Dude, you have a hole in your face...

When Jerry Bruckheimer asked me to come up with an idea for a teen version of his series C.S.I. I was honored. And only two months after that request I came up with the idea for a pilot that had the name I now, today, use as a title for this post.

"Dude, you have a hole in your head" was about an amateur club of forensics investigators/teens and their talking dog. My own personal homage to some childhood nightmares I must have had. Every episode would have fifteen to twenty minutes of incredibly gorey teen homicides, followed by five minutes of wacky chases and a twist secret ending in the last minute. I know what you're thinking: Pure gold.

But Jerry shut us down even before we get to production, but after I asked the fat kid from Nickelodeon's amazingly lame hit show Drake & Josh to loose some weigh for the pilot (he was going to play the corpse...)


Like this, but way cooler and with at least one of them dead.

But this was never going to be, doomed to join my other unproduced hits like The Possessed Flying Nun (she could spin her head as a helicopter) and Biker Mice from Mars... No wait, that actually happened...

Moving on, this time, I got a cool toy that finally allows me to use my unused title for something: McFarlane's T1000 action figure from the series Movie Maniacs 4 (released in 2001).



James Cameron's Terminator 2 was released in 1991 (ten solid years before this action figure was produced). On a side note, hey, did you remember when James Cameron used to direct cool science fiction movies? OK, when the movie premiered I was on holiday with my folks and we went to a drive-in to watch it. I remember that the drive-in was pretty much destroyed and the wall that prevented you from looking at the screen from the outside wasn't there anymore. All the cars waited in line to get in while the movie was still showing, so I distinctly remember seeing the ending of the movie without sound, incredibly weird images like the T1000 melting and not getting what the fuck was going on. Then I saw the complete movie and everything made sense. Yeah, I know now that the plot itself didn't made much sense... But still...

I loved that movie.




The action figure is great and it captures perfectly the moment when Arnold was shooting the T1000. Some of the coolest special effects of my childhood memories, and the reason a huge amount of kids got mercury poisoning trying to build their own T1000.

The sculpting is excellent, it doesn't only capture the character but also is incredibly accurate to Robert Patrick's face:


"FX Tech: OK Robert, stand still, we're going to blow up your face now
Robert Patrick: OK... What?"

Being it's from early 90s McFarlane, this figure came with a ton of accessories: Two hands, a gun, two of those hook hands he uses to jump on a car, a slightly bent metal blade that's not really too threatening, and last but not least, a whole new torso:



I don't display him with it because, frankly, it creeps the fuck out of me. But I can imagine the dialogue on set...


"FX Tech: Stand still Bobby, we're going to blow up your torso now...
Robert Patrick: Oh, DAMN!"

This is a very fun figure, and it's incredibly versatile in spite of the clear lack of articulation. I think that these figures need another name, maybe Action Statues, I'm not sure, something like that.


Until next time. STAND STILL BOB, HERE COMES THE BIG MELTING SCENE!

(SHIT!)

Action Score!

As you remember from the other day thanks to a great present I officially started collecting Action League from Batman - The Brave and the Bold. You may also remember my rant on how this were really hard to get in Argentina. Well I was right, they are hard to get, there's not a single one in our version of Ebay and that's that. End of story.

Or was it?

Two days ago a friend of mine, collector and private toy seller sent me this magical text: "I have a bunch of TB&TB minis, I brought them for a guy that doesn't answer my calls, I need to sell them, are you interested in any of them?"

So I casually went to his house the next day and OH MY SWEET BATMAN! there was a really huge lot of loose figures!

Long story short, here's my haul:



I grabbed some complete two packs and since they were loose I only picked the different characters and not the Batman versions, my friend told those were the easiest to sell anyway.

Complete Two Packs:

From wave 3:

Etrigan the Demon and Batman as the Dark Knight:

I'll take the Dark Knight as a separate character since Bruce was possessed by Morgan La Fey at the time. Plus, he's really cool.

Batman and the Top:

What can I say? I like Black Costume Batman more than Blue Costume Batman...

Dr. Fate and Wotan (Wotan is an interesting character, he was actually a cave woman that studied the dark arts and was able to reborn into the Sorcerer guy in the pic... Weird magic stuff)


And the Crime Syndicate versions of Batman and Green Arrow, Owlman and Blue Bowman:


Also I got three villains loose from wave 2:

Ocean Master came with Scuba gear Batman, Joker with normal Batman and Sportsmaster with Green Arrow.

And two heroes that also were in two-packs with Batman (Grappling Hook and Batarang):

I just love that screaming B'wana Beast, he's the first reason I got to start collecting this line and was really high in my priority list.

The sculpts are cute and awesome, and there's a lot of tiny details and added things that crank up the fun factor of these figures. For example Joker's green maze has a little smiling face sculpted, just like the Super-Powers and DCUC versions, I think that's great.



I'm loving this line, Mattel. Keep making new characters and I'll keep tracking them down and buying them.

Until next time. SKITTLES!

A blast from the past

Hey Kids! Do you know what time it is?

Yes! It's time for a mildly amusing, certainly embarrassing, anecdote from my childhood. Here it goes: When I was like four I was obsessed with Captain Caveman. Don't ask why, I have no recollection of ever watching the Captain Caveman Show, the one with the three girls, or the one with Betty and Wilma. I probably saw it a couple of times and for my four year old mind, that spelled "awesome". The thing is one summer, my parents rented a country house with a pool and this little freak was starting to learn how to swim at the time, and how to jump in the water without being afraid. Progressive parents and all that. Apparently, perhaps as a way to give myself courage, I used to yell "Captain Caveman!" every time I jumped in the pool. Every. Fucking. Time.

I'm not amazed by the fact that my parents tell this story to everyone I know, I'm actually amazed that the didn't shoot me then. "Why is he telling us this?" you may ask, well, my mother told my girlfriend this story (of course) and, somehow, she remembered so, for X-Mas (I know we are in February) she gave this kick-ass present: Funko's Captain Caveman Action Figure.

My girlfriend never looked for a comparison pic, and when this thing arrived she realized it was 6" and way bigger than she thought.


"My girlfriend was shocked by the size of it" (you can quote me out of context any time you want, by the way).

This figure is great, is a great translation to the original design to plastic. And it's also kinda weird, it looks like it has some kind of action feature, but I never found out if this was true or what the Hell is he supposed to do. The figure is fairly simple, but the original design was simple too. The design was also very freaky, since we are talking about a guy that hanged around three gorgeous girls, wearing nothing but his own hair to cover his privates, and all of his body to be fair. We can make a new version of the Connect the bones song with him: The head hair is connected to the... Beard, the beard is connected to the... Chest hair, the chest hair is connected to the... Pubic hair... Etc. (and also, gross).

As I was saying, I never watched the Captain Caveman show when I was little, that's why the story is so bizarre, I did watch, long time after the pool incident, the Laff-A-Lympics, where the Cap was a regular in Scooby Doo's team. Maybe not Captain Caveman, but when I was younger I usually watched Wacky Races, end there were two characters that resembled Captain Caveman, but without super powers. Apparently for Hanna-Barbera, all cavemen looked alike, that's a little anticavite if you ask me...



I really liked Wacky Races, I have a whole theory about why was Dick Dastardly never allowed to win, when all of the other racers were just as dirty as he was. But that is a theory for another time.

In case you were wondering, no, I don't own every car from Wacky Races, I would love to, but I only could get four:



Well, at least I got my two favorite cars: Dick Dastardly's Mean Machine 00 and the Slag Brothers in the Bouldermobile (with number 1). Yes, those are the guys that looked like Captain Caveman... Hey, I told I was obsessed...

Until next time. CAPTAIN CAVEMAN!

King me!

Following it's proud tradition of reviewing action figures a long time after everyone else in the web already did it, this time Freak Studios is proud to present King Randor of the House of Randor. I mean, I'm commenting this one so late that he found a girl, got married, had kids and other blogs are already talking about his daughter Adora. But well, you talk about what you have, and now I have MOTU Classics King Randor.



A Randor figure is a little bitter sweet, he's a cool figure and all, but if I consider it as a toy I can say that a King Randor wouldn't have rocked my world when I was a kid. Of course, I can't be sure of this since I never owned an original Randor before this one, but he never really did much in the cartoon, so I'm guessing he would be in the first part of the adventure, telling everyone what to do, and that was about it.

On the other hand (the sweet hand) as an adult collector is a great figure to have, his color scheme is quite silly, but other than that it makes me think in the awesome mini-statue that the Four Horsemen did for NECA. And man, that was cool. This posseable Randor has a nice sculpt, lots of reuse but a great head, nice details in the armor and in the accessories. There are no QC issues with the paint either. He has one little crooked ankle, not too much and the staff is a little warped.



As with Teela I decided to display Randor with his sword instead of the staff, not only because of the bent plastic, but also because I don't want to have too many staff wielders on my display. For now, just Hordak and He-Ro kept theirs. Besides the sword gives him the look of a warrior King instead of being just a moderate ruler of half of a small planetoid in a dark corner of the galaxy.

The same as what happened with Faker's colors, Randor seems to use a blind man (who was color blind before loosing his sight) to pick his wardrobe for him. I do like the cross motif in the sword, staff and armor.



Disclaimer: If you are a member of He-Man-org, you might be annoyed by a mistake in the above comic. I know that King Grayskull is not the father of King Randor, I used him because he's Adam ancestor and all that. Please ignore that mistake. (I'm also thinking that a good name for Randor's father could have been Ances-Tor...)

Disclaimer II: If you're a member of He-Man.org and you do have a sense of humor, you may find the last disclaimer insulting. Please ignore that disclaimer, I can be a real jerk sometimes.

On other MOTUC news, Mattel revealed that Mo-Larr and a toothless Skeletor will be exclusives for SDCC this year (not the only exclusives, I think a more serious Tytus will be the other one. Where the Hell am I going to put that ginormous bastard?).


I stole this image from AFI.

I think the Mo-Larr figure is great, embracing Robot Chicken proves Mattel has a great sense of humor, something we knew after all those Ask Matty we read each month ("Can't comment at this point" is the greatest punch line of all time).

I, myself, rather ask Faker Matty...

And, that's all from this neck of Eternia.

Until next time. WHERE'S YOUR GODDAM AXE?

Oh, Action League, with a little help from my friends...

(Yes, you were supposed to sing the title... Duh!)

So, I'll just say it: My favorite show on TV right now is Batman - The Brave and the Bold. I think it's great, funny and clever. I think it digs very deep in the history of DC comics and uses the weirdest, most obscure and freaky (that must be why I like 'em) characters I can recall. I'm waiting every episode anxiously and I watch them in my free time, consider that, for someone who watches cartoons for a living, this is remarkable.

You may have noticed I also collect toys, but I had a problem: the 5" hole-in-joints line from Mattel wasn't doing it for me. Then I saw the Action league and, as a DC fan/collector of Marvel Super Hero Squad figures I was so incredibly happy with the images (add happy face here). The only problem is that the line is still pretty rare and hard to come by in Argentina (add sad face here).

But now, thanks to the help of regular visitor FishMilkShake... No, no, let me rephrase that, I have a rule that says anyone who gives me toys is automatically my friend, so, following that rule I'll start again.

But now, thanks to the help of my good friend, regular visitor, usual contributor to the kick-ass AFB Forum, Australian trendsetter and toy collector extraordinaire, FishMilkShake I now own these:



I helped FMS in the past with a Marvel Legends Black Widow and some DCUC figures he was missing, and in return he got me almost the complete first wave from the Action League line. Toasts in the Freak House will remember this for a long time.

What I got includes:

The Batman and Red Tornado two-pack:



The Blue Beetle and Plastic Man two-pack:



The Aquaman and Black Manta two-pack:



And two of the single packs, The Atom and Green Arrow:



Just the Batman vs. Kanjar Ro pack is missing, since the other singles are figures of characters I already own. I'll try not to repeat too many characters, but in this kind of line that's a really hard thing to do.

To sum up, thanks to FMS, and now I'll need to track down more figures, and specially more villains, since the poor Black Manta is feeling very lonely and pretty inadequate by now...



Until next time. OUTRAGEOUS!

Now it's official!

OK, so today, no toys, today I just got an announcement: Reis over at Geek Orthodox chose this little excuse for a blog (and the more deserving Toyriffic)to be honored with the Certified Geek Award:



Although this might be a shock to most of you, it is true, I am a geek. Well, most of my personalities were thrilled about it, some of the others, the ones that live in a little place I like to call "Denial Land" said "What? Me? A geek? Nah!", so the others got together and tried to come up with some proof... This is the best we got:

Who's got two thumbs and proves that this blog is really really geek?



Is that settled? Good, now lets move on. The rules of the This Blog Is Certified Geek Award (Trademark) say that now I have to choose two blogs and give the award to them. So, how about an applause and maybe even a standing ovation for your very-sharp-how-does-he-stay-so-young? host, Phantooooom Straaaanger:







For me (and for so many more) Action Figure Blues is one of the best if not the best toy blog out there. It has the occasional news, but it's mostly about a guy and his toy collection. It's the incredibly funny site of someone who, like me, is geographically challenged in the world of toy collecting. Plus, there's the kick-ass AFB Forum, the first on line community I have ever belong to and actively participate in. All those porn forums you say? Nice people, but no love... Wait, that didn't came out... Oops, wait again... Ehmm, Moving on... Next winner please!



Leon at Open the Toy has a very different taste in Action figures than me, that's why it's such an interesting blog to read, he gets really cool stuff I have never seen. Plus, he has games and funny comics (but not enough funny comics) in his blog too.

I think, what I'm trying to say is...



Now, is their time to pick two winners for the Award. The rules are the first comment to this post.

Until next time. GEEK!