Swords and Spaceships

Back in 2011, the GI Joe Collector's Club offered the first series of their Figure Subscription Service, a little thing intended to get into collector's hands those figures that Hasbro had no interest in offering. I've been a member for years now, since the Club offered Dial-Tone as a free membership figure, so that has to be 2010. The Service costs around $400 for thirteen figures, so it's HUGELY expensive. I never bought in again after the first series, since the value to me isn't there. (I have no desire for repaints of Hasbro-made characters in international repaint colors, and that's what far too many figures are in each year, in my opinion.) The only reason I bought in was for Cover Girl and Big Boa, since I figured (rightly) that those two would be the most expensive on the secondary market. A cursory glance a eBay just now shows carded examples of these two at around $300 for the pair, which is damn crazy, but that's how it goes. As a figur...

I received Kup for Christmas in 1987. Pretty sure it was then, because I had the Targetmaster version pictured here. This is the Takara reissue from 2005, from the Transformers Collection. #20, to be exact, so one of the last ones before Takara started yet another reissue series in 2007, Encore. Anyway, back to Kup. Kup was one of the new characters introduced in 1986's animated Transformers: The Movie, one of the high points in Transformers (from here, that's going to be abbreviated to TF) history, and still the only TF movie worth your time. My mother took me to see it after much pleading, and I'm sure it was the only weekend it played here locally. Not only did Optimus Prime die, the movie bombed so terribly that plans for theatrical releases of the GI Joe and My Little Pony movies were called off. I can't tell you what happened with My Little Pony, but GI Joe was released on video and broken up into pieces and aired on TV in 1987/88 with intros and outros (if...