Toy Review: Marvel Select Hulk (The Avengers movie)

After watching the awesome spectacle that is The Avengers, I rushed out to my local Toys R Us to pick up some toys... and I was thoroughly disappointed. The line was limited to the 4" scale, some figures had crappy paint apps, and the assortment was lacking with no Black Widow, Hawkeye, or Chitauri to be found. Fortunately, I did discover that two 6" lines would be available: one from Hasbro and another from Diamond Select. And Hulk, given his performance in the movie, was the clear choice to start my Avengers action figure team. But which to choose.. the Hasbro or Diamond Select version?

Toy Review: Nickelodeon Slime!

The 80's had its share of weird fads but one of the weirdest was slime, driven by gross-out shows like Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That On Television and Double Dare. Maybe kids liked the disgusting randomness of getting slimed because it was so unconventional compared with the normal constrictions of daily life. Maybe getting slimed was just comedic, like getting hit in the face with a pie. Whatever the reason, it was a decade of slime.

Toy Tribute: Playmates Captain Picard (non-4.5" scale)

I've covered the 4.5" Star Trek: The Next Generation line from Playmates ad nauseam. Although that line was pretty extensive, it wasn't quite all that Playmates had to offer. There were a few other lines that tried to capture the magic of the 4.5" figures in other scales. None were ever as successful but there were some great toys in those assortments for those collectors who who have maxed out on the 4.5" standard. Here's an homage to those often-forgotten Playmates figures with a Toy Tribute to Captain Picard, non-4.5" scale!

Movie Review: Avengers

While the Marvel movies up to this point have been good, they just haven't been good enough for me to totally dork-out on them. Sure they have great character development, but that's only one small part of the equation. For me to totally dork-out on a movie, it also has to have interesting production designs (character costumes, vehicle designs, etc) and exciting action. And the Marvel movies have, more or less, failed at those two points.

Card Review: Cereal Killers Series 1

I'm a serious cereal junkie. It's the ultimate comfort food for me, so much so that my night's sleep depends on a late-night bowl of cereal. Maybe that's because cereal, for all its seemingly endless variety and continual introduction of new flavors, has a timeless quality to it. Team Flakes might be long dead, but Grape Nuts is forever. Shifting gears a bit, I'm also a big fan of gross-out trading cards like Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packs. I don't actively collect trading cards these days, but every once in a while there's a series that catches my eye and I can't resist. And given my love of both cereal and gross-out trading cards, Cereal Killers by Wax Eye seems made just for me.

Toy Pix: Custom Muckman by Adam Pratt

I've been following Adam Pratt's work on Google+ for a while now and I've been impressed by his ability to take a figure and give it a new and imaginative characterization with his custom paint work. I thought it would be fun to see what he could do with my favorite TMNT figure of all time, Muckman, so I commissioned him to do one of his trademark custom paint jobs. And here's the result!

Toy Pix: Sneagator Mini-Figures (M.U.S.C.L.E.)

One of the coolest things about M.U.S.C.L.E.s was that they were so ambiguous. When Mattel got the rights to distribute Japanese Kinnikuman figures in the U.S. as M.U.S.C.L.E.s, they did so without including the accompanying storyline, leaving most of us in the dark as to what the figures represented. I always enjoyed the apparent randomness of M.U.S.C.L.E.s, not knowing when you bought a blind 10-pack what sort of weirdness you would end up with. Some seemed to have some sort of connection with each other, like these reptilian dudes wearing sneakers, but without the source storyline it was impossible to tell what that connection was. Were they all part of the same team? Maybe an alien race? It wasn't until the Internet hit the scene that I could research the Kinnikuman manga and learn that these shoe-wearing reptiles were actually all one shape-shifting character: Sneagator.