Prickle - Gumby

Prickle is a yellow dinosaur from the stop motion animated show Gumby. As a kid I loved Gumby and watched it every day. I'm a huge fan of stop motion and so I have figures of many of the Gumby characters. Prickle is made out of a rubbery plastic and is not articulated.

Harrier Hawk - Battle Beast

Harrier Hawk is one of the few Battle Beasts I have from the 80's. I never actually got any new in the package, but I have a handful from yard sales. He is a gray hawk with blue armor. I like how his wings are unfolded. You can see that his rub-sign has been worn off.

Mutagen Ooze - Nick TMNT

I heard that they were going to be releasing new Ooze to use with the modern Ninja Turtles. I wasn't really excited until I found out the slime came with baby turtles. Now I've got to get it. Four tubes later and I still need to buy more because I wasn't good at figuring out who was in each tube. I need to buy another tube and look real carefully to try to find a Michelangelo.

The Oooze is fun and the baby turtles are awesome. I recently bought a little "flip" cam made by Vivitar. I was hoping it would be useful for video reviews, but the sound quality is terrible. I don't plan on using it for future reviews.

-----------------UPDATE----------------------

I went back to Toys R Us and carefully looked at the tubes and bought more Ooze. I made sure this one had Mikey in it. I also learned you can open the tubes without taking the screw out. In Sean Long's review he showed that you can just pop the top off. This just proves that us collectors will waste money on this kind of stuff just to get the mini-figs. I've now bought 5 tubes of Ooze at $8 bucks a piece to get four little plastic turtles.

Leo Prime - Transformers

A few months ago my buddy Action Fig sent me a package that contained several toys. I posted about the package as a whole at the time, but didn't really highlight anything individually. So here is a better look at Leo Prime. This character is part of the Beast Wars and Maximals story lines/factions. I'm not really up on my modern Transformers but apparently this particular mold has been reused a couple of times for multiple different characters. How many robotic lions are there on Cyberton?

He has both a Robot and Lion mode. The figure is pretty cool, although the transformation is not very drastic. You can pretty much image in the lion mode by looking at him in robot form. The figure reminds me a lot of the White Tiger Zord from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

Bebop - TMNT

In honor of the new TMNT figures that will be showed off this weekend at Toy Fair NY, I'm posting about Bebop. This mutant warthog was the first villain I ever had in my TMNT collection. He was eventually sold off when I parted with my Turtles collection. The photographed figure below was picked up later on at a yard sale. He originally came with a gray trash can lid shield and a gray drill gun.

The figure has lot of fine details sculpted in. I always wondered if the face on the back of his vest was supposed to be a Foot Soldier or  some sort of weird skull. The turtle shell shoulder pads are one of my favorite details. I hope the new classics version is fairly cartoon accurate. The vintage figure was always a good one, but I like the toon appearance as well.

More Retro Sticker!

Here is another glimpse at my childhood sticker collection. Lots of awesome 80's puffy stickers. Today's grouping features many of the properties from the 80's that boys and girls alike enjoyed. In fact, my sister probably has stickers in her collection from the same sheets.

 Two Cabbage Patch Kid boys. The special signifigance here is that I owned two of 

these dolls as a kid. One had brown yarn hair and the other was bald.

 A pair of Care Bears

 This picture shows off a page from my sticker book with several Get-Along Gang stickers and

a number of Cabbage Patch Kids. There is even a Hot Wheels sticker on this page. There will be a future post dedicated to the car stickers.

More Get-Along Gang - Bingo, Braker, Montgomery, and Woolma

Bingo Bet-It-All Beaver was always a favorite of mine. Here is a non-puffy version of him.

 Here's tow Rowlf the Dog from Muppet Babies to wrap up the post.

(one with an one without a piano - the music notes are from the same sticker sheet)

The Nerd from Robot Chicken

Obviously I loved Robot Chicken. It combines two of my favorite things, toys and stop motion animation. A while back there was a wave a Robot Chicken figures, and I picked up some of them. Recently I saw the San Diego Comic Con version of the Nerd at Toys R Us. I had to get him. He is a great representation of the character from the show. He has decent articulation and is sporting a SDCC t-shirt.

He comes with several accessories. A white top hat, a tote bag, a bottle, and a sandwich.  I'm not sure if there is any significance to the various accessories or not. He does wear a tux and top hat in some of the episodes, but that's the only real connection I can think of for these accessories.

Mosquitor - MOTUC

Mosquitor, the blood sucking member of the Evil Horde was one of the coolest Master of the Universe Classics figures in 2012. He captures the best parts of his vintage figure with a few updates. The figure uses the standard male body with mainly new feet, head, and armor. This version of Mosquitor features two small bug arms on his back, which has been common with many MOTUC updates of insect characters. Some people would have liked for him to come with blood tanks on his back like the Staction version had. I think they would have been cool, but may have made him top heavy.

He comes with a little purple gun similar to the vintage figure. This time he has no working blood pump but they did sculpt nice details behind his translucent red chest plate. It would have been super cool if they could have molded the chest plate partially in red and partially in clear plastic. It would be hard to pour it into a mold and have it look like blood running down the walls of his chest.

He turned out to be a great figure... one of Pixel Dan's favorites at least.

Captain America - Secret Wars

I have previously posted  about other Secret Wars figures, and the line as a whole. Today's post is all about Captain America. He was the first Secret Wars figure I ever owned. You can see he has lots of play wear. The red stripes on his torso are almost completely rubbed off. The 'A' on his forehead is also gone.

Captain America came with a cool lenticular shield in which the image would change depending on how you looked at it. The figure came with several inserts for his shield. My favorite one showed Steve Rodgers and Captain America on it. Due to the stripes in the design it seemed closest to his actual shield.

 

Pictured bellow are the inserts. The square shaped one came with Dr. Doom.

Batman LotDK 146, 147, & 148 BAD

In the 90's Legends of the Dark Knight features stories set during Batman's first year on the job. "Year One" was always ten years in the past from current continuity, so that way the stories could be more modern. The writers on the book cycled through doing short runs of three or four issue story arcs. LotDK issues 146,147, and 148 contained a story called BAD.

In the first issue of BAD a little kid looses his toy rocket ship, "the Comet Buster" down a storm drain. A large hulking man helps out the little boy and they become fast friends. It's obvious the man is a simpleton and seems very innocent. The when someone passing by knocks the rocket out of the boys and and destroys it the simpleton goes berserk, releasing the bad within him.

 This three part story came out in 2001, while I was in college. One weekend while I was home from school I was at my buddy Derek's house. We were working on our stop-motion animated show, Animation Creation. We had the video camera out and a bunch of toys laying around that we were animating with. My buddies Dad, Doug Moench, walks into the room and tosses me a copy of the newest issue he's written. Doug starts to laugh looking around at all the toys on the floor and says, "I needed to give a kid playing with a toy a name, and I thought who else...Kevin."

I was super excited to have a "throw-away" character named after me. The little kid Kevin is important in the set up of the story. He helps establish the brute Jordy as a nice guy and a simpleton under normal circumstances. After that he's hardly in the rest of the arc and odiously never heard from again in the comic book continuity.

Not to long ago I saw a page of original comic art online by Barry Kitson from the BAD story line. It got me kind of thinking about how I'd love to own page 4 of issue LotDK 146 where the little kid say his name is Kevin. So I reached out to Barry online and he put me in touch with the fellow that sells his art for him. It turned out that he had the page as well as some other from the issue. I ended up spending the Christmas money my Dad gave me this year to buy up the pages that feature Kevin.

 Page 3: The only one in the part of the story to feature Batman. Kevin is

 trying to reach down the drain.  

Page 4: Jordy helps Kevin get his rocket back and the two introduce themselves.

 Page 5: A happy moment is quickly ruined as a person walking by rudely bumps into Kevin. 

Page 6: The toy is ruined and emotions run high.

Page 7: Jordy goes berserk and gives the rude man a little more than he deserved.

I also got a few other goodies to go along with my orignal art. Pictured to the left is a promo art proof printed for a convention Barry was at around the time BAD was released. It's the art from the 2nd issue of BAD. The colors are a little brighter than on the final cover. I've always loved this image.


I was also given a sketch of the cover design for the first issue of BAD. You can see the Barry was going to include Kevin on the cover of the first issue. There is a little note from the the editor (I assume) that says "loose the kid".

 I just love these pages. I haven't quite figured out how I am going to display them all. I'm not sure if  I should just fame page 4 or if I should make a larger display with all of them. I'd like to show them all off, but framing all of them will be expensive and take up a lot of wall space.  As a collector I do like to be able to see as much of my collection as possible. Why have it if you can't enjoy it. Living by that theory puts space at a premium.