It’s been just over a month
since Christmas and I’ve managed to buy enough crap to facilitate another one
of these, I shouldn’t be allowed money.
Honestly though most of
this comes from me chipping away at what was left of the money I was gifted at Christmas,
using the odd tenner on things as I came across them.So are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin:
Miss Hippo!
Stare into the cold dead
eyes of a long forgotten mascot! Stare and lose your soul! For maximum effect
re-read that in the voice of The Undertaker, now continue. I paid £10 for this
three inch piece of nightmare fuel, well I paid £10 for a lot of figurines but
this was the only thing I actually wanted from the items, though many of the
rest were pleasantly from a holiday camp chain1 I visited each year
as a nipper. This is Miss Hippo, one of the former mascots of
British theme park Thorpe Park and a corner stone of my childhood summers, they
debuted in 1990 but the two ladies – Miss Hippo and Miss Frog – didn’t arrive
until about 1995 and I had no idea they were given figurines like their male
peers. I was so surprised I’d clicked ‘buy now’ on eBay before my mind had
processed the thought that I was paying a tenner for something around the size
of a Monster in My Pocket. I regret nothing.
Shark Popper!
At last! I can’t remember
what blog introduced me to the Poppers toys, I thought it was my one stop shop
for plagiarising: Dinosaur Dracula but Google says it wasn’t and Google is
never wrong so it must have been somewhere else BUT they had a Shark Popper and
by god I wanted one, but it was only available in America then and I wasn’t
playing £15 postage. Anyway ever since then I’ve seen just about every type of
Popper around (and have, of course, bought all the Monster Poppers I can) but
never a Shark Popper, them BAM! I’m shopping for last minute items for my
holiday in The Range and there’s a Shark Popper for £5, a fiver, you can’t eat
in KFC for a fiver these days! As for why I was looking for items for a holiday
in a sports-focussed Centre Parcs resort in the toy section, nah I wasn’t, I
was dawdling. Should I have saved the £5 for food and activities on my holiday?
Yes, yes I should but I can now shoot foam balls at my friends and family from
the mouth of a cartoon shark and while that’s not life changing, it is
something I couldn’t do before.
Jack!
So yeah, I went to Centre
Parcs with five of my friends, I had a very nice time thank you for asking (you
didn’t ask? well fuck you you rude prick) even though I’m terrible at sports
(well I’m average at bowling, and
apparently very dainty at badminton). If you’ve never been to/heard of Centre
Parcs they’re summer camps for grown-ups open all year long and wildlife is a
big part of why people go, even more so if you go with four people who work
with animals. So I saw a lot of squirrels so I bought myself a cuddly squirrel,
that’s how you buy yourself gifts on holiday right? But one cannot simply just
grab one fluffy thing out of a basket and take it to the counter; one must
carefully choose the soft toy they’re going to adopt – so now picture a 19
stone bald metalhead in all black and spiked shoes in toy shop sorting through
squirrels. Some people choose the cutest but I always like to go with one who
has the most readily apparent character to them, in Jack’s case ‘character’
equals ‘being lethally pissed off’ – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a soft toy so
few seconds away from leaning across the table and glassing you. He was
perfect, now he’s mine, my friend Sam called her fox (she bought a Centre Parcs
fox, she likes foxes) a ‘memory toy’ to
justify buying another soft toy after she’d sworn off them and that’s just
what Jack is, all my memories of the holiday are stored in an fucked off
squirrel.
This Ball!
And also in a light up
meteorite, I bought this this from Centre Parc’s toy shop also. There was a
huge…rotunda of cheap £1-£3 generic toys to shut kids up with at the back and
this was amongst the rubber dinosaurs and clockwork owls, I was just being an
annoying child and bouncing the bouncy balls while waiting for my friends to
finish choosing their toys when I found this – a meteorite made out of silver
faeces. I liked it already! Then I bounced it and the fucking thing lit up!
Then strobed! It was a light up meteorite made of alien shit and it had to be
mine. So I added it to my pile of ducks (don’t ask) and have been bouncing it
around the house ever since, my family hate me.
All of these Thundercats Miniatures!
This was such a good deal
I’m going to talk about it on my blog, I need a life. Ok these little fuckers
are by Kidworks and aside from Bad Eggs Bunch they are some of the most
overpriced Mini-Figures around. Even in this condition (loose, missing most of
their weapons) eBay sellers want £5 upwards, the few I’ve owned up to this point
all come from me immorally ripping off clueless bootsale sellers. I got this
whole lot (which also included Ssslithe, I just forgot to put him in the group
shot) for £23 plus postage so they came in at about £2 each. But I actually
already have Ssslithe, Cheetara and Mumm-Ra the Everliving so after outing them
for a fiver this lot’ll’ve been even cheaper. This leaves me with only four to
find (Ma-Mutt, Mummy Mumm-Ra and the amazing Snowman & Snowmeow set) and other
than some paint wear on Rataro they’re all in really good condition – Jackalman1 and Vutureman were in
such good nick I thought they might be fakes at first (they’re not I hope,
though Vultureman does look exceedingly like he’s made of rice pudding) AND
Lion-O came with the Sword of Omens. I don’t get too many really good 80’s toy
deals on eBay so I am metaphorically dining out on this shit for months.
Flying Heroes Leonardo!
While looking for pictures
of the current Flying Heroes toys so I could mock them on a previous post I
found an Amazon sale for this and even though it makes even less sense than
Batman or Wolverine being this type of toy does it’s a motherfucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Dragon Flyz, that’s two
of my favourite action figure lines mixed into one logic defying mess. I’ve
only let him off once so far and true to form he hit everything he possibly
could within his flight path so it’s nice to know that Flying Heroes are doing
their predecessors proud and as this was in my mother’s bedroom (she took some
parcels in for me while I was away and of course I had to open them there and
then)… well I haven’t actually confessed to having done it yet (and she doesn’t
know I have this blog) but when I do you’ll probably hear her disapproving
reaction from where you are, for some reason she gets really funny about her
adult son bouncing toy turtles off her stuff, weird.
Doctor Who: The Secret Lives of Monsters!
This book is fantastic, and
more importantly it was on sale. It’s split up into information on a bunch of
monsters who’ve appeared in the show since it’s return, I flicked through it
and found that each monster had its own multi-page behind the scenes section
with concept art and vintage behind-the-scenes photos and that was enough for
me to buy it while in WH Smiths picking up a magazine and not bother to
look at anything else it may contain. That was a mistake – each ‘profile’ isn’t merely just
that, instead the whole thing is written in the style of investigative
journalism research and completely from the point of view of an in-cannon
citizen of Earth, made up of newspaper clippings, books, papers, textbooks,
stolen UNIT files recalling events that go back to the very first Doctor and
actually go a way to retconning and/or tying up conflicting events and
information from throughout the show’s life. It must have either been very well
researched or written by a massive Dr Who nerd, probably the latter – seriously just check out the notes section of its entry at the TARDIS Data Core to see how many things get referenced - and it is a fascinating thing to read.
Of course this format works best when the monsters have a lot of history or
appearances so the inclusion of 1-shot enemies like The Krillitanes are a
little baffling – oh, you don’t know who the bloody hell they are? They were
the bat things from that episode in the school with Anthony Steward Head in? The
one where Sarah Jane and K-9 came back? Honestly I think they included them
just so they could talk about Sarah-Jane Smith and the tin dog, both being very
popular and Elizabeth Sladen being very dead which usually bumps up how highly
regarded you are, and given that Sarah Jane was generally considered Best
Companion EVAR she is now regarded as something akin to a saint. I’m not saying
that’s wrong (though Ace was clearly a better companion) just that it is - well that and the Master should totally have
gotten an entry instead of the Giles-Bat-Things.
Tuskor Raider!
Save the best for last! And
you don’t get much better than finding a huge Chap Mei beast in your local
charity shop3, well ok you do, lots of things are better including
sex, chocolate and bowling but shut up. I actually went to my charity shop on
the off-change they might have had Disney’s version of The Hunchback of Notre
Dame on DVD (I want to watch it again but don’t want to pay HMV prices) but to
my delight there was a Tuskor Raider, dusty and unloved shoved in a shelf
between bags of naked Barbies and some Bayformers – for a fiver. It was hard to
keep the squee inside, which further proves how pathetic I am, or maybe not, I
mean it’s a giant mammoth in a spiked hat, surely the appeal of that extends
beyond toy nerds right?
Vikings: Legend of the
Norse Warriors is one of the cult favourite company’s best offerings with one
of the best range of beasts (Chap Mei’s crowning achievements in my mind) – a
line-up that included the incredible Sea Wyvern, a new sea serpent, Arcturus
& Nereus from Legend of the Knights and Mighty Moe from Deep Sea Adventure4
and gave the Ice Quest: Wild Artic beasts a new fantasy inspired paint job
including their mammoth, who is now the helmeted war beast Tuskor Raider. I don’t
know in what reality Vikings would ever be able to use a giant mammoth in their
pillaging or even how they’d get it on the boat and feed it the whole time they
were at sea but that’s what makes Chap Mei lines so charming – fun and awesome
rule the day, not silly things like logic and physics and scales - and if it gets
me a war mammoth they could have packaged it in Soldier Force for all I care.
This one is missing the spear for his gun and his ladder but neither of those
things affect me in the slightest and the main thing is that he still roars
(when you push the trunk down, which made cleaning him a loud experience) and
he’s a war mammoth.
And thankfully I’m done, I
hope this killed some time and gave some enjoyment, because writing it
certainly did both those things.
1
a holiday camp, or holiday park as this company – Haven Holidays – likes to
call them: imagine a trailer park and a summer camp had a baby by the seaside
and they put a cruise liner’s entertainment and swimming pools in what came
out.
2
yes I am aware that Jackalman is holding Monkian’s mace, I fucked up this
picture a lot, ok?
3
our version of Goodwill stores, only smaller and each charity runs their own,
thus there’s a couple of dozen charity shop chains across the UK and Ireland,
there’s three different ones in our parade of shops alone.
4
also used to make up the Animal Planet line; I think Ice Quest may have been
folded into that line too actually.
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