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February 7, 2009

New Gods

Filed under: Toys — fairplaythings @ 12:25 pm

Admittedly I’m a little schizophrenic when it comes to action figures. While in general I am a big fan of lines that offer similar dimensions, scales and sizing (think G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero, DC Super Powers, or Justice League Animated), I can be completely won over by the right subsets within long-running toy lines that have no continuity in scale or focus to the rest of the collection (TF:A Activators and Transformers Action Masters are good examples here).

So it is with the current crop of DC figures. On the one hand, I love the Mattel line of DC Universe figures, a line so long in coming, because they offer the right level of detail, articulation and (very importantly) scale and continuity. On the other hand, I have a much more nuanced view of DC Direct. Due to its longevity, its figures have improved in terms of variety and quality, but the result is that early models like Sandman don’t fit in with more recently releases like Geo-Force. More importantly, DC Direct is not beholden to a single unified style, with the result that its releases can be all over the map, and range from brilliant to terrible.

For every Identity Crisis figure flop, there is a Ed McGuinness-styled Superman/Batman win.

So it is we come to DC Direct’s interpretation of Jack Kirby’s New Gods. I absolutely fell in love with this line when it was advertised fro its April 2008 release. I felt it really captured Kirby’s style, in a way that DC Direct had mirrored the style of the New Frontier for that line. When the first wave arrived on shelves, I eager bought all four figures (Darkseid, Lightray, Mr. Miracle and Orion). And the only minor complaints I’ve had about this line owe to the stability of the plastic (something that is becoming a problem in a lot of superhero figures) and the inclusion of mother boxes that don’t quite naturally rest in the figures hands. Minor complaints really.

You can imagine then that I was overjoyed to hear there would be an expansion of this line in February 2009. The second wave (Kalibak, Big Barda, Superman, and Metron) arrived this week. And… I was surprising underwhelmed.

Let me start with the highlight of this wave, which absolutely has to be Big Barda. Although it would have been nice if she had been scaled to tower a bit over her Mr. Miracle, she is just a joy to behold. The perfect accessory and the perfect head sculpt make her a must have addition.

But beyond her, the rest of the line runs into significant difficulties. Metron is just not Metron without his chair. Why DC Direct didn’t find a way to offer a chair through a special promotion (through a mail-away offer or an external forum like Wizard), or offer a deluxe version of the figure that came with this all important accessory is beyond me. So while the figure itself is good, it’s just wrong to have Metron standing DC Universe version. Lastly, I can’t tell if I can’t get behind old Supes because I don’t feel he fits the motif of the line or because I find the face sculpt so unappealing.

beside his fellow New Gods. Although there is really nothing aesthetically wrong with Kalibak, in short shorts, I just can’t get motivated to add this loser to the collection. Which is strange given how much I like the

Admittedly, my qualms about Kalibak and Superman are more a matter of personal taste than anything else. They both reflect the appropriate Kirbyesque style and blend in with the line. However, I couldn’t justify the expense in either case and I left both to sit on their pegs, while bringing Barda and a chair-less Metron home. Certainly, Metron offers me the challenge of coming up with some kind of stylized chair for him, and I’ll put my thoughts to that in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I must say I would like to see a third wave of four figures. I think seeing a similar style Desaad, Forager, High Father and Granny Goodness would really make excellent additions to the line, although I expect a third line would likely substitute a Batman for commercial viability.

January 31, 2009

1985, Childhood’s End

Filed under: Toys, nostalgia — Tags: — fairplaythings @ 8:39 pm

Even though I attended a small school where all grades from primary to grade twelve were in the same building, there was a psychological break between grades six and seven. What in really wasn’t that big of a deal felt enormous at the time. We’re only moving between school ending in late June and school returning in early September. And yet it seemed to mark this huge change, make this big difference.

Grade six was for children. Grade seven was for adults. Or adults as seen through the eyes of twelve year olds.

Twelve years old was also perceived by many as the age in which boys put down their toys and picked up with girls. To risk doing otherwise was to risk stigmitizing one’s self as a child, and one ran the risk of having that stigma remain for one’s entire high school career. And who really wanted to do that.

In 1985, I was twelve years old.

What this meant was that the toys I got for Christmas 1984 — notably the G.I.Joe Killer Whale and the Decepticons Soundwave and Buzzsaw (my first transformers) — were meant to be discarded within eight short months. Well, not meant as much as predestined. To do otherwise was to risk the above mentioned stigma.

So I went underground.

Now that was actually quite easy for me to do. The only toy line I really collected and really connected with was G.I.Joe. Micronauts were just outside my time horizon (although I had a few pieces) and Star Wars seemed lacking because of the absence of joints. But I was all about G.I.Joe, mainly because my buddies (exactly one grade behind me in school but within a six house radius of mine) were all about G.I.Joe. And because my buddies were still a year younger than me, it was relatively easy to continue to pick up a few pieces here and there and fully enjoy my G.I.Joes. I even still got toys for Christmas the next year, notably the G.I.Joe Tactical Battle Platform (if there was ever a toy that encouraged kids to want to work on an oil platform, this was it!) and the Cobra Moray.

And then we were in 1986, and my G.I.Joe days were truly done.

In 1986, my younger friends hit the point I was suppose to have hit, and I actually didn’t feel much like playing with toys anymore. Others who I knew had gone undercover as well (one friend in particular had been inspired to buy the entire line of Coleco’s Sectaurs figures) lost their taste for it. So I carefully wrapped up my G.I.Joes and put them into storage (avoiding the familiar pattern of either blowing them up with a fire cracker or selling them at yard sales for a quarter a figure). And promptly forgot about them until today.

Okay, that’s all true except for the promptly forgetting about them part. Instead, I quietly got hooked on Transformers. But that’s a story for another day.

January 26, 2009

Mighty Mugged?

Filed under: Toys, Transformers, munny — fairplaythings @ 5:39 pm

Oh Hasbro… how can you get the Mighty Mugg Jazz so right and Shockwave so wrong! The laser is too big and what is with the painted-on ears? Nothing, that’s what.

January 16, 2009

Droid factory and the fight for freedom

Filed under: Toys, nostalgia — Tags: — fairplaythings @ 6:13 pm

Upload care of www.toybender.com

I was never a Star Wars collector. Oh I liked the AT-AT of course, and the Falcon and the weird Tatooine-based, non-movie Stormtrooper transport (damn you Marvel Comics and your intoxicating cartoon advertisements!), and I really wanted to get my hand on my parent’s friends’ kid’s Tie-Fighter, but I had very few toys from the line itself. I was more impressed with the Micronauts (for which the Battlecruiser was my pride and joy, even if an incident with my foot separated the left rear wing from its peg on the very Christmas day it came into my possession) and Shogun Warriors (which I never seemed to be able to get as presents).

Really, I never played with that many memorable toys as a kid growing up. It was not until the unholy combination of (a) Hasbro decision to release a military-based line of 3 3/4″ figures in 1982 with super poseability and really cool details, and (b) my two best friends of the day decided they were also going to be completely swept up by the line, so much so that we could spend pretty much every afternoon after school for two years playing out elaborate military scenarios.

And knowing is half the battle.

Uploads care of www.toybender.com

Uploads care of www.toybender.com

Anyway, back to Star Wars. It was impossible not to have a few Star Wars toys. I had a Boba Fett (one I certainly do not misremember firing its missile) and a Hoth-suited Han Solo. I had the die-cast Cloud City ship and Snowspeeder. And I had the Droid Factory. Seeing it on the ActionFigureOfTheDay certainly brought back memories. And I can attest for certain that:

  • yes, it was really freakin’ cool to have the only R2-D2 available with a third leg, and
  • every so often to this day, I find those little bitty bits that constituted the set, even if the majority of the set is long gone.

(Apologies to www.toybender.com for the theft of the print ads.)

Adieu KB

Filed under: Toys, Transformers — Tags: — fairplaythings @ 12:51 am

Action Figure News and Toy Review (Feb 1997)

Action Figure News and Toy Review (Feb 1997)

I’ve been thinking a lot about KBToys, since word came in that they were liquidating and closing their doors for good. But working on the calendar really brought things to the surface.

The reaction in the Transformers community seemed to be a sense of smug satisfaction, that the chain’s prices were too high and they brought this upon themselves.

I know little of KBToys’ day-to-day operations (since the chain does not exist in Canada), so I cannot speculate about specific business practices. But I do know a bit about toy pricing.

It’s really hard for a specialty store to compete with the generalist, particularly one as big as Wally-Mart, under normal conditions. When your bread and butter are toys and games, it becomes even more difficult because the big box stores use your main product as a loss leader, selling at a loss to bring in customers to buy their clothes and groceries and other merchandise through which they can profit.

So while it might ultimately be the store’s fault, I would not jump to that conclusion off the bat. And I wouldn’t be smug about it either. In the end, when a specialty toy chain like KBToys falls, we are all the losers because there is less choice and opportunity in the marketplace. And that’s seldom a good thing.

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