By Past Nastification GI Joe was dead, at least in 1:18th scale, in 1996. Like many of us now in our mid 40’s, even if 1:18 GI Joe wasn’t dead then, it would have been dead to me anyway. I had outgrown it around 1988 and wouldn’t rediscover my love of GI Joe as adult collector/customizer until the Stars ‘n
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The news of a possible return of Kay-Bee toys reminds me of the defunct chain’s mall stores and the oddities often found within. A visit was equally likely to result in deep disappointment at finding the same-old same-old for ridiculous prices as it was shock and surprise at happening upon a rare or unusual item. KB is the place that
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I know what you might be thinking: Have you finally gone off the deep end, Rob? Are you so burned out from the daily grind that you’re just throwing up whatever toys strike your fancy? No and no, although I do wish I could let loose and write about a broader range of toys. Maybe I’ll start a sister blog
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Released by Chinese minifigure maker Dargo, the series with the supremely odd title Outfight Gold offers military styled figures in an all-gold color scheme. When I first saw a picture of the eight figure set, I was reminded of Mego’s Eagle Force, the 1981 die-cast action figure series. One beret wearing figure in particular brought to mind the group’s leader,
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I’ve long thought I could tie GI Joe and Visionaries together in a way that goes beyond the figures’ construction style. Now I don’t have to try to make up some sort of half-baked No-Prize explanation connecting the world of Prysmos to the larger Sunbow Cartoonic Universe. That’s my original term, by the way–feel free to use it. Hasbro is
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I don’t think any figure quite sums up the crazy possibilities (with maybe the exception of Lightning Mobutu) of what’s possible when a knock-off toy maker throws caution to the wind and goes all-out on a ridiculous concept. Witness Condor Strike, a baseball/-themed me-too corollary of 1980s GI Joe, produced years later in the 1990s. The most apt comparison I
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By Past Nastification When the grocery store is three blocks out of the way, and all you really need is milk, Family Dollar is there. It doesn’t have to be milk. Maybe it’s shoelaces. Or batteries. Whatever sundry items you need, Family Dollar probably has them. And this time of year, they also carry various GI Joe knock-off items as
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When I covered the original Rom toy a couple years ago as part of my phoney-baloney April Fools Day posts, I never imagined there would be another action figure version of the cult comic star, much less one I could legitimately cover here. And yet here we are in 2017, with Hasbro attempting to mash its various properties into something
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By Past Nastification Green Lantern wasn’t a bad movie, or a good one, although my opinion of it went up after the unnecessarily destruction-rific Man of Steel and dreary Superman vs. Batman were released. If it were up to me, I’d recast Justin Timberlake in Ryan Reynolds’ role of Hal Jordan and just bring this continuity’s Green Lantern into the
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It’s not often that a turkey of an action figure, particularly one of the knock-off variety, transcends its own weirdness and circles back around to being cool. It’s also rare to find a knock-off figure that shows some kind of care (albeit offbeat and/or misguided) went into its production. Both are the case with the Power Commandos figures, which appeared
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