Ok, so I broke down last night and bought a bunch of toys that I don’t technically collect or was looking for. And one of them, Luke Skywalker Snowspeeder Pilot, is so well-made that it just might be my favorite figure in a long, long time.

So I think I’m going to make a decision on my Star Wars collection in general based on this one figure: get rid of almost everything else. Now, I’ve been working to ditch the majority of my collection over the past year. How I’m going to do it will remain under wraps for the moment, but I’ve been sorting and documenting what I’ve picked up in the past 20 years as time has permitted (most of it is in storage). I had planned on getting rid of most of my Star Wars figures, having given away my entire vintage collection a few years back to friends with kids. But now that I’ve seen how nice the latest figures actually are (I stopped collecting Star Wars around the time of Attack of the Clones, with their stupid action features) I’m rethinking that a bit.

The toys that I’m keeping are small representative batches that make good displays. And the things that got me started in the first place, the figures that hold the only nostalgia for me are the original 21 figure from Star Wars, and the first set from The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, that first set from Empire holds the most memories from my childhood (although I can tell you where I got each and every one of the first 40 or so Kenner figures).  So here is what I’m going to do: replace a set of the first 32 Kenner vintage figures, and acquire the best Hasbro modern day versions of those figures to make one big display. And that’s it. No more Star Wars figures outside of those. I’d be lying if I didn’t say this idea wasn’t heavily inspired by our pal CantinaDan’s awesome evolution blogs. No joke, go check them out now!

And since I haven’t been paying attention the SW for the past 6 years or so, I’m asking all of you: What are the definitive versions of those original 32 characters? Post a link to the figure you think is the best one in the comments below, and I’ll keep everyone updated with my progress as I pick them up. (Picture links are a must, especially for ones like Boba Fett, who has way too many to choose from!)

So I just got back from a futile trip to my local Walmart to look for DCUC 11, but I didn’t leave empty handed.

No, I instead found a plethora of Hasbro products that wore down my resolve and forced me to purchase them. Which items? Well, I’m glad you asked.  First off, I had decided to only acquire the Marvel Universe figures that were in the original Mattel Secret Wars line. But tonight I saw the new 3 3/4" Spider-Man line and had to pick up the Green Goblin and Venom. The Goblin will replace (in my mind) my old Mego Pocket Heroes Green Goblin, which I loved dearly as a lad of 8.  And now we finally have a Todd McFarlane version of Venom that can replace the one by Toy Biz waaaaay back in 1992. (Hey, do you realize that it’s been longer since Dazed & Confused was released in ‘92 than it was from 1976 until 1992? Crazy!)

I would have left it at that, but I had to pass the Star Wars display on my way out. Now, I haven’t bought any Star Wars figures except the McQuarrie ones since 2002. But of course they now have a NEW SW concept figure out, the Empire Concept Snowtrooper (#2). And with it they have a finally perfect on-model Snowspeeder Luke, which was another favorite figure of mine as a lad of 9. 

So that was it. But as I left to toy section, I happened to look at the Xmas clearance section…where they had the MU Giant Battles figures for 50% off. I don’t really care about the big figures, but I did kind of want that Bucky Cap…

Damn you, Hasbro.

Well, in the six or so months since I last updated the classic Super Powers line-up with DCUC figures we’ve seen a few more slots filled. It’s amazing to think of it, but within a year we should have (for the first time!) the entire Super Powers roster recreated with a modern day line. So once again, I’ve recreated the well known shot from the back of the 3rd series cards using DCUC figures that have been released or revealed as of now. It’s a lot bigger than the last one, and with all-new, nice big pictures of these greats sculpts (and big thanks to Cornboy for helping to fill in a few gaps!). Click on the pic to embiggen.

Lots of rumors are hitting as to what’s coming next. The biggest being that next year’s SDCC exclusive will be a Plastic Man figure with multiple attachments.  Fans are already going nuts over the news (and not entirely in a good way) so we’ll see what actually plans out in the next year. There has also been talk of completing the line-up by SDCC, with Desaad in Wave 12, and a Golden Pharaoh/ Cyclotron 2-pack to be revealed on MattyCollector.com next year. 

Is any of this true? Who knows for sure. We did get a pretty accurate leak about Waves 10 & 11 all the way back in Nov. 2008, so anything is possible. It’s a pretty safe bet in any case that we’ll wrap up the Super Powers homage sooner rather than later. And that’s where it gets really interesting for me:once the full lineup is released, will we see any of the characters that WEREN’T produced? We already have a few of them: Man-Bat, Bizarro, Kid Flash, Vigilante, John Stewart, Deathstroke, Supergirl, and the Wonder Twins. But is it possible we might see Quadrex? Silicon? Howitzer?!? 

Only time will tell. 

Well, this year at SDCC I ended buying much more than I usually do, albeit a lot of it for friends and co-workers. I’m not normally one who wants exclusives unless it’s a new character than fits into an existing collection. not just a variant or retool (slimed Egon, anyone?)

But this year I did get what is probably my favorite exclusive yet: Hasbro’s Marvel Universe Invaders set! (Although the Wonder Twins were neck and neck. I love those goofy bastards!) True, it is a bunch of repainted and/or kitbashed figures, but they did such a good job I can’t really complain. And Mattel take note: this is how you do exclusive packaging! New art by Marvel EIC Joe Quesada, all on new individual cards that fit in with the regular collection, in a special case with Cho’s pencil art backing each figure PLUS a neat Marvel 70th Anniversary magnet holding the front closed. 

And if you pick up Union Jack you have almost the whole Invaders team (although it’s a shame that the upcoming WW2 Cap and Bucky figures weren’t ready before this set was made. They really would have plussed it up). As is, at least they repainted Cap in desaturated colors befitting the period. If you repaint Firestar’s hair yellow and give her Hobgoblin’s cape she makes for a convincing Spitfire. I did a photoshop mock-up of the sorely needed Baron Blood to round out the lineup. Can you believe we’ve never gotten a figure of this guy?

This set is what’s forced me to give in and pick up a few select MU figures. I’m not going to be a completist on this line, by far. I’ll outline my MU collecting strategy in an upcoming blog, though. I hope Hasbro fulfills the promise of this line, with a few playsets and even crazier forays into depth of character down the road.

So it was a strange week, with 4 deaths in the entertainment world in short succession. First Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson, followed this weekend by Billy Mays and Fred Travelena.  It certainly ranks up there with previous back to back passings, such as 2003’s Johnny Cash/John Ritter event, or 1997’s back to back travelers Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart. Or even 1991’s Sammy Davis Jr. and Jim Henson. Still, nothing may top Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on July 4, 1826.

But I don’t want to remember them like that, as an odd factoid. Nor do I want to remember them by just their hits, although they had many. No, this is the way I like to remember them:

So it’s taken quite a bit longer than I planned on to get back to another installment of my unproduced Star Wars gems. But here at last is the untold story of the promotion that you never got to see, and what a doozy it is! A couple of caveats right off the bat: I did not actually have anything to do with this promotion. It was developed and presented by another marketing agency in the wake of the Star Wars Trilogy re-release in 1997 as a possible idea to launch the Prequels, in specific Episode I.  So most of this is strictly going from my memory of how it was explained to me. And the bag illustration at right is just something I whipped up based on what it might have looked like. Cool?

In the wake of the big hits of the Lay’s Spirit of Obi-Wan offer in 1996 and the  Froot Loops Stormtrooper Han Solo in 1995, Lucasfilm wanted another big product tie-in to push Episode I on the masses. Unfortunately for the marketing gurus, pretty much every brand under the sun would be also launching Episode I promotions at the same time. Pepsi cans, Pizza Hut boxes, Taco Bell toys, and KFC cups were just the tip of the iceberg of what would probably be the largest promotional movie launch ever to be seen. Multiple companies pitched ideas to Frito-Lay as to what their big promotion would be, one that would stand out from all the other Star Wars items on grocery shelves and most importantly, what would sell more bags of chips. Keep in mind that Pepsi/TriCon/Frito-Lay paid up to $2 Billion for the license, so you better believe they needed to move product to make that worthwhile.

So what was pitched was this: trading on the success of the Spirit of Obi-Wan, each bag of chips would have a mini-figure inside it. There would be 128 (!) different figures to collect, from Episode I and the Original Trilogy. Not only that, but there would be a handful of rare figures, and a possible mail-away display case for all of them. Talk about an incentive to buy chips! And you have to think back to how it was in 1998: still relatively little Star Wars product was out there, and you had a ravenous base of fans who were desperate for new items to collect! And these would hit months before the movie actually came out, so it didn’t rely on how well the movie was anyway. It really was the only time this program could have been pulled off and been a massive success (and anyone who doubts it would have been a success didn’t go through the pain that was the initial Hasbro Midnight Madness launch!) But Lucasfilm pulled way back on promotions for the next two films, so this was the one shot it had.

Ok, so if I didn’t work on this at all, how do I know about it? Well, my company was contacted to help out a bit on the toy aspect of it, and make some prototypes for the pitch itself. This was fun, if a bit frustrating as we couldn’t affect any details of the actual promotion, just what the figures might be. And that in itself was a challenge; to be fiscally viable, each figure could only cost a few cents! So much of the work we did was exploring the possibilities with such a limited budget.

We had Gentle Giant sculpt and cast a few sample figures. You can see how fragile these had made resin figures are; I don’t think any of the Luke’s lightsabers survived the first time we moved them around. One way to save money was to have limited paint on each one. To save even more, we could have them as only one color. We also experimented with themed materials, as seen below: Luke is a sandstone finish, Leia is pearlescent white, and Yoda is glow in the dark! Another possibility would be for each figure to have a flat back with a peg that would plug into a cardboard diorama that featured a background from the respective movie that the character is from. These dioramas could then be fitted into each other, making one long scene when all connected. The backs of the dioramas would have character/film information on them.

But even then the cost might have been too high for Frito-Lays’ tastes. If that were the case, we also had a back-up plan: two-dimensional characters that would be die-cut from styrene that could plug into "puzzle bases" that you could make a large display out of.  The bottom of the bases would have added info about each character. The art would either be photos from the films or would be drawn by popular comic artists as almost 3-D trading cards. These samples were drawn by Art Nichols and myself (and I had to cut A LOT of these by hand the night before the presentation…not fun!)

So why did you never see these on store shelves? Well, unfortunately the simple answer is that back then it was hard to explain just how big the collector base had become. Frito-Lay executives thought that it didn’t have a big enough payoff apparently, and they went with an instant win game with a limited number of game pieces that had the same movie pics that everyone was using. But it had one million dollar winner, and they felt that was a bigger draw than a tiny plastic figure. But what they just couldn’t grasp was that the chance in millions to be that one winner was no going to drive you to buy more chips. But you would if you were trying to collect 128 different figures!!! Hasbro proved the viability of the mini-figure idea nearly 10 years later with their 2006 Star Wars Saga mini Hologram pack-ins (one of which is shown in some pics above for scale). We tried to explain to them why the collectibility aspect would sell more chips, even if it had less of a surface "wow" factor, but they didn’t get it. We talked about seeding in some gold Yodas that could be redeemed for an instant full collection OR $1000. And we even talked about posing online as a wealthy collector who offered $5000 to the first person who could put together a full set for him. Not sure if we could have gotten away with that one…

So that’s this installment of regrets from my past. Sorry for the huge watermarks on  all the pics, but the last one of these I ran ended up with lots of folks just taking the pics for their websites without a link back here. At least one more Rejected! Star Wars article to come, probably two!

When I first started collecting toys back around 1990 I would run into other collectors sporadically (this being in the dark days before the internet collecting community at large had coalesced around USENET, for the most part). One way I would know that they were die-hard toy hunters was that they had had "The Dream". Usually this centered around Star Wars, but every collector who I talked with had it at one point or another after they had become totally immersed in hunting down old toys.

Make no mistake, The Dream never involved new toys. It always started with you being in a store (most likely a store that no longer existed, frequently a department store that still had a toy section) and as you wander through the store you find all the toys you wish were still there brand new on the shelves. And tons of them: the first 12-back Star Wars figures, all MOC. The original run of Master of the Universe. The 3rd wave of Super Powers. Maybe a Bionic Bigfoot, or Micronauts vehicle peeking around the endcap. And even better, toys that were never made! A vintage Tie Bomber! A Bantha playset!  A whole rack of He-Ro figures!

And then you wake up.

Well, I didn’t have that dream often, but I did have it. Up until about 12 years ago, that is. And then it went away, probably because nothing was hard to find anymore thanks to eBay, and everything you wish had been made in the 1970s was now being made in the present day. But last night, I had the dream again! Sorta…

I dreamt that I was buying Marvel Universe figures. And not just the ones I’ve been passing up, but ones we haven’t seen yet, like the Lizard, and Juggernaut, and Wendigo. And even better, there were a lot of DC characters there too: Superman, Joker, Killer Croc, Blue Devil. All sculpted just like the MU figures. Now, I don’t know what this means. I’m in the process of dumping most of my toy collection for good, and I surely don’t need anything new outside of DCUC to take my money these days. 

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do some mental calculations about just how much it would cost to catch up on the MU figures as soon as I woke up…

Ok. So there isn’t a modern line of toys out there today that doesn’t have flaws, something for the average collector and/or fan to be aggrieved about when they inspect their new purchase.

I know I’ve found them.  Loose joints, bad paint masks, bad tampo printing, oversprays, mold marks, splatters, frozen joints, scuffs, nicks, and on and on.

These things used to really bother me. I mean, really, really bother me, in an OCD/can’t stop fixating on them way. But now, today, they don’t anymore. Because I’ve come to a realization: flaws are inherent in the manufacturing process. They’ve always been there. The toys haven’t changed…I’VE changed. And it’s not just me.

When did this happen? When did we, as collectors, start expecting perfection in a cheap, mass produced item? When did toys stop being toys, and start being "works of art"?  Was it when McFarlane pushed the boundaries of sculpting and modling in the late 90s? Was it when toy companies stopped targeting kids and started catering coley to adult fans? Was it the advances in molding technologies that allowed sculpts to be incredibly intricate while the painting and manufacting processes haven’t changed as much? I don’t know. But I do know my memories of always being this demanding are faulty. 

Now, before I go further, let me clarify the difference between "flaws" and "bad decisions". I’m not talking about figures that look like bootlegs, or that can’t stand due to engineering mistakes, or ones that have clear mistakes, like two left legs.  Those are problems. Scale differences are not flaws. Painted detailsinstead of sculpted details are not flaws. $5 figures priced at $10 are not flaws. 

That said, it took Cantina Dan’s awesome blog that compared old figures to new figures to really open my eyes that figures have been far, far worse in general in the past few decades than they are now. I think when we have such high standards now for sculpts and articulation, when there are flaws it is that much more glaring to the critical eye. I’m not caring too much if Bob the Goon has a lazy eye, but the Riddler better damn well have multiple crisp, clean question marks on his jacket!

But you know what?  I’ve been focusing on things that just don’t matter, even at my nerdy collector level. I’ve now realized that once these guys are displayed on a shelf, especially if they overlap each other in a tight group, I can’t see those flaws, even if I look hard. Yeah, my Metallo’s legs didn’t fit in the sockets. But superglue fixed that real quick. Yeah, the Eradicator’s goggles aren’t clear. But his eyes don’t really work, do they? Yeah, Shazam’s ankles have a bright red overspray. but who is looking at his ankles?!? I look back at my Toy Biz figures from the 90s, and wonder why I wasn’t enraged when those were out of scale, or badly painted, or had crazy articulation that didn’t make sense. I dunno, I just liked that I got a Swarm, and a Stegron, and Spat & Grovel (well, maybe not the Spat & Grovel!).

So look closely at the picture above and tell me what you really see: is it a bunch of figures that just aren’t as cool as they possibly could be, or is it sheer amazement that we have figures of all of these characters in the same year? I know what my answer is, and I’m all the happier for it.

SUCCOTASH!!!

Oh, did I say Star Trek review? I meant my presentation of the amazing cross between "Planet of the Apes" and  "Stop, Look, and Listen": the halucinatory classic, "One Got Fat".

I’ve worked for the past 48 hours with only 2 for sleep, so I didn’t see Star Trek. 

Enjoy, you Star Trek watching bastards!