelves around the country.

Now for the most part I've managed to suppress the itch to buy a ton of action figures in general because I'd both go broke and run out of room in the living domicile (not to mention putting a strain on my marriage most likely), and when the news first hit about these new G.I. Joe figures I thought I'd end up looking but not buying.  At first I was only aware of a couple of 5-pack sets that were being released (one Cobra, on Joe team members), and though the sculpts on the figures looked really cool, I didn't really like the packaging and thus felt I'd be able to fight the urge to buy.  Then the single carded figures started to hit stores, and the packaging design was like a sledgehammer to the gut.  Hasbro decided to go with a very similar look to their original card layout and art designs, close enough that I couldn't fight the nostalgic feelings welling up inside and I bought in.  The next thing I knew it was a year later and I've picked up almost every figure in the line so far.  I have them neatly arranged in rows on the wall by my computer desk sort of recreating the look of the back of the packages (with the pictures of the available figures in rows.)

Anyway, to get to the meat of why I'm posting about this, Hasbro recently announced the remainder of the line-up of figures expected to hit stores this year and toward the end of the list was a curious entry, a figure named Specialist Trakker.  Now this wasn't a Joe or Cobra figure, at least not from what I remember of the figures available in the original line, and the spelling on Trakker seemed to point to a character from another toy line in the 80s.  The fan community was mildly abuzz about who it might be, and people like me were keeping their fingers crossed that it might just be a 3.75" version of Matt Trakker from the cartoon and toy line M.A.S.K.  It did sort of seem crazy though, I mean why would Hasbro intermix 20 odd year-old toy lines even if they did own the rights to both?  We never saw G.I. Joe vs. Transformers toys (though there was a comic book series.)  Well, I received an e-mail from my friend HooveR this morning with some links to the HissTank.com site with some pictures of the Hasbro booth from the San Diego Comic Con, and finally I have pictorial confirmation that there indeed will be at least one new M.A.S.K. figure coming to toy shelves this year…





To say that I'm excited about this upcoming 2 ounces of plastic bliss is a bit of an understatement.  Not only does the figure look awesome, but Hasbro has done a great job once again of throwing the fans a bone by including a small M.A.S.K. logo on the packaging, and not just forcing the character into the G.I. Joe line.  The idiotic demon-nerd inside of me kind of wishes the overall card art reflected the feel of the M.A.S.K. packaging from the 80s, but honestly, I'm not enough of a stickler really care all that much.  My hope now is that we get a chance to see a few more characters from M.A.S.K. show up in future G.I. Joe lines, in particular Bad Turner and Miles Mayhem (who were my favorites.)

Many thanks go out to Hisstank.com for getting out the scoop on the new Joe figures introduced at the SDCC…

Well, I broke down and opened my new Storm Shadow 25th Anniversary G.I. Joe figure. I just needed to let him out to get some air and, well, play with him. Keeping figures in the package is just not in my blood or something. The rest of the figures are up on the wall next to my computer for inspiration, but Storm Shadow is standing atop my tower keeping an army of cute little chub Transformers at bay. Since I tore off the plastic bubble, I thought I'd take a minute to scan in the card to show a little more detail on the packaging for these new figures and how faithful they are to the original G.I. Joe packs.

I'd mentioned in a previous post about the upcoming figure portion on the back, with boxes that are grayed out and reduced to silhouettes. Here you can see what's coming up based on the character's outline, 8 of which I was surprised how easily I could recall who they were. On the top row, from left to right, you have Beach Head, Lady Jaye, Buzzer, Sepentor, and a basic Cobra Trooper (but will he have a black or red mask covering his mouth?) The next row was a little trickier, for one because the silhouettes were a lot fainter, but also because a couple threw me a little. From left to right we have Firefly, Red Ninja, Stalker, Shipwreck, and Zartan.

I had a little trouble with Stalker as I never had him as a kid and I wasn't familiar with his packaging art, and as I mentioned before I was totally clueless to who the Red Ninja was as I didn't remember anyone besides Storm Shadow with package art depicting a bow. At first, based on photos taken at the San Diego Comic Con, my friend Daniel and I figured that it was probably another version of Storm Shadow, in his get up from the Valor Vs. Venom cartoon, but in the comments on my last post I was corrected by a few people that it was going to be a Red Ninja (btw, thanks for the picture link Hoov.) As you can see in this I-Mockery article, as well as on YoJoe.com, that there was indeed a Red Ninja called Satan back in the 80s, though it was most certainly only released outside of the US (in Argentina I believe), but regardless, there's the art that matches the silhouette.

Finally, here's a close-up of the artwork from the front of the packaging. Just can't say enough great things about this.

I still haven't found any 5-packs on store shelves, but I'm sure they'll pop up sooner or later.

I was browsing my local Target at lunch today when I was surprised by finding the new 25th Anniversary G.I. Joe figures on the pegs in the toy aisle. All they had was the 1st wave of the individual figures (all of the 5-pack box sets were sold out), which is all right because honestly I wasn't in the mood to drop $80 on toys this afternoon. I couldn't help myself though, and I bought all five of the new figures.

On the ride home I was trying to figure out why I caved so easily and bought all these new figures, and it occurred to me that the packaging is what sold me on these. A little while ago Hasbro began selling the 3.75" figures individually again, and they even sort of made an effort to hit that key nostalgia note with the coloring and design but it totally missed the mark in my opinion. Take their new Low-Light figure for example, and compare it to the original packaging…

The concepts are similar, but there's something that just works better, at least for me, with the original release. I think it's the painted artwork on the packaging that really sells me on the figure (at least initially.) The newer release still has similar art, but it's a computer colored line drawing that just feels flat and hollow to me. It doesn't help that I'm not a big of that particular line art style, which looks like something you'd find in a comic book where the artist was trying to copy Marc Silvestri or Jim Lee's style. It looks like a knock off, which in turn makes the figure seem like a cheap rip-off to me.

Now take a look at the 25th Anniversary packaging…

Much better. Hasbro made a ton of strides here in terms of hitting the nostalgia nail on the head, from switching back to the 80s version of their logo, to reproducing the original paintings, right down to the awesomely dynamic bursts of flame. Now these paintings are reproductions, as you can see by taking a look at the original artwork for Flint, Snake Eyes, Cobra Commander, and the Cobra Officer, but I think it's cool that Hasbro put the effort into making them look just as cool as they did 25 years ago (well actually 22-23 years for these figures if you want to get technical.)

Granted, I'm a nostalgia buff, so seeing something that looks almost exactly like it did when I was a kid is going to catch my eye, but as I was walking down the aisle in Target, these were the best looking toys, hands down.

Also, according to the back of the package, there are at least two more waves planned of the single figures (there are boxes that are grayed out, but you can see the silhouette of the characters), and judging by the poses we can definitely look forward to Beach Head, Lady Jaye, Sepentor, a Cobra Trooper, Buzzer, Firefly, Shipwreck, Zartan, Stalker, and one other figure with a bow and arrow that for the life of me I can't identify. I haven't felt this sort of pull to buy toys since the first couple of waves of Star Wars figures came out around '95 or so. Now I have to decide whether or not to take these out of the packages, which I typically do, but the packing is just so pretty.  I'm so gonna go broke on these…

For our wedding, my wife and I decided to defer an actual wedding, and instead we asked all out friends and family to chip in on a trip to the 2008 San Diego Comic Con as we both want to go and it's freaking expensive. Well, I was checking on news from this year's con, and I saw this on the Wizard Magazine site…

There are apparently tons more 25th anniversary G.I. Joe figures yet to come beyond the 14 or so already hitting shelves. If they're planning on doing figures like Airtight and Alley Viper, then they might release, I don't know, like the entire original run of figures. Jezz, if I was worried about going broke before, I might as well just set aside the 2008 trip money now and just write Hasbro a check or something. Hasbro lists all of these new figures as custom, so I'm not sure if these are just for fun, or serving to give fans an idea of what's coming. There's also an un-painted Firefly and Zartan, as well as a pretty nifty Beach Head up on the Wizard site. Crimeny!

Yo Joe also has a bunch of photos up as well.

I actually have another bit of fun G1 Transformers merchandise to take a look at this week, so I guess it's sort of an unofficial "celebrate the new movie" week, except without actually looking at anything that has to do with the movie (and Nala, for two microseconds I actually considered opening a Cafe Press store so that I could print up my own Decepticon G-Strings to both review, and review this game in, but nobody wants that, not even my wife.)

Today I'm going to take a look at the new-ish USAopoly release of Monopoly: The Transformers Collector's Edition board game. If you aren't familiar with the USAopoly line of products, most of them are variations of the Monopoly game, only re-branded with the characteristics of a city, college, TV show or movie. Over the last decade or so there's been everything from Georgia Tech Monopoly to Star Wars, and even a Las Vegas version. To be honest, I've tended to stray away from anything except the original game because I'm the kind of person that gets completely thrown off by the name changes, not to mention any extra pictures on the board. You ought to see me play chess with non-standard pieces, I spend more time trying to figure out why Han Solo is the Queen and Leia is a Bishop. Maybe because Han Solo is a queen. Anyway, I've only played the Star Wars version of Monopoly before and I really didn't like it for the reasons stated above. I'm not a whiz at the game or anything, but I've played it enough to more or less memorize the base rent rates for the properties and stuff and when people were throwing out locations like the Sarlac Pit instead of say Baltic Avenue, I just couldn't process it in my head.

That being said, I figured I'd give the Transformers edition of the game a shot for two reasons. One, USAopoly decided to stick with the G1 Transformers characters and designs and considering the hype and spectacle being thrown about over the new movie I thought that was interesting, and two, for the first time (I believe) they've included alternate rules which I was insanely curious about. Like I said above, I've played my fare share of Monopoly and for the last 10 years pretty much every single time I've sat down to play, the game turns out the same way. See my friend Jeremy is a Monopoly nut and he's read all of the histories and strategy books, so it's gotten to a point where we tend not to play like the common family or friends would. There's hardly any trading, and every one of us adheres to the hard and fast rules, for instance, buy every property you land on even if you have to hawk your already purchased properties to do so. Keeping properties away from other players is the first key to winning the game. It's gotten to a point where the first person to get a natural Monopoly (landing on all two or three un-purchased properties in a set) usually wins, and since that is sort of rare we typically end the games in a stalemate. How we managed to turn Monopoly into tic tac toe is beyond me. So I was itching to find out what the new alternate rules were to see if they would enhance the playability of the game for my friends and I.

Okay, so what exactly am I reviewing here? Well here's the box...

My first impression when I saw the box art was instant joy that the designers at USAopoly chose to utilize the artwork from the 2002-4-ish Dreamwave revamp of the Transformers comic. Pat Lee and the artists in his studio at the time were doing some really great stuff with the original G1 characters and I remember being really jazzed by the super-realistic yet faithful anime influenced designs. For the cover of the game box the design department decided to lift the artwork from the first three issues of the first Dreamwave comic, which was kind of weird at first glance. At first I thought they combined both cover variants of issue one (each of which featured a group of either Autobots or Decepticons), but then I realized that Optimus and Bumblebee were both from other issue covers. Now I'm switching into super stupid geek mode for a second here, but I'm bringing this up because the mock up ended up being a little weird. First off, I believe there was already an error on the Decepticon variant of issue one (there were two Thundercrackers right next to each other instead of a Thundercracker and a Skywarp) and the designers kept this error even though they ended up breaking up much of the Autobot portion of the artwork, flipping or rearranging characters and adding additional artwork. You'd think they'd just Photoshop out the extra Thundercracker. Of course I could be wrong about the twin Thundercrackers to begin with (though I didn't think that Skywarp had the same paint applications as Thundercracker). I'm also being super stupid on this observation as it doesn't even reflect the game it self at all, but if I thought it was interesting (and considering how detailed into the universe the rest of the actual game gets, it was surprising) chances are that at least one other person will too, and all of the rest of you reading this can just suffer though and laugh at my stickler-ness. Since this paragraph is already ten miles long, I might as well add that they also shifted Omega Supreme's legs in the background from the Autobot's side to the Decepticon's, and honestly, I'm just happy that I can recognize that (seriously, I am so over compensating for my lack of detailed Transformers knowledge, which made me feel pretty dumb when I actually read a bunch of the flavor text incorporated into the rest of the actual game; gotta get my licks in where I can.)

Here's some of the artwork from the Dreamwave Comics for comparison's sake...

From the back of the box we can get a first glimpse of what the rest of the game looks like, as well as noticing the old school grid design which is nicely melded into the background, unlike how plain and lazy it looked on the commemorative Toys 'r' Us Transformers re-issues.

There's a nice close-up of what the pewter tokens look like here as well. It's a pretty standard mix of characters, Optimus and Megatron, which are pretty much required, Soundwave and Starscream rounding out the Decepticons, and Bumblebee and Jazz rounding out the Autobots. I was sort of hoping for a set of tokens that reflected the original Monopoly pieces, say a Ravage in place of the dog, a Sideswipe in car mode instead of the normal racecar, or Preceptor in microscope mode in place of the thimble (because every group of Monopoly players needs the guy who has to call dibs on the pointless piece, thank you Cliff from Cheers) but I'll take what I can get.

So what's in the box? Glad you asked.

Basically you've got your standard Monopoly fare, money, houses and hotels, the game tokens, property cards, chance and community chest cards, as well as dice, board, and a rulebook. The money tray is pretty basic and lacks the improvements that the regular game has made (e.g. molded slots for the various pieces and cards as well as the money) but that's pretty nit picky.

The board looks really snazzy wrapped with a ton of comic art including another huge group shot that is an amalgamation of various comic covers and pin-ups. All of the properties have been re-dubbed with Transformers universe locations and items, one of the more cleaver changes being the railroads switching to the Ark, the Nemesis, the Space Bridge and the Transwarp Drive. Actually, here's where my lack of in-depth knowledge of the extended Transformers universe lets me down a bit. Was there are Transwarp drive in the show or comics? Anyway, I actually like most of the property changes, though I think there were a couple missed opportunities here. For one, I think it would have been cool to have all of the Cybertron-related properties in a row, as if while playing the game you are going around the planet, and then off to another world, and for the most part this is the case, at least with Boardwalk (Cybertron) through the light purples. After that it jumps around a lot. Second, I think it would have been cool to have Unicron be Illinois Avenue so that there would have been a chance card that would send you there (actually it would have been even cooler to have Unicron as the Jail corner, but USAopoly never changes these.)  Either way it could have read something like, "Proceed on your way to oblivion..." or something. What's that, do I hear grasshoppers chirping? Anyone? Okay lets move on...

Here's a shot of what the tokens actually look like. They're kind of small, but for the most part you can tell the apart. Actually for being so small, they managed to mold in the faction symbols, so kudos for that.

Here's a shot of the money, which I think is really cool. The guys at USAopoly managed to make the bucks pretty by throwing in a lot of little details, character quotes and alt modes and such, which makes it a hell of a lot more interesting than the basic Monopoly money, and since it's presented in the standard Monopoly colors it's not distracting at all. If you're like me, you tend to count Monopoly money by color anyway.

The property cards are pretty standard on the front, but the designers added flavor text to the backs, which gives a short explanation of what the item or location is (which is pretty cool for guys like me who only recognize about half of this stuff.) For the most part, I think a lot of these locations are culled from the Dreamwave comics, though a lot of the more obvious ones are from the show and even a couple are from the U.S. Headmasters comics from the 80s. You'll also notice that the houses and hotels are re-dubbed Energon Cubes and Anti-Matter, which was a very nice touch.

Actually all of the small Transformers details in the game are what really make this re-branding of Monopoly very attractive to me. I mean the dice are even red and purple. It's attention like that which really shows that some love went into the design of the game. Even the box art being from the Dreamwave comics was an awesome choice.

One of the other cool little touches that might actually be distracting in game play is the addition of the tech specs encoding on the chance and community chest cards. The game comes with a little red plastic reader to decode the cards, all of which are just reworded versions of the basic chance and community chest cards, though they've worked in the characters who are on the cards into the wording. I say this can get distracting because after the first few times you're not going to want to have to decode the message. At least it's a creative and faithful gimmick.

By far the only real disappointment I had with the design of the game was on the houses and hotels, both of which are just re-colored versions of the basic molds. The reason that this is so disappointing to me is because they were re-branded into Energon Cubes and Anti-Matter, and I thought it would have been so damn cool if the Energon Cubes were little purple clear plastic cubes instead of looking like houses. I'm sure that for cost reasons alone, this is prohibitive; I mean they can just use the same mold for every variation of Monopoly that they produce. There might also be a stipulation in the license that requires that they use the "houses" and "hotels" molds, sort of like how they keep the corner pieces on the board the traditional Monopoly spaces (again, it might also be to keep some of the Monopoly iconography so the game appears to be Monopoly.) I just think it was a missed opportunity.

As far as game play is concerned, it's pretty much business as usual with the only difference being whether or not you closely adhere to the faction choice at the beginning of the game. Based on the playing token you choose you will either be an Autobot or a Decepticon. This only really takes effect if you choose to utilize the optional new rules. So what are these new rules? Well, when rolling doubles you now have two options. One, you can take you turn and then roll again as in classic Monopoly, or two, you can choose to "transform" and based on the set of doubles you rolled you can perform a "transformation" action, some of which are slightly different based on what faction you chose at the beginning of the game. After you perform that transformation action you do not get to roll again. Here are the new doubles options:

Double 1's: Move your token to any space.

Double 2's: Collect $200

Double 3's: If an Autobot, you can remove one energon cube from any Decepticon's property (you still have to conform to the even building rule.) The owner of the house does't get the money for it. If a Decepticon, you can remove one energon cube from any Autobot's property (you still have to conform to the even building rule.) The owner of the house doesn't get the money for it.

Double 4's: If an Autobot, Draw an Autobot card (this is where it sort of matters since the Chance and Community Chest cards are different.) If a Decepticon, draw a Decepticon card.

Double 5's: If an Autobot, collect $50 from every Decepticon. And vice versa.

Double 6's: Attack to control another player's property. The player chooses another player's property. Each player takes a die. The player who rolls higher takes or keeps control of the property. In case of a tie, re-roll. You can not try and break up an already completed Monopoly.

Like I said, depending on how hard and fast you stick to the whole faction thing some of these options either might not apply (if every one is on the same side), or might be limiting (if you are forced to pick chance or community chest when you might want the other.) At the end of the day though these rules can help to brighten up your standard Monopoly game. They're also weighted according to the standard Z distribution curve for dice combinations with the more powerful transformation actions on the lest rolled combos, double 1's and double 6's (since 2 and 12 are the least rolled numbers in the game.) And even though some of these actions can make or break a game, they are rare and as the game goes on, become less and less powerful, which only adds to playability. So even though a lucky bastard who rolls double 1's twice at the beginning of the game might get a monopoly sooner, in the long run there's just as much chance that some one will be able to attack them to break it up before it becomes a monopoly. The most commonly rolled doubles are 3's and 4's and these actions aren't that big of a deal, though interesting enough to pep up a game.

At the end of the day I was seriously impressed by how detailed this Transformers game is, branding-wise. For the novice fan who has nostalgia for the property, it's got a ton of info on the locations that you probably don't know which can add to the fun of the game for the first couple of plays. For the hardcore fan, it offers pretty design and enough faithfulness and legwork so that it won't seem too shallow or mainstream to be a part of a Transformers collection. For the Monopoly enthusiast who would like to try some alternate rules (beyond the more normal Free Parking house rules) than this is also worth a look.

Overall, I guess I'd have to give it a 7 out of 10.  As a derivative of Monopoly it doesn't offer much new, but it's cool enough that it's probably worth a Transformers fan time to check it out.

I'd suggest that if you are looking to pick up this game you might also consider picking up some of the new Robot Heroes figures, which I think will make much better player tokens than the relatively small pewter pieces. They even come in 2-packs with one Autobot and one Decepticon, so you'll have even choices for the two factions. Plus, they're just so damn cute, it can't help but enhance gameplay.

The game is available directly from USAoploy for around $35, but it's also available in larger stores including Amazon, Toys 'r' Us, Boardgames.com, or Funagain.com. I'm sure it's also available in the brick and mortar stores as well.

Hoover sent me a great link to a series of reviews by Fred Meyer (of Joe*Battlelines) on the new G.I. Joe 25th Anniversary line of action figures that are just now starting to hit store shelves. I mentioned them a little while ago, and I've been looking forward to them since I don't have any of my original figures anymore and because they looked to be very much in the vein of the Transformers Classics line, which was pretty awesome. From the promo pictures the figures looked amazingly detailed and appeared to be molded so that they are faithful to both the original character packaging artwork as well as coming pretty close to the designs on the original cartoon. Though some of the figures look better than others, I pretty much resigned myself to getting them all which was eventually made unavoidable since they're being packaged in special edition 5 packs, and I'm not sure if they're going to be available individually.

Fred Meyer has done a bang up job reviewing this new line of figures, which points to the line not quite seeming as cool as they did at first. It seems that there is a pretty large form vs. function issue with the figures in that Hasbro has ditched the O-ring design of the past 25 years in favor of a more realistic set of articulation points, that in the end seem to hinder movement and pose-ability which is sort of a backfire in design. Honestly, I'm typically not that much of a stickler for massive articulation, as it tends to make figures look all lanky and over-jointed, so I'm not sure if this is going to bug me as much. Actually, even though the molds are pretty darn awesome, I see a pretty big issue with the whole pivot-able head on top of a ball joint. From most angles it makes the jaws of the figures look like they are two feet long, or the necks elongated. Characters with helmets seem to be less effected by this design, but it's still noticeable. I'm sure when I see the actual figure it'll be much less of an issue as they're a lot smaller than they appear in most photos, but close up it's pretty ugly. In fact when you see the close-up photos there seems to be an odd texture to the plastic that makes the figures look weird, which once again I'm sure won't nearly be as much of an issue in the actual toy.

Anyway, if you want to check out the reviews, click on the figure below to be magically whisked away to some pretty fine action figure reviewing…

I noticed that a weird trend in comic book advertising at the beginning of the 80s, a concentration of BB gun ads. At first I didn’t think much of it, but as I stumbled upon more and more ads it seemed like they were becoming more and more disturbing. I'm certainly not anti-gun or anything, but these drawings of fathers snuggled up close to their sons who are intently aiming their Red Ryder's at some can or tree stump off panel is kind of weirdly creepy to me.


A couple of these Daisy ads feature former Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas and his son, and they aren't all that bad. There's some father-son bonding going on, very picturesque and it reminds me a lot of the relationship between Ralphie and his father in A Christmas Story. Ralphie just wants an Official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock, and this thing that tells time, and on Christmas morning, there it is behind the desk, carefully wrapped and hidden so that the mom wouldn’t know ('cause we all know he'll just shoot his eye out right.) I guess since I didn't grow up with guns, the imagery is just a little off for me.

Hell, I wanted a BB gun just as much as the next kid and I bothered my parents for one for years just like Ralphie. They finally succumbed when I was about twelve and picked up a cheap Marksman air pistol, a model that I bet a lot of kids were saddled with because of its price and how easy they were to find. I was in a state of rapture for months. Not only was it a pistol as opposed to a rifle (I'm more of a handgun guy when it comes to aesthetics I guess), but also it was solid metal and must have weighed like 4lbs which made it feel all the more real. Though I always sort of missed it having a "clip" that I could slam into place, I was unending impressed by the faux slide assembly style of cocking the pistol. You pulled back on the slide (though it was only on the back half of the pistol and not the entire length of the barrel) and had to push it back hard to compress a spring or something. It was actually a really horrible gun with seriously bad accuracy and cocking it required the combined strength of Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and a steroid enhanced puma, but I loved it nonetheless. So on the one hand I completely understand where these ads are coming from, but on the other the pictures and ideas presented just seemed wrong to me.


In this first Crosman ad there's nothing more going on than a kid cocking his trusty BB rifle as he stares down lovingly at it, but I think it's the gist of the ad that bugs me. The Crosman 788 BB Scout is apparently made for the kid who isn't old enough to operate a normal sized rifle. "Hey parents, if the kid can't handle it should he wait until he can, or should we make a designer version molded specifically for his little hands? Yeah, that's what we thought too, and that's why we're now considering a partnership with Tonka to make a tiny but durable molded plastic rifle, complete with carbine action and a 150 BB shot capacity." Can't let the toddlers run out of ammo, at least that's what my grandma used to say. Seriously though, it just seems weird to me to be modeling guns for kids too young to handle what is effectively a middle school aged kids weapon.


Then comes the craziness. Setting up a BB gun range in your living room or basement? Really? My mom wanted me to keep my pistol in the garage for crying out loud. Honestly the mom in that picture looks like she's quietly opposed to the whole thing. The ad does kind of have a nice "shoot your TV" kind of vibe to it though. "Hey Mom? You need to hole punch that piece of paper? Don't worry; I'll get it with trusty blue here! Pa-Ting!  Hey sis, that pimple still bothering you 'cause of your big date with Davy Jones from the Monkees? Don't worry; I'll shoot the puss out if it from 40 yards, I've been practicing on the dog! Heck, I'm getting so go with this thing I can change the channel and adjust the rabbit ears with it!!!"


For some reason the most disturbing ad for me is this last one with a father and son making camp and in the dark, by the fire the kid is wiping that gun down after a fine day's shootin', all decked out in the free Daisy swag he's managed to acquire. Like I said, I know this is probably just the stupid PC-ness of our modern society that's pervaded my thinking, but the picture is just creepy to me.


"I shot that can good Dad, didn't I"  "Yeah, son, you really pinged the hell out of it, I'm so so proud of you." Shudder. I guess it's sort of like watching that early first season episode of Dif'rent Strokes where Mr. Drummond has just punished Arnold and then Willis gets upset and runs to take a dip in the whirlpool. Mr. Drummond comes in, has a heart to heart with him and then there's a big make-up hug, a big half-naked, wet young boy and older adoptive father make-up hug that seems so wrong, even though at heart it really is sweet. The times they are a-changin'…

Obviously the main reason I began putting this site/blog/podcast (etc) together is my love of mulling over nostalgic memories and all the crap I had/wanted/loved as a kid. Well there is an aspect to this desire that is even more seductive than the nostalgia for stuff I had myself, the memories of things that my friends had that I always loved or wanted. When I think back on my collection of G.I. Joe figures versus the figures that my friends had I get more of a thrill thinking about their figures. Sure, I love my Storm Shadow, Dial Tone and Cobra Eels, yet on the other hand my friend Bryan had Barbecue, Scarlet and Gung Ho, which seem cooler because I never had them.

One of the other things Bryan had that I used to covet was a board game called Go For It, which was released by Parker Brothers in 1986 or so. My family had all of the basic games, Monopoly, Clue, Life and Scrabble, but I always wanted more. I remember back in the day you'd stroll into Toys 'r' Us and there would be a virtual wall of board games along one side of the store, floor to ceiling, and all of them were tempting. Risk, Castle Risk, Yatzee, Shoots and Ladders, Candyland, Operation, Trivial Pursuit, not to mention the million and one games based off of popular properties of the day, from M.A.S.K. to Goonies, E.T. to G.I. Joe, there were just so many seductive options. As it was my parents only really broke out the board games around Christmas, in particular on New Year's Eve when we'd eat shrimp, drink champagne (just a tiny glass for the kids) and play a mammoth game of Monopoly.

So, long story short, every time I'd go over to Bryan's house and we were trying to decide what to do my answer was always the same, "Lets break out Go For It." Basically it's the quintessential 80s "gimmie-gimmie, I want more" game of status and collecting stuff, which is basically the yuppie credo, and it's perfectly captured in the artwork that adorns the box…


I mean how much more 80s could you get? You've got airbrushed silk workout shorts, leg warmers, sweatbands, suburban mansions, wind surfing, solid gold singing, Ferrari driving, tennis playing, executives behind the desk, lush green lawns, and a little bit of Europe just to make things feel a little international. For me this evokes Wimbledon, John McEnroe, Olivia Newton-John getting physical, the Surfing fashion craze, Princess Dianna, hardly working at the office, Magnum P.I., and Life Styles of the Rich and Famous all rolled up into one awesome piece of cover art. If there were only some checkerboard, neon, and a Patrick Nagel painting in the background it would be perfect.


According to the back of the box this is the game where you can have it all by risking what you have to get what you want. How poetic is that. Sure it makes logical sense, but it sure as hell sounds a like sleeping to get to the top to me.

I managed to find a copy on eBay that was both in nice condition (it looked barely played with) and complete with all the pieces.


Here's what the game board looks like when you set it up. The board itself is based on the calendar year with 52 spaces, each representing a week of the year. Each player gets a birthday themed marker that is placed on the board in the spot of their actual birthday and stays there throughout the game. All the players use the same time marker piece to "move" around the board. In the middle there is a tray set up with all the crap you can acquire and then there is a section of the News cards at the top.


There are also 12 career cards that are shuffled face down and dealt, one to a player. Your career card lists how much you will earn throughout the game, though money is merely a means to an end and doesn't help you win the game. Each career card has six job levels, each defined by owning between 0 and 12 pieces of status (i.e. the cards that you acquire in the game), and you go up a level as soon as you get enough status.


Of the 12 career cards there are 6 different pay tiers ranging between a top pay of $175,000 and $200,000. The two lowest tiers include jobs in Broadcasting, High Technology, Publishing and Sports, which actually seems to be very out-dated, even for the 80s as Bill Gates and Tiger Woods would agree.


The middle range jobs include Advertising, Law, Finance and Fashion. The pay scales on the jobs is about 50%/50% on accuracy, but as you get into the better paid jobs a weird jump develops between 4 and 8 status cards that is pretty unrealistic, in the beginning you have a $25,000 jump, but by the last set of jobs you’re making a $75,000 dollar leap.


The best set of jobs consists of Music, Real Estate, Acting and Medicine, though the highest position on the best two is only $25,000 different than the lowest, and at the end of the day they are all high paying jobs. No janitors or mail clerks here.

Since a few of my friend's birthdays were coming up (as well as mine), and because we are all turning 30 this year we decided to get together and have a game day where we veg out to card and board games while overdosing on snacks and novelty soda and beer. I figured it would be a great time to relive the thrill of playing the game and a good opportunity to get some pictures for this review.


Basically the game goes like this. You start out with like $15,000 and then each player takes a turn rolling the dice, moving the time marker appropriately, and then reading out what is on the space and following the instructions. These spaces determine whether a player is allowed to buy status cards from the tray or other players, and then in particular what types of cards (there are fours different types of status cards, vacations, stuff, cars and homes.) The object of the game is to get a set of 12 cards, three different from each category (and by different I mean each card has to be worth a different amount, so say a $4,000, an $8,000, and a $16,000 set of vacation cards.) As you travel around the board (and throughout the "year") you get paid only once when you pass the Labor Day space. You use the money to buy the status cards and honestly after the first couple of turns around the board you'll have enough money to purchase mid-size countries in Europe so it's not a worry. When you feel that you have enough status to win the game you announce that you are "Going For It" when you pass Labor Day (any number of players can do this at the same time) and the game goes into a Clue like sudden death round where you play one more year and based on your prediction and the reality as you pass Labor Day again you'll either win as you thought, or have to pay a penalty for prematurely blurting out your intentions of being yuppie scum.


During game play there will be plenty of status swapping and stealing as well as plenty of ups and downs, most of which won't have anything to do with your money. There are special "News" cards that spaces will instruct you to pick up and play that mostly reward (with discounts on status or free status) and rarely punish the players (I mean we're in this for greed, but un checked and only rewarding greed.) There's also the whole birthday marker thing. Whenever a space is landed on that has a birthday marker, all the players must give one status card (or in the event they don't have one money) to the player whose birthday it is. So there is always status flying across the table. There's also an option to trade up any purchased status card by "Going For It" (see the theme yet?) where the player gambles the status card by rolling the dice, a 5 or lower and the card is lost, but with a 6 or greater you can trade the card in for one of greater value in the next column.


One of the things that I remembered the most about this game was the birthday markers, which were more or less birthday themed. There's a cupcake, a birthday hat, an ice cream cone, a present, a cake and, um, a slice of pizza? Yes, I guess the game designer (Charles Phillips, who also brought us Advance to Boardwalk, Free Parking and Castle Risk) was a big fan of hitting Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz on his birthday.


My favorite part of the game though, is of course the status cards. Even though I was only 9 when I was playing it there was something addictive about the idea of collecting trips to the Australian Outback, Pontiacs and $400,000 townhouses. Like I stated above there were four categories of crap you could get…


…my favorite of which was the Goin' Places cards. My goal each time I played was to get that Australian camping trip because I wanted to bag a koala to take home with me. This, of course, was followed by the Orient Cruise because I liked the splash of colors. I never wanted the Florida fishing trip because I lived in Florida at the time and it just seemed like a waste of money. The airbrushed art isn't quite as cool in these cards as it is on the box cover, but it's still pretty nifty.


It’s with the Feelin' Good status cards that you really get an 80s feel to the game, what with the $12,000 TV and VCR systems (did it ever cost that much, even for the best of the best?), leg warmers on the gym membership (if I ever paid $8,000 for a gym membership I think I'd kill myself), and a sweet new pastel wardrobe. Life is good.


Looking back, I'm slightly disappointed wit the Wheels status cards as it really doesn't quite capture that 80s car feel. Sure all of these cars scream the 80s (boxy Volkswagens, nondescript sedans, and Corvettes) but where are the true luxury cars? Where are the Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porches? Where are the BMWs? Where's my damn DeLorean?!? Sure the '57 Chevy was pretty big in the 80s what with Christine, Eddie and Cruisers and the rest of the weird 50s nostalgia that hit hard in the decade, but $30,000? I doubt it. It is kind of cool that there aren't like 600 SUVs here, just the one Jeep which is all I really remember in the 80s anyway.


With the House 'n Home status cards, even as a kid I knew there had to be something fishy about the $400,000 houses. A Ranch for $400,000? It better be made of solid gold.


Anyway, the game play is pretty balanced and when you get used to the idea of collecting status cards instead of cash it actually becomes kind of fun, especially in a dated ironic way. I'm glad I got a chance to play it again after 21 years, and now that I own it hopefully I'll be able to bust it out more often. Here are some scans of the rest of the game pieces, the money, News cards, the board broken up by month and the instructions as well as a couple more pieces of swell airbrushed 80s consumerist art. News Cards

Today was a very strange day. It started with my (now) wife and I trying our damnedest to get married while battling the crazy squid-like bureaucracy of Georgia and its many twisted tentacles of changing rules and absent judges. We had our research on the whole getting married thing done months ago as we're both anal and hate running into problems, and for once being prepared worked against us. The rules for what you'd need to get a marriage license changed exactly a month ago and there was no grace period. We needed two forms of IDs now instead of the one we were told we'd need, and the second forms were things we didn't have access to (passports or birth certificates) and today was the freaking day. We had it planned, it's our 7 year anniversary of being together (I'm slightly obsessed with 7 incase the image above wasn't enough of a hint) and it was the perfect day. Supposedly. Long story short, what should have taken us 30 minutes turned into a four hour marathon of driving from county to county acquiring a license, finding a judge, and getting everything together. We did it finally and we are now in blissful marriage mode.

Well being the dork that I am and knowing that some toys I've been craving for years (well officially for months, but before that these were my dream toys) were about to hit store shelves, we made a quick post wedding run to Wal-Mart to see if the new adorable Transformers Robot Heroes chibi figures were in. Oh they were in...


There were six sets on the pegs, the five above and a Mirage/Starscream pack, and I bundled them all up in my arms very lovingly as we made our way to the check out counter. I was so happy until Carrie scanned the first one at the self-serve check out lane and an error message came up on the screen. "Item restricted for purchase." What the blue blazers fuck does that mean? I was thinking that since they were so new that maybe they hadn't been entered into the system. We called the cashier over and she tried it and then took them all from us with no explanation. WTF?!? I followed her after a second and asked what was up and she just said these are restricted. I asked to see a manager and she led us over to a customer service guy who look frazzled and overworked and who didn't appear to give two licks off a rats ass what our problem was. She kept repeating restricted and he just said that it was probably a recall and that he was sorry but he couldn't sell them to us.

I started to form an argument about how I'm an adult and that there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to buy them when I just gave up because at the end of the day he works at Wal-Mart and he honestly doesn't care if I live or die or pitch a fit because I can't have my stupid little plastic toys. I don't think I've ever had something like this happen to me, I mean it's pretty stupid and I know that eventually I'll be able to buy these dumb toys until my bank account is completely depleted, but it still irked the living hell out of me. Apparently either Mr. Hasbro or Mr. Sam Wal-Mart doesn't want me to own these yet.

As a stupid P.S. to this I looked up Hasbro recalls online and there are none listed for these toys.

The fantabulous Bubblegum Fink passed along a link on his blog to an awesome site filled with G.I. Joe packaging art and file cards called the Art of Joe Online. It's limited to 1982-1985 which covers the majority of the first wave (when the art had that kick ass burst of flame behind the characters as opposed to the later art which had the weird pixilated digital fire burst) of action figure and vehicle packaging art as well as art from puzzles and some of the book and catalog covers. The cheeky bastard(s) has/have also hidden other G. I. Joe art databases within the pages. If you click on the 'About' link on the front page there's a list of easter egg hints. I only managed to find a couple, apparently knowing IS only half the battle as I couldn't figure out the hints, but it was fun nonetheless.  You can click on Mr. Cobra Eels to join the hunt...

The woman and I decided this past weekend to "do it up right", by which I mean that I practically forced her out of the apartment on an adventure to a flea market in the middle of nowhere followed by her choice of fun eating establishment, namely Stevie B's pizza buffet (which is like the unloved smaller cousin of Chuck E. Cheese with a lot less games and a lot more weird pizza toppings.)

I sought out the flea market in hopes of finding some fun gems from the 80's but didn't really find anything. There was one stand that had a bunch of comics and a few magazines. The comics were so mixed up that it was way too much of a chore to look through them, though I did find an issue of Marvel's Alf for $0.50, so I snagged that. I found a couple Starlogs from the early 80's with articles on the Dark Crystal and V, so I'm sure I’ll be sharing those in the coming months. Other than that it was a bust though, so I left feeling like I'd never find anything cool from my childhood, at least not this particular weekend.

When we hit Stevie B's my only expectation was weird ass pizza and some ghetto skee ball. As far as pizza goes, we hit the jackpot. On the buffet were no less than five weird ass pizzas including, baked potato pizza (slices of baked potato, bacon, and cheddar cheese with a sour cream-esque sauce), taco pizza (slasa base topped with ground beef, cheddar cheese, black olives and lettuce), nacho pizza (same as the taco pizza with no lettuce and a lot more corn tortilla chips), mac & cheese pizza (think pizza crust topped with mac & cheese and then topped with mozzarella cheese), and for dessert, Boston cream pie pizza (let your imagination run wild.) Definitely cheered me up.

I was coasting on semi-terrible yet amazingly fun pizza when we hit the tiny game room in the back, hoping that the Galaga machine was at least still there, when I saw them. Two boys were cashing in their meager strings of prize tickets for these little red and yellow envelopes that contained a blast from my childhood. Power Prop Flying Gliders. The day was now complete.


I must have won a hundred of these fragile Styrofoam WWII gliders from Chuck E. Cheese, Showbiz pizza, and the couple of arcades I went to as a kid. Out of all the bins of plastic spider rings, crayons, little plastic jumping frogs, super bounce balls, fake plastic moustaches and pixie sticks, the Power Prop Flying Gliders looked like the best possible option, the winner of the beauty pageant that was cashing in tickets for prizes. It was like the Wheel of Fortune back in the 80's when you'd spend your loot on the crap residing in the rooms on the spinning platform, and the gliders were always the first choice, with a spider ring thrown in to spend out the ticket change.

As you can see from the scan above, they really are simple as hell. One body with two slits punched in it for the wings and tail rudders, one plastic weight (and propeller holder), and one propeller and pin.

I managed to get enough tickets on crappy skee ball and this weird "shoot a token into a hole via a ski slope" game to get three of these gliders. These are exactly as I remember them, down to the styles and packaging. I'm not sure if these were a product of the 80's or if they were gliding through parking lots and crowded birthday parties in the 60's and 70's as well, but I haven't seen on in almost 25 years.

I left it up to the lady at the ticket counter to pick out my three gliders because I wanted to be surprised, and she did a pretty good job picking. Not only did I not get a duplicate, but I also got one of three different WWII factions, America, Japan, and Germany. She also managed to pull out one of my favorite designs, the EOCKE Wulf TA 152H, better known in my simple mind as the purplish, blue-red one with the German symbol on it.


After a quick scan of the available designs on the back, the Wulf is the one I'd choose first every time. So yea, me. When I got home and constructed them I went through the same range of emotions that I probably went through as a child, that it felt too light and skimpy to actually fly and then the amazement of watching it soar along my apartment hallway when it did in fact fly very well.

When I was a kid I always wanted one of those large sturdy Styrofoam airplanes that people were always demo-ing in the mall, the all white ones with the blue and red stripes down the side and a penny inserted into slits on both sides of the nose to give it weight. They would always do these awesome loop-de-loops in the open air of the mall and it fascinated me, though they were a bit steeply priced for what they were and I invariably ended up with the flying gliders that I'd score at Chuck E. Cheese instead. In the end, I'm glad I did.


All in all it made for a nice capper to a fun weekend.

See Hoov, I learn from my mistakes eventually...

Nala over at Plastic Crack tipped me off to a new line of G.I. Joe Classics 3.75" 25th anniversary figures that Hasbro will be releasing soon.  On the tail of the Transformers Classics line this is both cool and probably a hazard to my bank account.  I especially dig the Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes figures, but the basic Cobra Trooper and Scarlett are pretty bad ass.  Here are a load of pictures from the new line…










The Baroness is pretty good, but her glasses just look awful.  Maybe on the actual figure they'll look a little better…


The Destro figure is pretty awesome too.  I love that the guns fit in the holsters and junk.


Dukes pretty boring, but then again, Duke is pretty boring, so no surprise there.






So what's next, a 20th anniversary edition of the Masters of the Universe flick and an uber cool toy line to go with it?  Nevermind…

Finally, after years of putting it off, I broke down and bought the entire V television series on DVD, both the mini-series (including the Final Battle) and the regular TV series.  It's one of those things that I've been meaning to make my fiancee sit down and watch, but it's hard to get someone to commit to 27+ hours of TV, especially when they think it's going to suck and take a day away from a life that could be spend doing anything else.

Anyway, for me (and a lot of other geek/nerd/dorks who grew up in the 80's) V was the next best thing to Star Wars, which is probably the best way to describe anything Sci-Fi related in the late 70s and early 80s (e.g. Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rodgers, the Last Starfighter, etc., etc., etc.), and was the closest thing to a huge cultural TV event that I experienced first hand in the 80s.  I remember watching it every time it was on TV either first run or later re-run on Saturdays on the more local channels, and then being so jealous of my friend Jeremy who had a copy of both the original mini-series and the Final Battle on VHS recorded from when he was living up in Route Island.

My family didn't have a VCR when it was aired originally, so I never had a copy of my own when I was a kid, but I did have the next best thing (at least in my weird young brain), the official V action figure.  But lets be honest and call it what it really was, a doll.  It says action figure on the original package, but in a time where the standard for action figures was between 4 to 6 inches, the V doll just didn't fit in (unless you assumed that all alien races were three stories tall like the Zentradi in Robotech.  In fact if you were lucky enough to have some of the Indiana Jones figures you could probably have this figure mixed in as the result of the Nazi's contact with the alien visitor race and the Zentradi, and Harrison Ford still would have beat the crap out of them.)



As far as dolls go though, the V figure was pretty cool.  Not only did he come with a removable head mask (yet another in a long line of awesome figures with removable headgear), but he also had a pretty darn accurate laser gun (I've always loved the design on the V laser), nifty sunglasses and tongue flicking action.  This was no Ken doll.



The only thing this doll was lacking that would have made it the best doll ever are shock trooper accessories like characters have on in the pictures printed on the box.  I mean a doll with a removable head mask as well as a cool black helmet would be like four times as cool.  Add to that a black vinyl Michael Jackson vest and attachments that made the laser pistol into a rifle and were talking male doll nirvana.



It's a mystery to me how a lot of my toys became lost to time, but the destruction of my V doll is pretty much burned into my memory.  Actually destruction is the wrong word as it was more of a dissection.  I was pretty good about taking care of most of my toys, but some just were not meant to last.  I think I had the V doll for a couple of weeks before the head mask started to tear.  There is a slit on the back of it from the neck up to the middle of the hairline so you can open it wide and put it on the figure's lizard head.  Well every time you do that the rubber on the mask would tear a little because it isn't slit far enough up.  But when you start a rip in rubber it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.  The next thing I knew it was all the way up and over to the hairline in the front so that the mask would stay on properly anymore and needed the sunglasses (which wrapped around the entire head) to keep it on.  My mask also had a thin spot of rubber on the front where a bubble got into the mold, thin enough so that the green skin would sort of show through like on some of the TV episodes.  This was cool at first but then it broke and now I had a new rip in the rubber that was spreading.

At this point I just threw the mask away, I mean the lizard head underneath was cooler anyway right?  Well at some point in the next few weeks I started getting curious about how the tongue mechanism worked.  I had already ditched the mask so I think at this point I was ready to give up on keeping the figure intact, and decided to do an autopsy to really see how this figure worked.  In the end the figure was in about 15 pieces and was relegated to the trash when it just didn't interest me anymore.

I've always sort of regretted taking the figure apart, especially as the years went by because I realized that the figure was actually kind of rare.  There wasn't all that much V merchandise made (at least not in the USA, apparently there was a ton produced in Argentina) and because it was so unlike the rest of my toys I had a soft spot for it in my heart.  While looking for 80s stickers on eBay recently I stumbled upon a guy who pretty much specializes in selling V figures.  I guess he lucked into like 10 cases of old store stock or something and he sells them mint in box at varying prices depending on how yellowed or otherwise damaged the plastic on the box is.  I decided to break my rule of not replacing my old toys this once because the figures are basically new, and picked one of the cheaper ones up.

When I got it in the mail after I got back from my vacation in Florida I was torn.  I knew I wanted to write this article on the figure, but I wasn't sure if I should keep the figure in the box (in case I wanted to re-sell it or just for posterity's sake) or if I should rip it open and have some fun with it.  In the end, like I've always done and probably will always do, I opened the figure.  I have some weird internal thing that prevents me from keeping toys in their original packaging.  It's like the toys can't breathe or are frozen in carbonite and I have to rescue them.  I had a friend when I was 10 or so who kept all of his Transformers mint in the packages, and even though he's probably a plastic crack dealing millionaire now I have to wonder if a small part of his childhood is dead to him now.



Besides, the plastic on the packaging was getting pretty darn yellow and brittle and didn't look all that good on a shelf because of it.  It just looked dirty.



Now that he's liberated from the confines of his yellowy plastic prison he looks a lot cleaner and happier, though I'm sure the happy bit can be attributed to his god awful evil Nazi smile.



That is actually one of the more disturbing things about this figure in fact.  LJN based this figure on the alien Visitor propaganda posters that you see in the mini-series (made popular by that scene where Abraham Bernstein (Leonardo Cimino who played Scary German Guy in the Monster Squad) spray-paints a big "V" for victory over a Nazi looking visitor who has his arms around some young kids and grand parents.  It's pretty much your basic Aryan Nazi stereotype, which is actually the basis for the V series to begin with (the mini-series started out as an alternate 1980 where a new fascist regime comes to power and eventually the producers wanted to make it into a sci-fi film instead.)



This was the only style of V doll that was made, though I've heard rumors of a Diana doll and a proposed line of smaller figures and vehicles that were never produced.   It's kind of weird when you think that they only made the one figure, a very Nazi-esque figure and no good guys (I guess because a Marc Singer figure doesn't have sweet tongue lashing action capabilities), that kids would be sort of just goose stepping along with this toy.   Like that one shady kid down the block that had one Skeletor figure and he used to play "torture my sister's stuffed animals" with him, cackling in a high pitched laugh.







Even though the figure is kind of weirdly disturbing, I'm glad I bought it again.  It's actually kind of cool to have something like this back from my childhood, and I can totally see how easy it would be to get swept up in trying to buy everything back.  Luckily I have a pretty high threshold for the amount of money I'm willing to spend on stuff like this so I doubt that I'd be willing to plunk down much money on the hobby.  Since most of the other toys I was into usually fetch about $75-$100 on eBay for mint in package figures I don't think my collection is going to grow all that much.   That's alright though, I'll just sit and watch my cat chew on this one content in the knowledge that some anal fanboy is getting the shivers as if someone walked over his mint in package grave.

Talking about Transformers, I just recently stumbled upon a new line of toys from Hasbro that I have just fallen in love with.

Before I get to that, let me preface this by saying that I loved me some Transformers when I was a kid, but I never had that many. At least it felt like that at the time. I guess I had my fare share, though most of them were either the small figures like Cliffjumper, Warpath, and Brawn, or the slightly larger figures that would combine to form a larger robot like the Technobots (which formed Computron.) I had a few of the regular sized figures, though I got most of these through trading with the exceptions of Sideswipe and Ironhide.

Since there were like six hundred thousand other figures I wanted in the toy line it quickly became a product that I coveted and obsessed over. Later in high school when I had a little bit of my own spending money I splurged a little on some of the Generation 2 repaints (I was so happy to get a complete Devastator I tell you what) but I was very unhappy with the paint schemes (too neon and gaudy, I mean who wants a set of multicolored Dinobots anyway?) Then Beast Wars came out and totally ruined my hunger for Transformers. I just wasn't into the animal/robot thing, with the exception of the Insecticons and Dinobots, which were a lot cooler and just don't count since they're G1.

For years after that I kept hoping that Hasbro would just go back to making vehicle oriented Transformers, but it never happened, at least not to my liking. When Armada came out a few years ago I was excited until I actually watched the cartoon and wanted to strangle myself to make it stop. I just haven't liked the direction the toys have gone in. Even when the Alternators came out a couple years ago I wasn't all that jazzed because by that time I just wanted the original toys to be re-released (which did happen, and still is, Soundwave comes out in December as a Toys 'r' Us exclusive, but even those were hampered by the prohibitive $40 price point.) I got a temporary reprieve when the re-issues were marked down to $5, a price I was more than happy to pay, though a lot of the cooler figures were gone by then (no Starscream for me.)

Well, last month when I was out at Target just browsing the toy aisles at lunch I noticed a peculiar set of TF packaging amongst the rest of the toys. They're called TF Classics, and I am in love with pretty much every single figure I've seen. Now I'm far from a fanatic when it comes to toys. I know pretty much when new stuff comes out and I'm more familiar with the toy aisle at most stores that say a birthday gift hunting mom or your basic store clerk, but I couldn't tell you the difference between an Armada figure vs. an Energon figure to save my life. I'm just not that into it anymore. I guess my nerdy fandom is a lot more general these days.

Anyway, I loves me some Transformers Classics and here's why. For my money they are the perfect blend of classic G1 characters and updated designs that don't make the figure seem different enough to warrant a different name (like Armada Sideswipe.) Now I understand that, for example, not every fan wants his Sideswipe to be a red Lamborghini or some such thing, but I do and that's just all there is to it. With the Classics line Hasbro has re-imagined the characters so that they pretty much resemble their G1 counter parts, but are just a little more modern. What struck me first was how character accurate the head molds were. Take Bumble Bee for instance, his head on the original toy was a small flat-ish alien looking head glued to a flat piece of plastic that looked nothing like he did on the show. The Classics figure does it's best to represent the original cartoon design. Here's the comparison:

Cartoon


G1 toy (a little alien what with the Optimus Prime mouth plate and the slanted single eye visor)


TF Classics head mold


I think this is pretty freaking awesome. If nothing else, for once it shows that the designers had the original fans at heart, even if his vehicle mode isn't a VW Beetle. I've read that this toy line is sort of tied into the 20th anniversary release of the Transformers movies on DVD, reviewed below, so that makes a lot of sense. As far as re-imagining the vehicles and robot mode body styling and stuff, the designers haven't strayed too far, at least not far enough that the character isn't recognizable or anything (they've kept the feel of the personality of the characters) and honestly some of the figures in the line are better than others, but overall it's exactly what I've wanted out of a new Transformers toy line for the last 15 years.

The designers have even gone so far as to make the Classics Megatron a gun again (which I think it the first time since the original toy came out.) I will say that he is the worst off in the new line of toys though, with a hideous Nerf color scheme and design that makes me cringe. I realize that they probably couldn't make him look too much like a real gun, but did they have to mold him out of green (not visible in the pictures below, but it's there trust me) and purple plastic? There is an awesome custom repaint of the figure floating around on ebay though that illustrates that the mold really isn't the problem, it's the butt ugly color scheme. Kudos to the guy who did the repaint, it's freaking fantastic.






So far there are 13 or so figures in the line, 8 of which are available now in stores. Tformers.com has an awesome database of the overall line. The figures so far are Optimus Prime, Megatron, Ultra Magnus, Rodimus (actually Hot Rod, but oh well, what's in a name anyway), Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Grimlock, Mirage, Starscream, Ramjet, Skywarp, Astrotrain, The Constructicons, and my personal favorite Jetfire. Nala over at Plastic Crack has a great review of Jetfire up with some pictures that he took that would put mine to shame.

Jetfire is the only figure that I've purchased so far, and I got to say that I love him to death. I had a tenth generation hand-me-down G1 Jetfire for a while that I loved literally to pieces. He started out with a broken shoulder, and just continued to fall apart from there. I remember wanting him back so badly in high school when I finally discovered the Robotech cartoon. The new Classics version is pretty freaking badass and has pretty much everything I'd ever want out of a Transformer. He comes with a battle helmet (and we all know how much I love figures with removable helmets), has an overall look that is pretty much reminiscent of the original without being a blatant Valkyrie rip-off (including super mode red booster jet pack), and is pretty amazingly pose-able for a Transformer toy. There are a ton of working parts and it's been designed so that everything fits real well together and won't wear out (unlike the original.)

The price point on the figures isn't that bad either with the normal figures at $10, and the deluxe figures at $20. I've put 'em on my Christmas wish lists, so here's hoping they are deposited under my tree in 26 days.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that this line also brought back the heat sensitive Autobot and Decepticon logo stickers, fan-freaking-tastic!

So I thought I'd cover an easy topic, nostalgia wise for today.  I'm all full of dim sum and kind of drowsy.

Absotutely-positimibly my favorite toys growing up were G.I. Joe figures and vehicles.  I was weaned on the Star Wars 3.75" figures and I have a butt-load of He-Man figures, but G.I. Joe was where it was motherfucking at for a seven year old in the 80s.  I had a whole mess of 'em too, mostly because the figures were cheaper than Transformers or pretty much any other action figures at the time.

Most of the nostalgia I have for the figures and vehicles involves the little odd things, like how the figures would get soap caked into their backpack hole and the peg holes on their feet when I took 'em into the bath with me, or how all the figures ended up having this bite indentation on the thumbs where I would bite down to make them have a stronger grip on guns and stuff.  In fact I was a pretty weird kid when it came to playing with toys anyway.  I didn't really play as much as set up elaborate scenes in the living room using the TV stand as the hidden Cobra base and the couch as a vast mountain range.  Then after surveying all that I had set up would then tear it all down and set it up somewhere else, possibly in the kitchen under the table or in the study on the bookshelves.

Another aspect I find mildly amusing about collecting the figures as a kid is that I had this really weird system of favorites.  Any figure in water or diving gear, any figure with a beret or any figure with a face mask (like the stocking kind that covered everything but the eyes) were automatic favorites.  So Cobra Eels pictured above, Dial Tone, Storm Shadow, and Beach Head were prized possessions.

Now I definitely had a lot of figures, but I only had a handful of vehicles.  In fact I only wanted one in particular, the G.I. Joe Sky Striker, but alas by the time Christmas came around the year I could actually get it, it was out of print.  Instead my parents decided to buy me something else, something that would both shock and amaze friends and family alike, the U.S.S. Flagg.  This was six feet of room swallowing toy glory.  It took the place of the dining room table for a good three years and became an instant toy boy where I would pile up all my figures and vehicles.  Because it was so big we never moved it and when we finally moved from Florida to New Hampshire in 1990 we dismantled it and it was never reassembled again.

Anyway, here is a great website where you too can relive all your G.I. Joe memories, it was invaluable when I was first searching for images and stuff for my personal collection.