Month: June 2008

Can you tell I’ve fallen off the wagon with my Doctor Who figure collecting? I suppose there are worse habits to pick up again. You can spare yourself the toy talk by not clicking here. … Read more

…you think you could do me a solid? Character Options is doing a SDCC exclusive Doctor Who “Time Crash” action figure set, featuring what they claim will be the only version of the fifth Doctor sporting celery on his collar. There will only be 3,000 of these two-packs at the event, and proceeds will go to the Children In Need charity, which is kind of appropriate since that’s what “Time Crash” was done for in the first place. If anyone reading this (who I know and trust, that is – people who I don’t know and trust probably couldn’t find anything interesting to read about here anyway) is going, I can paypal you in advance for the figures and of course for shipping ’em to me once you get home. Assuming you don’t get terribly attached to them in between. Which, actually, I could see happening, because how awesome is plastic Davison + his plastic celery?

Now, a bit of funny commentary about this set: the irony of doing a “Time Crash” set in the U.S. is off the scale, because, of course, you haven’t seen “Time Crash” in the U.S. unless you downloaded it. If you want to see some pissed-off Brits, hit up any Who forum and look for the thread about these figures. The British collectors are – quite rightly, in my estimation – furious over this, because while they’re likely to have been the people who donated money during the telethon-style broadcast of which “Time Crash” was one small part, we’re the ones getting the figures. The UK collectors were already up in arms about the wide-release fifth Doctor sporting no celery, so they view this as a slap in the face. Now, the money all going to charity = a good thing, but it seems like someone’s marketing logic is a little askew here. So, my thanks to Character Options for announcing something which has cheered me up a little bit after a craptabulous week, and…I guess…thanks for rewarding us Yanks for…technically speaking…illegally downloading…that little Doctor Who special?

If CO can get permission to legally show TC at the con, that might make marginally more sense. But still, the basic assumption in place is that the target audience has got hold of the thing somehow, by hook or by crook, and knows why the tenth and fifth Doctors would be packaged together. *shrug*

So yeah, if anyone I know is headed for SDCC, hit me up here.

(Sorry if this seems like an awfully trivial thing after all the Othello angst – you can almost hear the mental gears being stripped. If you were to accuse me of trying as hard as I possibly can to find anything to distract myself and snap out of it…well, you’re dangerously close to being right on the money.)… Read more