Peg, it came back to me.

Previously, on Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods… you may remember a while back I was trying to come up with some simple, elegant, and zero-cost solution to a photography/video project I wanted to shoot for future use in the ToyBox portion of the site. Truth is, one idea had already occurred to me, though I had dismissed it as being a bit too cheap ‘n’ cheesy. In the end, it’s the one that came closest to working. But despite some of the inherent flaws – gravity, really, being the main one – I think the results were kinda cool. Since we’ve already had one wave of bad weather blow through, sleep is pretty much out for today (pity, that), so I thought I’d try to go ahead and knock this project out. Read on to see some of the pictures – and to see what crazily cheap-ass solution I came up with.

The idea, if you recall, was to create, on some small scale, a simulated retail environment with a selection of stuff you’d never actually find in the same store all at the same time.

I had quite a few “product samples” to work with – some of them Dave found for me, some of them were given to me by Paul “Pantechnicon” Cortez, and yeah, there’s some eBay loot here too.

It’s really unlikely that you’re going to find anywhere with minty-fresh Star Wars, Babylon 5, Doctor Who and Star Trek toys hanging on the pegs.

Well, okay, not really pegs. You ought to be real close to figuring out where/how this was arranged by now.

Aisle three: action figures, shampoo, soap, shower curtains, clothes hangers.

And live cats underfoot. Pretty broad selection of merchandise there, eh?
Now that I look at the photos, I realize I could’ve stuck some Tron and Donkey Kong figures in there too. Ah well. The problem with the coathanger system of doing this was that it limits you to figures whose cards have “hook” pegholes – i.e. a sideways-J-shaped slot that actually begins with an opening at the top of the card. All of the Star Wars figures going back to the 90s had this, as did the Babylon 5 figures and Star Trek toys from the second wave forward.
The Doctor Who figures didn’t, however, but since I’m planning on opening those anyway, I made a very small cut on each card at the furthest right edge of the peghole, so I could slip them onto their “peg.” I had a first-wave Star Trek: TNG Riker figure that I could have done this to, but I’m planning on leaving it sealed, so I didn’t have the heart to cut that one. (Now that I look at my carded Donkey Kong figures, I see that I would’ve had to do that to them too – again, no way, Jose.)
Ideally, if there had been another curtain rod free somewhere in the house, I would’ve tried to create another vertical layer of goodies, but y’know, for what this stuff is intended for, it’s all good. The real challenges were trying to keep everything balanced, and trying to hide – as much as anyone could hide – the fact that they’re hanging from coathangers on a shower curtain rod. I haven’t looked at the video yet – not sure how well the whole set up came across in motion. Sadly, the topsy-turvy balancing act meant that I had to drop one video idea I had, of actually thumbing through the figures on the hangers. There was just no way – they either fell forward right into the camera, or took a sickening tilt backward.
I had forgotten just how many figures I have still trapped in their bubbles that I fully intend to open. Time to go play. Now just watch, someone’ll hotlink these photos at a message board somewhere with the subject header “ZOMG R@RE!! Best Toy Store EVAR!!!1!one!”