I’m pretty sure ‘Doctor Who Adventures’ launched right after the revamped, Russell T. Davies produced juggernaut took the world by storm. The magazine kind of serves as a children’s version of the over 30 year old Doctor Who Magazine (formerly ‘Monthly’), except it comes out every two weeks and is a pretty slim read. On average it’s about 30 pages or so, filled with story recaps, set visits, puzzles, jokes, games, cut-out-and-make-it items, and the occasional dip into the show’s history, showcasing previous Doctors and monsters. Christopher Eccelston’s tenure was so brief that there ended up being very few issues produced featuring his Doctor, but from issue #1 on, the premiums were stellar. Things like back to school kits, consisting of a large tin pencil case with an image of the Doctor and the show’s logo on the cover,  a TARDIS ruler, pens, pencils and the like. Once David Tennant showed up, the magazine really gathered steam and the free gifts got more elaborate, with things like games, a sonic screwdriver that squirts water, canvas wallets, sticker sheets and badges galore. It seemed that as the show got more popular, the magazine got more bold with it’s give a ways, which led to me picking it up more often.

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Read the rest of Collecting Adventures – The Doctor Who Edition

Cliché that it is, I HAVE owned these films on every single format but Beta for the last 20 some years. Hell, I even owned that huge Lasedisc boxed set with hardcover book from ’93, the one that cost $300.00 when it was first released. I dragged that sucker all over the country with me on all my moves, as it was the only way to get pure, unadulterated Star Wars as we all knew and loved it. I remember being insanely excited that it had the theatrical trailers for the trilogy, and made a special VHS burn of them just to pop in whenever I felt like. See, before I get to my rant, I need to point out something very sad, but telling about myself and my relationship to that place far, far away. When I was at Best Buy the other day and saw the cardboard stand up of Threepio holding a sign saying ‘The Complete Saga’ coming to Blu Ray, my first instinct was to give that droid the finger (MY Threepio? One of my favorite characters from those movies?? Why??), and then tell him, “Yeah, but, see, it ISN’T the complete saga, is it? Because those AREN’T the films I grew up with and loved for so long”. And all of this nonsense, and (I’m sorry to say this and offend all the New Trilogy fans) the fact I always have to clarify just which part of the saga I love when I talk to people to distance myself from the complete awfulness of Episodes 1-3, has made me start to walk away from Star Wars.

It’ll never leave me as a thing, as a love, but I’ve realized that there are so many other obsessions of mine that haven’t let me down the way Star Wars has that I tend to give my attention, and more importantly my money, to them instead. So, I admit, the lure of extras and that purported to be amazing documentary is what got me to shell out for the trilogy when it hit DVD in 2004. I also have the 2007 editions, with the original versions as the ‘flip sides’, and most of the time, if I DO want to watch the Star Wars Saga (’77-’83, ‘natch) I put the latter in, because even though the quality isn’t as crisp and clean, they’re MY Star Wars movies, full stop. When I do try and watch the 2004 discs, I appreciate all over again just how terribly they’ve been tampered with. So, I don’t need to hit on any of the obvious points already being lampooned allover the ‘net about the new releases. They either bother you, or they don’t. You either ‘get’ why they’re a travesty, or you accept them. And May the Force Be With You, Amen.

So, all that said, there’s a very simple way I could have been lured to pick these things up, warts and all. It’s what I was getting to earlier, what really burns me up about these releases: the extras. Or should I say, the lack of extras. Most of us come from the VHS Generation, when that’s all we got and we were lucky to get it. Once in a while, a special VHS release came out as a stand alone, as in the Star Wars classic making ofs FINALLY being included with the Blu Rays (I had burned my copies to DVD long ago on my own, thanks George). But to actually get trailers and deleted scenes and commercials and such, that took the small but vocal Laserdic community to support, which led logically to DVDs. We’re living in the Wonderland of DVD, where anything and everything that ever aired, was filmed, got released or shown once on the ABC Sunday Night Movie is making it’s way to our shelves. And that is a good thing, a GREAT thing, it’s what gets us giddy about new release news, what makes us hopeful about long overdue films getting their place in the sun with all the bells and whistles.

Which brings me back to the Star Wars Blu Rays. Has anyone out there read the list of extras? OK, the big news that almost had me way back when we saw that Luke on Tatooine clip, are the deleted scenes. Up til now, we’ve had to rely on grainy footage from that computer game back in 1999, or on set pics from old issues of Starlog. I don’t know how many there are, but even a few are gold when it comes to these films. Hell, I could pick up Steel Magnolias and probably get an hour’s worth, why shouldn’t I for one of the biggest pop culture happenings in history? Well, it’s a good question, because if we go back to that list of extras, what else do we have? A documentary about the 501st? A documentary that chronicles how Star Wars has seeped into different comedy projects over the years? Star Wars Tech, a 45 minute piece that talks to scientists about the weapons and gadgetry….(zzzzzzzz……..) wha? Huh?? Oh , sorry, I nodded off there because I got bored shitless by just listing the filler they’re blessing us with. Oh, and I should add, we ONLY get this fried gold by buying the entire saga. So even if we’re repulsed by the newer films, we’re being forced to accept them into our homes.

So, am I being petty? Am I being a ‘whiny fanboy’ about this? If you think so, start bopping around the internet and doing some digging. Believe me, you won’t have to go far. Why, just last week someone unearthed an amazing clip that I’d certainly never seen before, from the UK series Jim’ll Fix It, of Mark Hamill having a picnic on Dagobah with a kid that won a contest. It was weird, kind of brilliant, and something you will NEVER be given on a Lucasfilm release. I could go on, but spend a few minutes on You Tube and have a look round, there are insane amounts of Star Wars goodies to be savored. Talk show appearances by the cast on the Mike Douglas Show, literally WEEKS after the phenomenon exploded; Kenner commercials galore; Hamill and Ford facing off against Jane Pauly on the Today Show as Empire is about to be released; Burger Chef and Burger King commercials; the cast at the Academy Awards; Carrie Fisher on SNL, the list goes on and on. These are the things true die hard Star Wars fans cherish, those hazy years between that first experience and Empire, when the world revolved around Luke and Vader, and it seemed to permeate every corner of our existence. And please, no one try and tell me these could be rights issues. Lucasfilm has more money than Europe, with a few days and dollars work it could all be tied up.

I have a friend that used to do some work for a studio in their archive department, and for years he used to beg his higher ups to seriously consider releasing some of the more obscure titles in their library, that there was an audience out there for them. His pleas always fell on deaf ears, but it seems Warner Brothers has caught on with their burn to order site, getting dozens of movies and specials out to market after their solitary airings. This is rare, most of the time when it comes to cult or lesser known films, the studio doesn’t want to go the extra mile at all, they just want to get it out. I had an experience a few years back, when I’d met with Universal about getting Flash Gordon re released on DVD after so many years in moratorium. I had gotten hold of a making of mini doc, and offered it to them for inclusion. The woman in charge told me, “well, we really don’t know where this came from, so we may not have the rights”. A making of doc on the set of Flash Gordon back in 1980 and shown to exhibitors round the world most assuredly belonged to them, but she basically didn’t want to do the paperwork and research to sign off on it, and so the release was bare bones.

My point is, this is LUCASFILM we’re talking about. Seriously, where is this stuff? And I’ll go even further, where is the Holiday Special? I know, I know, Lucas says he’d like to destroy every copy, but do YOU know any place else the main actors lent their voices to their animated counterparts? Further, any other place that has ever produced their animated counterparts? Or the only other place they all appeared as their characters, other than the original trilogy? I mean, hell, if you want to throw Bea Arthur and the Jefferson Starship in the bin and JUST give us the stuff with the original cast and the cartoon, we’ll take it! I find it bizarre and beyond frustrating that every time we get a new batch of releases we get shafted, and each time we think, “well, maybe next time they’ll give us everything”, and they never do. I listed a bunch of pop culture relics earlier, things that surrounded the original releases, but just imagine what else Lucas has in his archives. You know those snippets of screen tests we’ve seen on line and in the 2004 doc? Wouldn’t you love to have those, uncut? I know a  guy who turned his hobby of collecting into a job with Lucasfilm, and he had scoured the globe for these promotional 7” singles that told the story of Star Wars, that got sent out to radio stations. They were a fascinating bit of memorabilia that few people ever knew about, and after a decade, he’d only found 3 of the 6 parts he needed. Just the sort of thing I’d love to have as an extra on a Blu Ray set of DVDs.

So, thanks for the memories George, they’re unforgettable. I’ll still watch my ‘classic’ DVDs and pick up the odd figure or two, but I have to draw my line in the sand. I know you don’t care, but I have better luck and more fun trying to find what you won’t give us on my own. It’s a lot less frustrating, and a lot cheaper. I keep thinking in the back of my mind, “he’ll come to his senses, he’ll give it all to us eventually”. But I’m now convinced that he never will. So, to those of you who will forgive and forget, enjoy the Blu Ray hoopla and releases. I know what Star Wars was, what it meant to me, and how it should be treated, and I’ll just put together my own box set illegally. It’s what Han would have done, back when he knew how to shoot.

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Read the rest of Obsessive Compulsion.

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Read the rest of Treasures Under the Tree.

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Read the rest of Harshing My Marshmellow, Man

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Read the rest of Unhappy Meals in Dangerous Times

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Read the rest of Decisions, decisions.

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Read the rest of Missing a Trend.

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Read the rest of ‘The Empire Strikes a Chord’

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Read the rest of Long Agos and Worlds Apart

If you haven’t already noticed, this week marks the Wooden Anniversary of Action Figure Insider. (No, really, it’s wooden. Look it up. Luckily it’s not the third anniversary: leather). And to celebrate and contribute a bit more, I thought I’d do something different with my blog privileges, and interview co founder Daniel Pickett. I picked Pickett, ’cause he’s the guy that first got in touch with me all those years ago, asking if I’d like to be on a SDCC panel. And it’s been a beautiful friendship ever since. I tried asking the tough, probing questions that the discerning readers of AFI wanted asked. Let’s see if I succeeded. Either way, Happy Anniversary from me to Action Figure Insider! Take it away Daniel! :

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Read the rest of Daniel Pickett: Five Years In

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Read the rest of Things We Saved From the Fire

I’ve remarked before in these entries that I believe we’re living in the Golden Age of Action Figures, and for me, there’s no better evidence than this past decade. Now, because we’re all geeks at heart, and passionate ones, we always quibble, and a great many of us moan, about the shortcomings of our favorite properties finally getting their due in figure form. Some of these grumbles are justified, especially when the item comes from a mega company with a team of full time scientists concocting these things in their labs. But in my mind, nine times out of ten, I’m willing to overlook the failings, to just stand back and bask in the glory of what’s come to fruition.

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Read the rest of A Decade Down

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Read the rest of Collecting genes.

There is a place more terrifying than the Bermuda Triangle, more mysterious than the pyramids of Egypt, and more baffling than the crowd at a Michael Jackson memorial tribute. This place has plagued generations of toy lovers, and continues to be an ongoing, though not often explored, conundrum in all of our pasts. I’m speaking, of course, about the Portal of Lost Toys. That mystical place where so many toys have gone, never to be heard from again, leaving broken hearts all over the world.

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Read the rest of The Portal of Lost Toys

In case you weren’t already hip to it, I’m going to let you in on a little fact that all humans and pets should be well aware of at this point in our evolutions: Halloween is the best holiday of the year. Period. Oh, and also, for those still in the dark, Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, Adam and Eve didn’t cavort with dinosaurs, you can’t get pregnant from using the same toilet seat, and the light does indeed go off when you close the refrigerator door. But why am I telling you this on the Action Figure Insider ‘Men of Action’ blog? Well, because for me, Halloween has several significant memory triggers, and as always, they’ll come back to toys.

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Any geek worth their salt has had the same age old conversations: who’d win in a fight between Superman and Captain Marvel? Is Godzilla bad or just misguided? When is ‘Ten Speed and Brown Shoe’ going to get a DVD release? And what if the ‘Star Wars’ prequels had been any good? But the one that comes up all the time when you have your own toy company is, “Oh, you should do toys from….”, or, “Have they done action figures of…” or even better, “Oooo! You should make dolls from that movie.…”. Oh, if only it were that simple.

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Read the rest of Here’s some that got away……

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Jason Lenzi, and I have a toy company called Bif Bang Pow! Some of you may have heard of us, but for those that haven’t, we’ve been around about four and a half years, and have produced action figures and bobble heads for various properties: ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘The Big Lebowski’, Showtime’s ‘Dexter’, ‘The Twilight Zone’, and ABC’s ‘LOST’. AFI and Daniel Pickett in particular have been big supporters of all of our activities, and when I mentioned to Daniel recently that I was thinking of doing some guest blogging here and there, he very graciously offered the ‘Men of Action’ board for me to set my soap box up on. So here I am.

I’ve been a follower of AFI and its blogs for a while now, and I enjoy them very much. I love the diversity of the subjects being tackled, but have noticed one pleasant underlying theme (while not a complete shock) is the sense of nostalgia everyone has. Whether writing about toys of the past, or the newest catch from a day’s run to Target, everyone seems to be motivated in their passion for collecting by what they loved as kids. Sure, sometimes that means junior high as well, maybe even high school. (And some folks never stopped collecting at all). But people seem to especially cling to the lines or characters they were introduced to as kids.

Which brings me to my motivation for writing on here in the first place. I’m sort of a pop culture junkie, always feeling like I’m going to run out of time before I see, hear and read all the things out there in the ether I’ve been seeing, hearing and reading so much about. I read a stack of magazines every month, cover to cover, and tend to make lists of all the new music, DVDs and books I have to seek out (whether old or new) so I can update the file cabinet I keep stored in my skull. But, similar to the point I was making earlier, if I was to make a family tree of all those interests rattling around up there in my melon, I could trace most of them back to the greatest years of my life: 1976-1984.

One of the things I thought I could bring to the blog that might be of interest to it’s readers, was my perspective as a guy who started his own toy company. We have our own Bif Bang Pow! blog that we update occasionally with new releases and announcements, but as far as I know, there’s no one out there from inside a toy company that’s giving out any inside scoop. My “day job”, as it were, in Los Angeles, is working in television production, but whenever BBP! comes up in conversation, I find that people are endlessly curious about the why, how, and where of the entire operation. And looking back, it has been a wild and fascinating ride. If I knew then what I know now…..I probably STILL would have taken the trip, but I would have brought more aspirin with me.  Now, I’m not saying this is going to read like the Watergate transcripts, or be a ‘how to’ through the toy business. No , no, no. I came here to talk about all the things I dig about toys, past and present, but there will be some juice along the way.

And it will all most likely tie into those glorious, youthful 10 years or so. Case in point: ‘Flash Gordon’. In 1977, there was a great animated series on CBS called ‘Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle”. It was about four teenagers and their talking dog, and they drove around in a van solving spooky mysteries. (No, it wasn’t, it was actually about Tarzan. I just wanted to see if you’ve stayed with me through this first column). Anyway, I loved it, watched it every week. Then, a couple of years later, fall of 1979, NBC started airing what I consider to be one of the best, if not THE best, animated series of all time, ‘Flash Gordon’. Immediately, my 9 year old eyes and ears noticed the similarities to the ‘Tarzan’ series that came before, especially because Tarzan and Flash had the same voice. (A year later, Thundarr had it too!). Since May of 1977, I had eaten, slept and drank ‘Star Wars’, so anything remotely sci fi was going to be diligently followed by me. My father had given me some Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon reprint books for a birthday that summer, to show me that yes, there WAS life before Vader, and I loved Alex Raymond’s artwork. So I was slightly primed when the animated series began to air, and was immediately hooked from the first episode. It was must see television every Saturday morning that season, and I collected the entire line of Mattel toys, the coloring books, lunch box and whatever else I could beg to get my hands on. Still have ‘em all, too.

Then, a cosmic event took place a year later that I’m still reeling from today: a big budget, live action ‘Flash Gordon’ movie was about to come out. WITH A SOUNDTRACK BY QUEEN.  (I wrongly assumed some Hollywood studio executive had singled me out for a ‘remote viewing’ project, thinking my pure Minnesota mind must have box office gold buried somewhere in it). The movie came out, and while it still wasn’t as cool as the cartoon, I saw it four times. I bought the soundtrack on vinyl, transferred it to cassette, and walked around with my tape recorder, re enacting the film and air guitaring through the house. At B Dalton’s I managed to find the official storybook, and the hardcover comic adaptation (and hey! Isn’t this the same guy who drew the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ adaptation?). I even found some puffy stickers at the local drug store. But something in the merchandise department was sorely lacking.

Toys. That’s right, zip, zilch, nada. Not a thing. I hunted high and low, from Target (a Minnesota born enterprise, so there were a lot to sift through), to Children’s Palace, Kidsville in the Maplewood Mall, Borgstrom Pharmacy, Wards and JC Penny’s. Not a thing. There must be some mistake, I thought. Every OTHER Sci Fi movie got it’s own toys, and I grabbed ‘em all. ‘The Black Hole’, ‘Star Trek the Motion Picture’, ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’. But nothing for one of the coolest, loudest, most garish and freaky, rock and roll sound tracked space flicks of all? Nope.

So when I did finally decide to give this toy company thing a go, I made a list of all the properties that I’d always wanted action figures of. And right at the top of that list was 1980’s ‘Flash Gordon’. How it all eventually happened and the craziness involved with getting the license is a story for another column. But the beauty of all of it was, I found a kindred spirit through the process. Another lost soul who felt that one of the most overlooked movies of the past 100 years was also criminally short changed in the action figure aisles. That man was Alex Ross. Except he went even further than I did when he was a kid, and custom made his own Flash, Ming and Prince Barin, out of various Mego 12” figures. (And if you know Alex at all you’ll know how unsurprising that little tidbit is).  So 27 years after the film first came out, little ‘ol Bif Bang Pow! brought the world what I knew it always needed: action figures from the ‘Flash Gordon’ movie.

So there you go. Proof, conclusive I think, that it all comes full circle, and in some way that probably reflects on all of us and why we collect and come to sites like this in the first place. I look forward to posting on here, hearing your feedback and hopefully connecting with all of you in the near future. Hope you all enjoy it, and thanks in advance  for your future time. Here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship.