Category: ToyBox

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...And Little E Makes 3 ToyBox

The Mosesmobile

Collect the whole setWhen I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was one basic rule in the toy world: Star Wars was king, so if your toy line had to have a chance of success, it had to be in the same basic scale as the Star Wars figures. Things aren’t quite so unified in the modern toy-making or toy-buying world, but it’s neat when it does happen – mixing and matching characters and vehicles and whatnot kinda flexes a kid’s mental storytelling muscles (or at least it did mine). There was some justification for the smaller-scale G.I. Joe guys and the Micronauts and the crew from The Black Hole hanging out on the Death Star. You just had to use your imagination to figure out what that justification was.

So generally speaking, when buying toys for Evan, I keep half an eye open on “compatibility.” It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s kinda neat when stuff fits/works together. Right after Christmas, I was delighted to see that Evan discovered that the engineer, the monkey and/or the elephant from his little train set could also sit in the driver’s seat of the little jeep and the little truck that he got. Which is cool, you know – you can’t get everywhere by train. The Wonder Pets and their “Fly Boat” are vaguely compatible with all of the above too, though they’re slightly larger than everyone/everything else.

When one of my wife’s cousins sent a big belated Christmas package for Evan in January, I was pretty jazzed to see that the big wrapped gift inside was a big Fisher-Price Noah’s Ark set. All right! More critters! And they can sit on the train or in the driver’s seat too. Well, maybe not the train – it makes noise, and has no volume or mute switch, so mom kinda disappeared the batteries that kept the train running. It can still make its rounds manually via Evan power, though. But without the noises, the train seems to have lost some of its appeal for him.

But that’s okay! The engineer, the monkey, and the little elephant quickly joined the motley crew of Noah’s Ark. Or is it Noah’s? I’ve caught no end of grief for the fact that, as we untangled all of the critters and characters from the ocean of twist-ties that held them in place and handed the critters off to Evan, I told him “Here’s Moses!” Wait, what? Well, he looked a little more like a Moses than a Noah when I first saw him in my perpetually sleep-deprived state. I was quickly corrected on that account, but when Evan eagerly added the train characters to Noah’s Ark, it certainly raised some other questions: why are there suddenly three elephants and only one monkey? And who the heck is this engineer? (Well hello, doesn’t someone have to keep the boat running smoothly? I mean, if all the animal species on the planet are riding this thing…yeah, I want an engineer. Dare I say…a miracle worker.)

And of course Noah (Moses? Moses!?) and his buds can drive the little jeep or truck. Evan has already decided that since the pickup truck is the same color as Noah’s Ark, it’s Noah’s Truck. Well, he got the animals to the boat somehow…wait, I’ve got it. While we’re rewriting the entire Old Testament to include the combustion engine and the Wonder Pets, Moses can be the driver of the truck. Um…and the engineer…whoever he is…drives the jeep. With the monkey. And as for the Wonder Pets? This whole boat gig is all about saving animals. Well, if you’ve watched Wonder Pets at all, somebody’s gotta save the baby animals. See? Daddy’s got this whole thing worked out about how to mix and match the backstories of all of one’s toys.

Well, okay. Maybe this is one case where toy compatibility has caused a few more problems than it’s helped along. (Moses!!??!) In the meantime, Evan’s having a blast, and that’s all that counts.… Read more

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ToyBox

Little Cybermen, yay!

Due out after the first of the year:

Cybermen figures

I’ll take half a dozen of each, thanks very much. Left to right: Tenth Planet Cyberman (1966), Moonbase/Tomb Cyberman (1967), Tomb Cybercontroller (1967 – this one is a build-a-figure whose pieces will come with the other characters in this wave), Invasion Cyberman (1969), The Next Doctor Cyberleader (2008).

I don’t know if this is the entirety of the second classic wave, or if previously announced characters like the third, seventh and eighth Doctors are still on the way. Obviously, with the Cybermen being all over this year’s Christmas special, these figures are being announced now.… Read more

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ToyBox

Torchwood figures for sale on eBay

Buy now, buy oftenGrrrrr. Basically, this is almost all of wave 1 (I’m keeping Gwen if I can afford to); I ordered in July, cancelled in August, and scificollector.co.uk seems to have forgotten I cancelled…so, long story short, I have an overdraft and some stuff for sale. Listings: Captain Jack, Weevil, Cyberwoman.

Didn’t really plan this, and it’d be Groundhog Day before I could get them returned and refunded, so to eBay they go. Thanks for looking.… Read more

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ToyBox

Skip this if you’re not up for a toy-collecting rant

Kind of awkward huh?As has probably been painfully apparent lately, I really off of the sci-fiaction figure collecting bandwagon in 2008, largely thanks to Doctor Who. (Hey, there are worse hobbies/habits to have, and in all likelihood there are less expensive and more “mature” ones too. At least my practice run for a midlife crisis involves little bits of plastic.) Now it’s looking like next year’s Star Trek movie is going to make 2009 a hell of a year to have fallen off the wagon. … Read more

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Gadgetology ToyBox

Exterminate the ice trays!

Left to right: Davros, Minute Maid Limeade, Dalek Supreme and a Dalek, presumably biding their time until they can make margaritasDon’t ask for them in your grocer’s freezer aisle: That’s right. There are Daleks in my freezer. (There’s a real and logical reason for this…which you’ll have to wait until the end of the post to see. In the meantime, my wife’s going to be pissed, looking in the freezer for some manner of foodstuff and finding evil armored mutants and stuff.)

They really like the moon: check out this link for a really cool project – a small NASA team has set up shop in, of all places, a disused McDonald’s, and they’re restoring and reprocessing raw data and pictures from NASA’s 1960s unmanned lunar missions with jaw-droppingly spectacular results. Apparently the data gathered by such probes as the Lunar Orbiters circa 1966 could be beneficial to the next generation of lunar mission planners, but hey, I’m okay with it if all we get out of it is more of these great pictures. That’s a perfectly good thing for my tax money to be going to. Be sure to check out their series of pictures showing where these open-reel data tapes have been for the past four decades or so, too! That information makes the restored data and pictures all the more remarkable, and makes me feel a little better about my own housekeeping practices. (Not that I couldn’t use some improvement…)

MobileProWoes: fifteen bucks later, I have a new wi-fi card to replace my horrendously abused one for my handheld PC…and it turns out that the wi-fi card may not, in fact, be the problem at all. It’s the port inside the machine. I’ve had all sorts of advice about what to replace the MobilePro with, but in the end I’m fond enough of the machine that I’m going to be happy to replace it with an only slightly newer MobilePro. There are fully capable laptops out there, but I’m on too tight a budget to even get into the $300 range. I don’t need this to play movies or MP3s – I just need something extremely portable for writing purposes that isn’t a Crackberry or anything of that nature. I’ll let you know how the hunt goes. In the meantime, the fact that the MobilePro won’t fire up a perfectly good new card raises the interesting possibility that I might just have two working wi-fi cards – one slightly battered and one backup.

Electric cattle pod: still working on the year’s-end best-of podcast thing, which is now looking like…ready for it?…five hours, split pretty evenly between soundtrack and non-soundtrack stuff. The frightening thing is, every time I think I’m ready to finish writing my material and start recording, some other really cool release pops up and I’m all “ooh, got to work that in somewhere!” So by the time Christmas actually rolls around and I unleash this puppy, it’ll probably be two days long. And yeah, I’m writing a script for myself; it’s bad enough that I’m going to have to listen to my own voice while putting this thing together, so I’d like to at least have the benefit of the illusion of sounding like I know what the hell I’m talking about.

Okay, okay, here’s why: I just got the Doctor Who Stolen Earth figure set, which has two Daleks, Davros and yet another Doctor (if anyone needs the spare tenth Doctor I wound up with here, give me a shout – if you can cover shipping and maybe lunch, he and his sonic screwdriver are all yours). Apparently, many of the Daleks manufactured this year by Character Options had some issues with the plastic of the ball joints behind both the “sucker arm” and “gun” swelling up; freezing them for a few hours gets things back to normal. It also works wonders for Davros’ head/neck joint, apparently. You learn something new every day, huh? Look for them wherever your grocer carries frozen genetically engineered mutants in bonded polycarbide armor. (If I was less tired, I’d totally geek out on you and regale you with the fact that freezing both the Daleks and Davros have actually been major plot points, but…….naaaahhhh.) I picked up this and the classic series Dalek 3-pack, along with the new wi-fi card, in a recent round of eBaying which is pretty much my early Christmas for this year. I picked up one other fun thing, but I got it for Evan…and you’ll see a photo of it soon enough. 😉… Read more