Swords and Spaceships

Here it is- that which is assumed to be the pinnacle of the Rise of Cobra tie-in line. And it's based on a design seen not in the movie, but the animation GI Joe: Resolute. Hasbro basically ran out of time to release all the Resolute figures they had designed before the movie stuff came out, so they've gone with the only option left to them: pepper the line with a few of them. (For instance, Roadblock was recently released in a Wal-Mart exclusive set called Outpost Defender.) Is this Snake Eyes worthy of all the hype? Sure, Snake Eyes kicked a lot of ass in the animation, and this figure looks spot-on to that design. The traditional visor was done away with, which I like to see. And the figure isn't all black, which is another plus. You have optional sword placement as well- you can place it high on his back, or lower at the waist, as seen in the animation. The figure features a nice selection of guns, fitting the commando part of the Snake Eyes equation. There's a larg...

I've purchased a lot of GI Joes in the last couple of months. Thanks to prices that are 30-40% cheaper than this summer, I bought all the figures I wanted for a tidy price of $5-6 each. One of those was this fellow here, Duke in the Delta-6 Accelerator Suit. A lot of GI Joe fans who saw these in the trailers didn't like them, and matters weren't helped any when, on the DVD/Blu-Ray special features, the director of the film Stephen Sommers basically admitted to putting the Delta-6 suit in the film to satisfy his own ambitions from a failed 25 year old script about a super suit that did pretty much exactly what these suits did in the Joe flick. I really liked the idea of such a suit, especially growing up as a fan of the old Sunbow GI Joe cartoon. I was glad to see some tech for the Joes that wasn't another damn box with a beam emitter. This 3.75" figure recreates the look of that suit fairly well. Hasbro are kings of this scale, and there's lots of sculpted deta...

Ah, yes. Scare Glow here is one of the figures I was wishing for when Masters of the Universe Classics began, and less than a year into the line, he's chilling on my shelf. Happy dance? Fuck you, I'm going to do it anyway. Scare Glow was a figure that came at the end of the original Masters line in the 1980s. He was in the very last series, just so you know. To be honest, I never knew/remembered he existed until 1999 when I discovered he-man.org. By the time he came out, I had pretty much moved on to GI Joe, and I knew that last series also had King Randor and the Sorceress, and I mainly spent my time looking for them. This Scare Glow character just didn't register for me. I had plenty of bad guys (most of the figures in the original line were villains) so I rarely looked for more. However, as a discerning adult collector, Scare Glow appealed to me, mostly I'm sure due to scarcity. That's just how it works for toy collectors- if it's rare, it's gotta be good...

Star Wars toys are coming fast and furious these days, thanks to a dicked-up release pattern by Hasbro. This summer was a drought, with Legacy wave 5 showing up in March/April, wave 6 I didn't see until June (and only sporadically), and wave 7 barely made it out here at all until October when Kohl's unleashed a torrent of that particular wave. In the last two months, I've seen figures from four waves in rapid sucession. I won't even be close to scoring what I want from one wave before the next shows up. This has been happening for a few years now, but it's no less annoying. For instance, I picked up this figure, Concept Art IG-88 from wave 11, a full week before I found and picked up the figures I wanted from wave 10. Based on concept art for The Empire Strikes Back by Ralph McQuarrie, I knew as soon as I saw this figure I had to own it. I know the art was merely intended for a background character from a galaxy far, far away, but I'll be damned if it doesn'...