Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Mini Monster Mash

Who doesn’t love monsters? And by monsters I’m referring to those iconic ones like Dracula, Frankenstein, the werewolf, etc. Ok truth be told…when I was younger…I was terrified of werewolves…but that’s beside the point. When I was a kid some of my favourite tv shows starred many of these monsters. Now at the risk of actually revealing how old I am, I figured it would be a fun exercise to look back at some of my old favourite monster shows…
so without further ado, let’s start with….

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

A Fondness for Male Sheep

One of the main reasons why the original He-Man & The Masters of the Universe toy line was so successful was because of the relatively resourceful method they employed for making toys for all their numerous characters. Two words: Shared Parts. Look at almost every Masters figure and you will notice that almost 90% of them share the same crotch/furry underwear piece. Over 90% have the same body structure. And when it comes to arms, feet and so on, you will usually find only a few variations of each scattered amongst hundreds of figures. More often than not, the only unique items each character would have were their head sculpts, armor and weapons, and even a good number of those were used at least more than once!

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Hawking It Up To Nostalgia

When I first decided to go all out on collecting the 25th Anniversary G.I.Joes way back in 2009, I gave myself ONE restriction. I told myself that I would collect whatever figures I wanted from the toy line BUT I would stay away from getting any vehicles. My reasoning was simple, first, I wanted to keep my toy spending down (yeah right!) and second, I literally didn't have much display space for larger scale toys. Four years later, Joes have remained a major part of my collection and for the most part, I have managed to follow my self-imposed rule. Every now and then I would find myself getting a smaller scaled vehicle (like a motorcycle or a single manned cannon) in order to get a particular figure that came packed with it. But yeah, I managed to stay away from anything bigger. That is until this year when the bastards at Hasbro decided to release this baby….

Friday, August 9, 2013

The Perfect (Sand)Storm

In 2013, Hasbro released a proper modern update to the Transformer Springer. Unlike the past “updates” to the original G1 toy, this wasn’t just a simple repaint of another character. This was a true triple changing Springer with all three modes nicely executed. But more importantly, it was an all-new design that wasn’t previously used for an older character. This was 100% all Springer. Or so we thought….