Ten Examples of Crap I Waste Other People's Money On: Christmas 2016 Edition*

I wrote this on Christmas Day, everyone went out to drop off relatives and I got half an hour to myself, so spent it writing about my prezzies, god I’m such an attention whore – look at me, look at the cool stuff I got, I make myself sick – and yet I’d still never do this in real life, I think I now understand how come people can write such horrible shit in YouTube comments but I’ll be dammed if I can put it in words. This may only be part 1 in fact, my gift giving and receiving is very spread out this year, beginning on the 23^rd and ending whenever the NES Mini arrives (so probably February) but I made out so well so far – in fact in truth I already had enough for a post by Christmas Eve - I thought I may as well get bragging, I mean blogging, I think I may mean both. Now as always I’m not saying these are the best presents I received, they’re just the ones I can get a paragraph of semi-amusing waffle out of. So are you sitting comfortably? Of course you are, you’re still full of food, after four days, so I’ll begin:

Over 25 Years of TMNT!

So I worked out today that I’ve been receiving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles related gifts every Christmas for over half a century, I felt exceptionally old and ate Quality Street, lots of Quality Street, even the penny toffees no one but Sophie eats. This actually isn’t all of the TMNT stuff I received this year either, just the ones that were nearest the tree that accidentally ended up being the perfect items to photograph for this, with Raphael and the LP representing the earliest years of my life as a TMNT fan (I came in roughly in autumn 1990 with some stuff my dad bought back for me from Austria) and Karai and Armaggon representing the present day. Can we talk about that LP for a minute? That is the limited edition boxed version of the soundtrack to the first TMNT film, my favourite part of the Ninja Turtles franchise and my nan got it from a fucking charity shop. Some people might be unhappy they got a present from what is effectively a smaller goodwill store with a stronger stench of cat pee; I say that if it gets me a picture disc with T-U-R-T-L-E Powah! on it you can buy it from a fucking meth lab for all I care.

Quick Crappy Review: The Corps! The Corps vs The Curse: The Collection 3-Figure Set: Ogre, Buckshot & Snake Bite*

Even though I wrote some fairly recently, I’m feeling a lot of review rust, in fact I spent about 40 minute reading old itsalltrue.net and Fwoosh.com reviews to get myself back in the mood, though really all it did was annoy me because I’ve been so out of the action figure collector loop of late. But fuck it, I bought a new thing and I need a blog post to fully justify my purchase and I’ll only get more rusty the longer I wait and if I put it off enough eventually I’ll end up like the Tin Man and need Judy Garland to sort me out, and I will not rely on Judy Garland for anything every again.

So Lanard have been making The Corps! line for a looong time now, they launched in 1986 as the best of the G.I. Joe: Real American Hero knock-off lines as and have been going pretty much non-stop ever since, today’s set is now considered part of The Corps 2.0. by their official website but were also released as The Corps! Elite. I haven’t bought a Corps figure since I was small, we’re talking 1992ish, but while shopping for Christmas presents I fell I love with their new character Buckshot and, finding her set for a fiver in The Range, I caved in and brought her home with me, this not the only time I’ve brought an angry Australian home from Romford. Called a ‘collectors edition’ the The Collection sets are really just an evolution of their old Triple Pack and Action Pack concepts and includes three figures, a snazzy bike and a shitload of weapons. Not bad for a fiver.

A Tribute To: Smarties Smartians*

I was one of those kids who liked saving up for things, I was also one of those kids whose dietary habits were easily dictated by what free shit was being given away, there was no such thing as brand loyalty when free toys were involved – except Kinder Eggs, I am their high chieftain for life. This is leading up to the time I ate Smarties almost solidly for a month to get a set of four glow-in-the-dark mini figures, those mini-figures were the Smartians.

Toys of Christmas Past

So I said the next pot would be less indulgent and that was because I was planning to post my Smartians tribute but Dinosaur Dracula, my main blogging inspiration and by ‘inspiration’ I mean ‘house I repeatedly rob’, did a special edition of his 5 Random Action Figures posts, my favourite of his regular features. This edition was five figures that were all received as gifts at Christmas when he was a kid, he then asked for readers to post some examples/stories of toys/dolls they received as kids in the comments. I started writing a post but it got so long I decided to make it a full blog post, plus remembering is very difficult for me. Why is remembering hard? Apparently it’s a common problem for people who have the mental health issues I have – depression and related issues (paranoia, anxiety etc) - I don’t know why this is, I know that once out of a ‘bout’ of depression I remember very little of what happened when in it but then why does it affect memories of times before I had the problem or during times when I wasn’t having a bout? Is it the medication? Must investigate further. Of course it’s quite possible that it doesn’t apply to me and I just have a really shitty memory for life experiences because I use all my memory blocks to remember the elemental types of Pokémon and the real names of X-Men characters. Whatever it is, my memories are quite fragmented and just to be bloody difficult I have more fragments about Birthday gifts than I do Christmas ones.  I did manage to pull out five memories though, so are you sitting comfortably? Then it was Christmas Eve babe, in the drunk tank…

The Pop Culture Chritmas Tree*

The Pop Culture Christmas Tree™ is done!

Well actually it was done on Sunday but my phone ran out of battery and I couldn’t find the charger. This isn’t the first year I’ve done this but this is the first year I’ve been able to have solely pop culture related to decorations. I feel like I’ve achieved something even though all I’ve achieved is being alive long enough for enough hanging things to be released, hmm but given my various depression-based problems, maybe that IS an achievement? Fuck it I feel a sense of accomplishment and that’s all that matters – so of course I’m going to share it with the internet.

The above photo doesn’t do my completely Pop Culture tree justice (I’m not even sure if it’s in focus) so I’ve picked out some key elements for you, you’re so lucky, so are you’re sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin

Lumpy Cakes!*

I am really excited and cake is the cause

No one in my town sells Skips in single bags. This is important because a) how can it be that I can’t buy Skips in anything but bags of six? And b) it was while looking for a bag of Skips that I found these:

Pop Culture League: There's A Sale on At Penney's!*

So I deleted my last Pop Culture League post because I hated it and it made me sound like a dick and I don’t think I am a dick (I might be though). Let’s see if I can make myself look like less of a tosser with this one. What’s the topic Cool & Collected? “There’s a sale at Penneys! What was one of your greatest deals?” Oh noooo, this is going to be a bad memory. Also I don’t know what Penneys is, Google is giving me the option of JC Penneys or Primark…ANYway, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

I peaked early, find-wise: I found a Megator in the early ‘90s - only a few years after it was released now I think about it, about six years, just about the right amount for someone to have grown out of it and grown into masturbation and sports cars. Megator is one of the last Masters of the Universe figures released, part of the aborted Powers of Grayskull sub-line (only he and his fellow giant Tytus were released along with some dinosaurs, two more He-Men figures would be released in ’88: Laser Light Skeletor and Laser Sabre He-Man). His harness is currently on sale on eBay for £220 but obviously that’s still there, I saw one sell for £338– so he’d probably go for a couple of hundred at least today, I paid 50p (29 cents approx.). But what makes my Megator buy so good is that I had no earthly idea who the hell he was; Megator came too late to be featured in either the He-Man or She-ra cartoon and I’ve never bought or owned a single carded vintage He-Man figure so even if he was on one of the cardbacks (and I don’t think he was on any non-Powers of Grayskull packaging) I wouldn’t have known of him either. I bought him, well, got my mum to buy him, because he looked cool – he IS cool, he’s a giant green ogre who looks like he’s going to eat your entrails and really hate it because they came out of you and he hates you but he’ll do it anyway and he’ll do it why you’re still alive. I remember vaguely assuming he was from one of those toylines that weer vaguely He-Man/Thundercats scale but went nowhere like Sherriff Solar or Voice Squad (not that I’d’ve known either of those lines’ names back then). Megator strode across the battlefields that I turned my garden into, a lumbering subordinate of evil, regardless of who was the big bad that time (usually Mumm-Ra, Hordak and/or Super Shredder probably). The sad part of this is that Megator is no longer here, I have no idea what became of him, I can only assume he was in the Crash Dummies Box because I wouldn’t have sold him nor thrown him away so his disappearance must have been an accident. This means that I no longer have one of the coolest toys of my childhood and no chance of ever being able to afford a replacement, and frankly a replacement would be nowhere near as cool because he wasn’t bought for 50p at some random bootsale. I do have the Masters of the Universe Classics version who is technically a better figure (it doesn’t have rooted hair for a start, well the extra head does but I don’t use that) and I did get him cheap too thanks to He-Man.org but it’s still not the same, I miss you Megator. I know it says ‘one’ in the topic but I need to cheer myself up – meet Eggasaurus, who was 20p (along with a whole bunch of other stuff including four Fisher-Price Adventure People.). 

Eggasaurus here is part of a semi-obscure set of mini-figures called Bad Eggz Bunch whom I don’t bother with usually because, well, they’re fucking expensive – going for between 10 and 50 quid and that’s far too much for something that’s less than 2” (insert penis joke here). I have an old Egg Gripper from when they first came out but that’s it. The BEB figures came in eggs filled with slime, being a sequel to the Trash Bag Bunch, who came in dissolvable bags filled with slime – they used to sell ‘em in places like Tesco, so mum would get me one with the odd weekly shop, getting something that came in a slime-filled container with your Fish Fingers and Munch Bunch still seems cool to me. I can’t find a recent Eggasaurs sale, not even on the wonderful littlerubberguys.com but it’s certainly the only thing I’ve ever bought where I could sell it for 100 times what I paid for it! I’m not, going to sell it, the BEB figures are such wonderful sculpts (my particular favourites being Protein Plasm, Bategg, Yolkyuk and the aforementioned Egg Gripper) that I rarely get to enjoy in person thanks to their extortionate bloody value and even though Eggasaurus is one of the more ‘boring’ monsters, and that says a lot for the other figurines when we’re taking about a caricatured triceratops, it’s still worthy of praise, worthy of having and enjoying and it’s a fucking dinosaur – I LIKE dinosaurs.

Yeah I sounded much better this time around, sorry to anyone who read the last post. Also from the League? Also from the League:

Whatever Green PlasticSquirt Gun is actually talking about is irrelevant because they have a naked Frankie Stein making out with a naked Gooliope Jellington in the background of their photo

2 Minute Toy Break has a more recent find

Goodwill can be found at Alexis’ Universe

At first I thought Mr Smith’s Plastic Bubble was being an adult, then I saw their second pick

The Nerd Nook has a MUCH better. He-Man story than mine, sob