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.

Movie Review: The Three Stooges (2012)

I thought the Three Stooges reboot would never get out of development hell. Casting rumors were all over the place, proving that either the producers or the public had no idea how to cast the Stooges. At one point, it was rumored that Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Jim Carrey would be Moe, Larry and Curly respectively, a cast that appeals more to star power rather than to fidelity to the original property. Things started to solidify as Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, and Will Sasso were  officially cast, but that just started the Internet meltdown as fanboys rejected the concept of recasting the Stooges at all.

Toy Review: Pachyrhinosaurus (Papo)

Although I'm a big fan of ceratopsian dinosaurs, Pachyrhinosaurus never really caught my eye. The flat bones on the nose and the minor frill decorations made it pale in comparison to the more spectacular ceratopsians like Triceratops and Styracosaurus. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like this dude meant business. Pachy's flattened bony growth on its rostrum looks capable of inflicting serious blunt force trauma on any theropod dumb enough to press its luck. So I decided to branch out of my usual ceratopsid fare and pick up this Pachyrhinosaurus figure from Papo. The Papo Tyrannosaurus Rex was pretty awesome... does Pachy follow suit?

Arcade Tokens: Namco Pac-Man (A Tribute to Pac-Man)

In my adventures collecting arcade tokens, I've come across a few that aren't directly related to arcades I've frequented but are crazy cool nonetheless. One such example is this Namco Pac-Man token, purchased on eBay from a Hong Kong seller. Considering its minty freshness, I'd guess that it was recently struck and hasn't been through any machines. This token directly appeals to my love of the Pac-Man franchise, with a cool cartoony Pac-Man on the front and an even cooler ghost sprite on the back. I just couldn't resist picking it up... and it gives me an opportunity to write this tribute to those iconic Pac-Man games that have been entertaining me for 30+ years.