gojira77

Beast-man has his own pick! * *Either the sultry redhead... or Orko! @hmmm@

More pics from the blog:

Great find, dude! The reviews are pretty brief, but there is plenty of added info if you scroll down through the comments. And though the pics are cropped funny by the format of the blog, you can see more of them by right clicking and saving them to your computer. At last, we know how they're gonna make He-man shorter than KG and how he looks next to the other great 1:12 Superhero lines. The proportions look waaay better too on He-man than on KG with his melon head. I must have these both; Dec. 1st is so far away...

I still think a Bruce Wayne season would be awesome if handled right and they weren't afraid to have Bruce toy with the possibilty of becoming a villain. Wayne could be the biggest Jerk on TV since "House" and he has enough supporting characters around him like Alfred to keep the show dynamic. I bet the show isn't in the works because of that whole "franchise stategy" thing. Oh well...

I gotta say that #130-131 and the following assault on Cobra Island were my favorite issues of the main comic. I got into the comic late, really towards the end of the run, and really had trouble with the aweful art before Andrew Wildman's stint. Wildman was my favorite Transformers artist and I was glad that he still had work at Hasbro USA. He had a little of a learning curve to master but I think he was pretty solid by #130, and it was cool to see the Joes with a certain First Shirt in charge holding off the Mark II BATs. I also loved how CC's whole reason for the attack was to film it as some kind of Arms Infomercial for Cobra's customers. That and when he told Firefly-- who got way cool at that point-- to just keep the island. Really, though, my favorite Joe comic has always been Special Missions. I'd seen Joe go up against the forces of Cobra plenty of times in the cartoon-- this was genuinely something different, and seemed to harken back to the days of the Original 13 with an even better pool of Joe characters to pull from.

My Target's already starting to thin out their revision guys and Wave 9 is pretty much gone other than a Bazooka or two on bent cards. Come on something new...

Excuse me, but if they need a new teen drama/ superhero origin show why didn't they go with Bruce Freakin' Wayne. A dark, brooding, chick-magnet billionaire trying to find himself through a series of boarding schools, broken teen romances, and awesomly choreographed afterschool fistfights! Why the HELL would they pass that up! The movies don't own the franchise-- that's basically how the comics recount his adolescence. It would be like Smallville with Martial Arts and Jetsetting instead of wussy pretty-boy angst 'cause Bruce doesn't whine-- he gets even! They could even forge a connection between the two shows and make Lex Luther Bruce's old friend from school. Or completely disregard the way Batman Begins handled Raz and have him observing Bruce from the beginning, Norman Osborne style.

I don't know if there's a better web site but my all time favorite brick-and-mortar import shop is Kicks Hobby Japan. Owned by a guy about our age, it has two locations in the Seattle area, awesome selection of the best Japanese action lines, and very good costumer service. They have a website too where they seem to be doing most of their business nowadays. The micromen seem to be mixed in with the scantily-clad anime girl figurines in the "figure" section of the site, which is basically everything 'non-robot'.

You got to appreciate it when any line still sells playsets these days.

I'll buy the occasional Luke Skywalker-- if I 'fall off the wagon', so to speak. It's kind of like an itch, or buying a Hostess Fruit Pie ever once in a while and then discovering all over how disgusting they can be. Sometimes, though, the shear coolness of a figure will draw me in, even though I don't regularly consider myself a SW collector. Anytime I see a super-posable little Yoda on the pegs, I have to stop and try to remember my checking account balance!

Lots and lots of golf pro lessons...

Blood plasma is valuable, too! @loll@

I've been waiting for this... Evil Lyn would be the WORST GIRLFRIEND EVER!!! She'd totally trap you with questions like "Does this cape make my butt look big", and boss you around in front of your friends to make you look whipped! She'd throw all your stuff out on the lawn for saying an innocent comment about the Soceress, and them torch it with a fire spell. And you just know that she'd cheat on you with Mer-man because she'd be slutty that way, too. Don't do it, man. Stick to good girls that you can trust like Glimmer! The kind of purple-haired enchantress that you can bring home to your mother... Not really interested in her as a girlfriend....But thanks for the warning!!! @hmmm@ Sooooo... You're talking more of a "Wham, Bam, Thank you, Skeletor" kinda thing? The Faceless One would not be pleased... And I should think not! It would kill a father to know that the reason his little girl got her position at Snake Mountain was infact because she was so comfortable... with other positions... @hmmm@

Playing with toys isn't that distant of a memory for me, but I'll admit that with nobody else to play with I got pretty rusty in college! @loll@ I wrote short fan fics for both G.I. joe and the Transformers (sorry, no cross-overs) all through Jr. High and High School and my social outcast friends and I would act out the plot and fill in the endings. It's just too hard to move around a whole squad, plus the enemy, and direct the story pacing all by yourself-- you gotta have your 'posse'. I did this a long with drawing amateur comics anmd coming up with my own superhero characters. I eventually had more friends in college and even found girls that could tolerate me enough to go out on a date, but it definitely wasn't the most creative time in my life. And I was an art major, for crying out loud! One thing with fanfics, though is that the characters "grow up" with you. In the cartoon, Duke got progressively less jolly as he evolved from that smiling little army dude into more of a veteran squad leader, and we kept that more serious progression until you basically had a black ops type character-- very commando like. Cobra Commander got a similar re-imagining, which was probably more believable than either the 'toon or Hama's version.

Yeah, I'd take any of those for sure! I'd also be interested in an Encore Ultra Magnus, in part because I don't have a UM anymore, and also just to see what subtle change they'd give him.

I've been waiting for this... Evil Lyn would be the WORST GIRLFRIEND EVER!!! She'd totally trap you with questions like "Does this cape make my butt look big", and boss you around in front of your friends to make you look whipped! She'd throw all your stuff out on the lawn for saying an innocent comment about the Soceress, and them torch it with a fire spell. And you just know that she'd cheat on you with Mer-man because she'd be slutty that way, too. Don't do it, man. Stick to good girls that you can trust like Glimmer! The kind of purple-haired enchantress that you can bring home to your mother... Not really interested in her as a girlfriend....But thanks for the warning!!! @hmmm@ Sooooo... You're talking more of a "Wham, Bam, Thank you, Skeletor" kinda thing? I'm telling you, once they go Mer-man...

The 6" guys will always look better MOC and may even be better toys individually (nothings more fun than a quality 12" Joe or a Sigma 6 Snake-Eyes), but the over-all potential of the line increases dramatically at the smaller scale. Kids and collectors can get more of them, and retail space opens up for vehicles (Quinjet and X-men's Blackbird anyone?) and playsets. For the loose collector, the potential for dios opens up because of space requirements and the fact that it's easier to find stuff for the 1/18 scale. A 6" Wolvie will likely be better than a 4" one, but see how much fun it would be to use props from Marauders, Inc and some generic G.I. Joes in a battle with a berserker Fury Files Weapon X! No one needs to 'start over'-- ML collectors can enjoy the rare nirvana that is closure. And then, if they really like toys, they can try something new. I don't think Hasbro would ever have started ML at the 6" scale-- it's kinda a throw back to the '90s when oil was cheaper and sculpting was less advanced. I think they would have had a standard 4" scale with plenting of interaction and vehicles, and also a super-deluxe collector-loving 12" line that would have put the ML Icons line to shame. I'm not an insider of anything-- its just what we've seem already with Star Wars and Joe for the last decade.

Pics, please! I think we all need to see that!

LOL - Awesome reference. Goji, you're my favorite. Thanks, Tom. That means a lot coming from you.

I've been waiting for this... Evil Lyn would be the WORST GIRLFRIEND EVER!!! She'd totally trap you with questions like "Does this cape make my butt look big", and boss you around in front of your friends to make you look whipped! She'd throw all your stuff out on the lawn for saying an innocent comment about the Soceress, and them torch it with a fire spell. And you just know that she'd cheat on you with Mer-man because she'd be slutty that way, too. Don't do it, man. Stick to good girls that you can trust like Glimmer! The kind of purple-haired enchantress that you can bring home to your mother...

Dear Hasbro, If you don't want to give them guns, then leave off the holsters! Did Lt. Falcon hock his gun to buy more drugs from Headman or what?! Well, once again his big brother bails him out with a sidearm from his private army of otherwise useless varients! I'd like to chalk up those little green tentacles to something I call The Yoda Factor. Why did the original Yoda figure from the '80s have a pack in snake? Why was a rather ordinary snake even on on alient planet where all the other creatures were cool muppets? Not a clue... I briefly remember a snake in a tree in a scene on Deggoba, so I'm not sure why we needed one with the little Jedi master, or why it comes prominently draped over his shoulders like it had a major role in the movie. Maybe Kenner thought kids should get a little more plastic for their buck (a scary, novel thought!) or else I missed that deleted scene: "Luke... That snake in the tree, check it out! Touch it I dare you! A stick here is." And yet, years later, the snake's back with Yoda in the celebrated Vintage line that seems to have established the pattern for our beloved 25th Anniversary collection. No longer on Yoda's shoulders, the snake returns with reasons not clear or really connected to the classic film. The tentacles are just like that IMO, a goofy idea that becomes a part of a legacy. My friend once had a Nemesis Enforcer, and he only wore his little green feelers on special occassions. When he wanted to feel extra pretty.

For me it's all about a chain of grocery stores called Fred Meyer. They developed One-Stop-Shopping long before the era of "Super 'Marts", and since they don't order too many of each thing, the one in my town by the mall moves inventory like a machine! They frequently get new stuff first. They also get cleaned-out pretty fast, so it's good that we buy milk there...

Basically, Wal-mart is the World's Largest Dollar Store-- if they weren't so damn big they wouldn't have such a huge effect on the world economy and even American factory jobs. Before Wally World came along, manufacturers like Tupperware (which they temporarily drove out of business along with Vlassic Pickles) and Hasbro told the retailers what they are making and the level of quality. The push came from the people that make things and the consumer got better quality and innovation and factory workers could count on stable prices to insure that their jobs didn't go to that Great Sweat Shop known as China. Walmart changed all that-- now the pull comes from retail. That's why there is so little new out on the shelves and we're drowning in Dukes, Retail says jump and Manufacturers say "How High" and "Thank you, Sir-- may I have another?". Wal-mart's like an amoeba who grows and absorbs-- there's nothing new about a discount retail chain, it's just there size and scale that worries A LOT of people. Target and K-mart are nowhere's as big! Wal-mart actually send their representatives around the world to developing countries and these execs from Arkansas are received like diplomats from a major world power. They tell Countries that they want items with such-and-such price and such-and-such quality, or else they'll go elsewhere. And if your job went to China and never come back, thank Wal-mart, because they did the same hard ball tactics with your own employer. What's scary is that some economists believe that we had such low interests rates for so long was because of Wally's effect on our economy. Take a classic 1950s horror movie for example-- Ants in general aren't very scary. They work hard and make cool tunnels, but they're little and cute and harmless. But suppose there was some atomic testing going on by that ant hill, which create giant super ants. Now you got your horror movie and your girlfriend will be so scared you're likely to make it to second base, daddio! That's what Wal-mart is-- K-mart mutated by Atomic radiation and grown to mammoth proportions. Mr. Roll-back Smash Puny Competitors!!! BTW-- I still buy Joes there, too.

Optimus prefers the term "circumcised"-- Oy vey! @loll@

No Joes yet at my Kohl's in Belligham, just Star Wars and Transformers. But thanks anyways for the heads up! I'm sure the recent rollback on the price at Target will help them burn through a little inventory and we'll see Wave 10 show its elusive head there as well... C'mon Canadian weekend shoppers!