Toy Bender

Here’s another round of quick news items that have come out of the San Diego Comic Con. If you require more of my patented in depth opinions, don’t worry. I’ve got picture posts on the way that are loaded with all kinds of sweetness for your reading pleasure. Until then, enjoy these links!

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Since huge, barely moving robo-ponies (i.e. Butterscotch) worked out so well for Hasbro, the power brains at the company got together and asked themselves, “How can we get boys to ride a robotic pony?” After many unspeakable failures, they ditched ponies and turned to the one guaranteed boy imagination attractor… a friggen dinosaur. The resulting beastborg is named Kota the Triceratops from Hasbro’s Playskool brand.

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Sigh, another day where I miss Comic Con. Bah humbug. Well, there’s still tons to cover. I figure that I can go over a few of the cool items that I’ve seen on the interwebs. I plan on doing more detailed posts on particular toys I really like if I can get some pictures of them later. If you noticed anything of note so far, drop me a line in the comments.

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There are a few pics that have emerged from Previews in the upcoming G.I. Joe toy line that are worth noting. From Wave 11 we get Tiger Force Duke, Cobra Flint, and a fancy ass Cobra Commander.

Flint in Cobra Uniform

I am all over that Flint like stink on rice and mixed metaphors. I guess I’m a sucker for anything 80s cartoon related in the G.I. Joe toy universe, no matter how terrible the source material is.

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Bloomberg.com is reporting that Hasbro is going to increase prices on our favorite toy lines for a second time this year to overcome the rising costs of production… just after announcing they’ve had huge increases in profits. Oh well, they’re a business and they’re in it to make money, so it’s up to toy collectors to tell them when enough is enough.

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Fairly recently a Fwoosh.com poster made one of the coolest Transformers customs of all time. Combine one concept that’s cool, transforming robots, and one that’s ultra cool, a talking super car, and you get a Transformer named K.I.T.T.

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If you haven’t gotten your 25th Anniversary mail-away Doc yet, then Hasbro has a message for you. After running out of Docs, Hasbro has sent out a message saying that they are making a second batch of Docs that will be sent out in September. This is good news if you sent in your stickers already and haven’t gotten Doc, or if you’re like me and haven’t sent in your redemption form/sticker yet. I was hoping there would be more comic packs that I wanted to shell out in order to complete the rather ridiculous requirement of six stickers.

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On Hisstank.com they featured a really great custom that had me drooling. It’s of a 25th style Alley Viper, which is one of my favorite G.I. Joe figures of all time:

This sucker won first prize in Hisstank’s custom contest for good reason, it rocks ten boners.

The original Alley Viper is one of my favorite Joe figures of all time. You couldn’t get a figure that looked cooler to me in my formative years. He had an awesome helmet/face shield, a cool gun, a super detailed backpack, and his beyond awesome body shield. So what if he was orange and blue? In those days, hideously bright colors were cool.

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Some lawsuits are just plain weird. While catching up on comic book related things, I ran across this bizarre story about how Marvel requested that a court rule that the X-Men weren’t human.

The reasoning for this is because there is a higher tarrif on dolls than there are for toys (why that is, is anyone’s guess). If a toy is a small representation of a human then in the eyes of the law it qualifies as a doll. In the 80s Hasbro’s G.I. Joe figures fit under the doll category. They tried to fight it, but lost. ToyBiz, who was making X-Men figures at the time, was paying this extra tarrif, so Marvel had a court declare that the X-Men weren’t human. How bizarre, considering that the X-Men themselves have been fighting for years in the comics to be considered human. The court agreed and ToyBiz managed to recoup the extra cash.

Now if you think about it, there’s a few non-human looking X-Men, but it with the way G.I. Joe had a lot of sci-fi elments (B.A.T. troopers for instance) you’d think that Hasbro could have gotten away with the same thing. Who knows? Maybe the court was made up of people who thought of G.I. Joe in the old 12″ more doll like sense and didn’t think of the smaller line as an almost entirely different product.

If you thought those big plastic boxes full of Star Wars figures and vehicles that were exclusive to Target were completely ball popping awesome, it really was only a vision of things to come. Target’s got an G.I. Joe Ultimate Battlepack coming down the pipe that is fantabulous:

This vehicle contains three vehicles. The first is the MOBAT, which I don’t think was released in quite a few years. If you don’t remember it from your youth, it’s the G.I. Joe tank that was motorized and still is in the re-release. Next up is the H.I.S.S. tank. I know what you’re thinking, you don’t need another H.I.S.S. This one is a bit different, though. This H.I.S.S. is of the ultra cool red variety, making it a cool Crimson Guard H.I.S.S. Finally, there’s a Trouble Bubble. Again, it’s not the one that they are re-releasing at mass retail. Nope, this one is Cobra Fricken Commander’s “Flight Pod.” I seem to remember him clinging precariously to almost any flying vehicle he could in order to escape instead of using any kind of fancy vehicle, but maybe my memory is wrong.

There are six whopping figures included in this set and one of them is Short Fuze. So it looks like fans of the first series of Joes will have to get this set in order to complete the entire group of thirteen original G.I. Joe team members. Sucks to be you!

To see more pics of the G.I. Joe Ultimate Battlepack you must head over to Toy News International. They’ve got close ups of each vehicle and figure! Oh yeah, the set is supposed to street on December first and will retail for fifty bucks, which isn’t that bad of a price considering what’s included.

Reading through Mark Bellomo’s Transformers Identification and Price Guide made me nostalgic for my younger days of loving Transformers. I never had a lot of Transformers, but I had some damn good ones. Still there was one Transformer that was my favorite that I never got, despite desperately wanting him. It was Soundwave, the most competent and coolest of the G1 Decepticons.

What’s funny is that I’m not sure if I actually told my parents how bad I wanted him. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even mentioned him. I guess that’s the danger when you make your kid think that Santa is real and that he knows everything, your child might just skip the middle man and try to go right to the source. Hell, I remember talking to my friend Jeremy about it and he said that one time that he wanted a toy for Christmas he wished really hard and got it. After I heard that I wished so hard I nearly blew my brain muscle, but I still didn’t get him from that bearded fat man.

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I can’t say that I’m a huge Transformers fan, in fact I really don’t give a damn about most new Transfomers merchandise and I practically have zero interest in collecting the vintage toys. However, I do have very fond memories of the toys from my youth so I do have a soft spot in my heart for Transformers. That’s why I initially started looking at Bellomo’s Transformers Identification and Price Guide, for a quick trip back while in the book store and nothing more. A funny thing happened though, just like in Bellomo’s G.I. Joe guide, The Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe 1982-1994, I became captivated by the tidbits of info he was dropping so I broke down and picked up the book.

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One of the coolest news items to come out of the last Joe Con was that Hasbro was going to make a series of short episodes for a G.I. Joe cartoon entitled G.I. Joe: Resolute. Instead of the series being some lame kiddified take on the Joes (I’m looking at you Sigma Six), it’s made for the adult collector in mind or at least a more mature fan who could go see a PG-13 movie. G.I. Joe: Resolute appears to be in good hands too. Famed comic book writer Warren Ellis wrote the series and from the short clip shown at Joecon fans were very impressed. Each episode will be five minutes long with a ten minute ender and will be shown on Hasbro’s website. Hasbro hopes that they can then get the episodes aired on Cartoon Network and on DVD, kind of like what was done with the first Star Wars: Clone Wars series.

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On Toy News International I saw an interesting news item that said that Hasbro was reissuing the planet devouring Transformer known as Unicron. While this is decent news if you’re a Transformers fan and missed him the first time around, it’s not really big news to get into a tizzy over (at least for me). However, there was another angle to this story that I found quite amusing… the annoying NERD angle.

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While Entertainment Earth usually gets some of the best Star Wars exclusive figure assortments, Big Bad Toy Store is going to get in some fly exclusive Cobra variant sets. Lately it’s been hard for me to get excited about small variants on figures, but for some reason the variants found in these two Cobra Extreme Conditions are so cool I nearly pooped myself when I saw them.

First up is the COBRA Arctic assault set:

This is one seriously badass cold weather squad, I’m afraid that the two cold weather 25th Joes are going to have some serious problems if you add these boys to your collection.

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