November Hauls!

[BWprowl]

Let’s all be thankful for the ability to spend disposable income on inconsequential collectible crap!

TFPrime First Edition Vehicon – I fully confess that this was mostly bought Because It Was There. I already have the allegedly superior PRID Vehicon, but I just generally like the design of the thing, and was interested in what a different interpretation of the same model in plastic would be like. Plus, First Edition toys and Vehicons aren’t exactly known for hanging around on shelves, so there was no waffling on this one. I’ve barely had any fiddle time with the thing, but it certainly is a different toy from the Revealer. I’d call it ‘less refined’, but there’s some stuff that’s also more ambitious. The wheels all have struts that they move about on somehow in robot mode, presumably for additional show-accuracy, and the gun-hand integration is more elegant than on the PRID (the gun on the FE is also smaller and just looks a little better). There’s no denying that this one’s a marginally bigger toy, reinforced by his stockier frame and the presence of the kibble-pack (which actually isn’t as large/obtrusive as promo pics made it out to be). This one generally feels more like a Movie toy, with more foldy-panely bits, and embellishments like the aforementioned wheel-struts. I don’t think it’s quite as good a toy as the PRID Revealer, it breaks less new ground (other toys are gonna have to work overtime to top the Revealer’s leg transformation), but it’s not without its own charm, and there’s certainly no harm in having more than one Vehicon. It’s actually kind of cool, having this slightly bulkier version around to imagine as the Commander unit or something; if I ever see another PRID Vehicon, I might grab it, just so this boss guy has two knuckleheads to kick around (aw man, am I troop building?!).

Also grabbed a blind-bag Pony, and wound up with Berrysweet, a light-purple repaint of the Rarity mold, who I think is my third fruit-themed Pony I’ve gotten out of these things. Not that Pony thematics are especially far-reaching with the toys, being primarily confined to fruits, desserts, and flowers, but at least I have the badass Firecracker Burst to offset things a little bit, right?

[JediTricks]

Picked up FE Starscream from TRU - very good bot mode that looks way better than RID Voyager model and scales nicely to RID Megs, nice transformation, vehicle mode is only so-so. Worth the $15 though, rounds out the Decepticons way better than the Voyager one could.

Received in the mail from Amazon.com 6 of the final Vintage Collection Star Wars figures:
Clone Wars Obi-Wan realistic - ok, good headsculpt, arms feel a bit less quality than expected, articulation is ok, cloth skirt is too short in the back (ew).
Ahsoka realistic - ok, a bit tall for the character as in "older teen", face sculpt is not a home run but not bad, just not quite her shape, paint is a bit garish for a realistic design, articulation is pretty good and she has both sabers in hilt and lit form.
Weequay - good, but I was expecting a sharper sculpt, and the braids still limit how he can move his head.
Nien Nunb - good, pretty short which is somewhat expected even though it turns out the character may not have been short after all. Tiny hands sculpted too small to hold the holstered pistol (which I think was sculpted custom to the character, so that makes no sense at all). Mouth not painted.
Royal Guard x2 - mixed, very articulated, and in theory the cloak is more accurately sewn, but both fall short because the cloak fabric is too heavy to sit right and too fuzzy to look right and too long to stand in any pose and any arm pose causes the helmet to fall off. Hand wasn't sculpted to hold pike against arm which is a missed opportunity. Disappointing.

Corelle Cafe Black Bread & Butter plate x3 - I accidentally dropped my cafe blue plate from 5' and it shattered (it's tempered against that sort of thing but sometimes there's just too much energy), the set no longer had 4 and I use them a bit, but they stopped making the blue plates so I bought the black to bolster the set up to 6 plates even if they are mismatched. Just arrived in the mail, silly postman woke me up with the doorbell at 9am.

[Onslaught Six]

Received in the mail from Amazon.com 6 of the final Vintage Collection Star Wars figures:

Really? Damn. Not that the line will suddenly start to suck or anything, but I'm curious to see where it goes now. I'd hate to start having to be cautious about SW purchases again--Vintage Collection was good because most figures in it were guaranteed to not be gimped in the articulation department. (That damned Han Solo excepted.)

[BWprowl]

It’s already turning out to be a totally toyetic November for me. I found friggin’ Thundertron at Target this weekend! Spoiler alert: This toy is awesome and I love almost everything about it. He’s a beast-former, and an homage to Beastformers/Battle Beasts at that (c’mon, a white and blue lion who turns into a pirate?). He’s a brand-new character representing a brand-new additional faction, complete with a symbol and the faction referenced right on the box, awesome. His function and style/personality are reflected in the toy’s design, him being a grizzled old robot sea captain with a big beard, peg leg, coat-tails, and a pirate-hat-type-head-thing, and the whole package looks badass as a result. Beast mode is marginally less badass, mainly due to the immobility of the forelimbs, but it’s the trade-off for a transformation that’s more interesting than just straight turning the limbs into his other limbs (the way the back legs do). Love the way the remaining parts of his beast forelimbs become shoulder pads. Weapon initially came off as kind of lame, being a Powerizer/Mechtech thing that just has the sword blade flip around (if you want the sword blade to point forward without having to hold the gimmick, you can just, uh, peg the thing in facing the other way), with a little claw as the ‘default’ weapon. His removable foot from the peg-leg can connect to his other hand for some mild Wolverine-claw symmetry with this, which is kinda cool, but it is just an infinitely better idea to peg the two weapons together, positioning the small claw’s peg down as a grip and letting him hold the whole assembly as a big, badass sword. Now this is the sort of weapon a kickass pirate captain should be swinging around! This guy’s great. Thundertron’s a lot of things I’ve wanted to see from Transformers for a while now, and I’m elated that Hasbro was apparently crazy enough to make him. I’ll need to review a bit, but with the end of the year approaching, Thundertron might be my TF of the year.

Also, GDO Generations Powerdive came in the mail, thanks again to Toys R Us’s online store picking up the slack where my local brick-and-mortar fell prey to scalpers. I already have Highbrow, but I do love that mold, so the opportunity to get it as a snazzy G2 homage was one I wasn’t going to pass up. It’s still a great toy. I love that the new head still has the goggle-deploying gimmick despite both the head and goggles being new molding. The sharky nose art is the icing on the cake. Sweet toy, though he had the misfortune of arriving on the same day I picked up Thundertron, so he’s been only mildly neglected.

-BW “and there’s an AmiAmi order in the mail, I’m waiting on a confirmation for this month’s HUGE AmiAmi order, and Dom was a bro and picked some stuff up to send to me; yep, too many toys this month!” prowl

[Dominic]

This is less a toy haul than it is an intellectual haul.

-the ability to use PhotoRec (a file recover tool).
-a much enhanced understanding of FTK Imager.


Dom
-going to spend the next few days working on FTK.

[Dominic]

Class got out early last night, and I was especially productive yesterday. So, I used the time and rewarded myself with a few "Legends" figures. (The trade-off was that I ended up missing a bus and had to wait in the cold.)

-Knock Out
-Wheeljack
-Breakdown

(aw man, am I troop building?!).

What is wrong with troop building?



Dom
-reviews coming soon.

[Shockwave]

Classics Megatron. Found one on the cheap. Voyager class.

[Onslaught Six]

Recently got my old desktop computer back from my father's house, it needed a new keyboard so I went out and got one, and in the process found that all the crappy Amazing Spiderman figures were on sale for $5 each...so I dug through the mountain of them and found the only Super-Articulated Spiderman in the store. For $5, I'm super happy with the guy...and they weren't kidding, either. I think he beats out the previous record holder MU Cyclops; he's got almost the same amount, but he also has double jointed elbows (holy crap) and the more recent GI Joe-style swivel wrists. The only thing Cyclops has over him is his below-knee swivels. He even has the double neck joint so he can look up, which means he can do all kinds of Spidey-esque poses, like crawling on the floor and stuff. My only complaint is that the stock photos show him with two different hands--one closed palm, and one doing the usual Spidey metal horns shooty thing--but the toy has two regular boring "c-hand" hands. If the figures go any cheaper, I might just grab one that has some wrist articulation and swap out a hand, because without that, it makes it hard to do any really cool-looking "shooting web" poses.

Here's a pic of all paltry four MU Spidermans I currently have:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdih5 ... 1_1280.jpg

I need a ton more. I made myself a promise I wouldn't get a shit ton of alternate versions of other characters...but Spiderman is one guy who I can't stay away from. (Now if they only made Spiderman Unlimited!)

EDIT: Hey Dom, you've been reading Ultimate Spiderman. Does Miles Morales have Ben Reily-style webshooters on his costume, or no? I've seen conflicting pictures and if I end up tracking down his toy--which doesn't have them--then I'll probably have to find a Ben Reily Scarlet Spider spare just for the damned wristbands...

[Shockwave]

That does look like a pretty good Spidey. Hey, have you seen the Amazing Spider Man movie? I just saw it the other day and I... like the first three better. I didn't like that his webshooting wasn't part of the mutation. I mean, I know there are certain stories in the comics where it was technological, but I still prefer good ole' natural mutation. And it took forever for him to mutate in this one. The last one they had him webbed out in like the first few scenes, this one took half that damn movie. It really shouldn't take that long to show Spidey's origin. It's like Superman, we all know what happens anyway, spend five minutes on it and move on with the real story.

But I digress, so back to figures, is this one better articulated than that "Transmetal" Spiderman they had at Walmart back a few years ago? Cause that had quite a bit. Except for wrists.

[Onslaught Six]

That does look like a pretty good Spidey. Hey, have you seen the Amazing Spider Man movie? I just saw it the other day and I... like the first three better. I didn't like that his webshooting wasn't part of the mutation. I mean, I know there are certain stories in the comics where it was technological, but I still prefer good ole' natural mutation. And it took forever for him to mutate in this one. The last one they had him webbed out in like the first few scenes, this one took half that damn movie. It really shouldn't take that long to show Spidey's origin. It's like Superman, we all know what happens anyway, spend five minutes on it and move on with the real story.

I saw it a week or two after it premiered or something. I may have even talked about it here, but fuck if I'm going to look up the thread I did it in.

I liked it a lot, actually! I think you might be overestimating how short of time it took for Peter to get his powers (it's not really right to say he "mutates," since that implies he's a Mutant and thus eligible to be in the X-Men--but that's not really here or there) in the first Raimi film. I rewatched it sometime during the summer and found it to be about the same, in a lot of ways.

You gotta realize--these two films were basically made a decade apart from each other, and the landscape of superhero movies has changed drastically in those ten years. When Spiderman came out, its contemporaries were things like Blade, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil. For most of those movies, they are almost always either shitty movies, or good movies that stray from the source material, or good movies that were good *because* they strayed from the source material. (Blade falls into the latter category, being almost nothing like the comic besides "black dude hunts vampires.") Amazing Spiderman came out now, in 2012, where a movie like The Avengers exists, and had 5 really good, accurate movies that led up to it, a really REALLY good X-Men reboot, and a trilogy of amazing Batman flicks. The landscape has changed, and we need a new Spiderman to go with it.

I think re: organic vs. mechanical webshooters...they did it one way in the last movies, so that almost guarantees that they have to do it the other way in the new one. I mean, if they were going to just retell the same story over again, that'd be pretty stupid and pointless. This movie is clearly meant to occupy a different space and is very visibly trying to distance itself as much as possible from the Raimi movies--if those are "616" Spiderman, then this is Ultimate Spiderman. (Or, if Raimi's films are the "Tim Burton" Spiderman, then this is the "Christopher Nolan" Spiderman. Arguments about tone aside.) The changes to the costume (which I actually dig--the only thing I don't really like is how small his eyes are, and that's just because I grew up with Todd McFarlane's Spidey), Gwen Stacey instead of Mary Jane, no Daily Bugle job (and no JJJ!), no Norman Osborne (he's mentioned; he's important; but he doesn't show up) OR his son (who was a major part of all 3 Raimi films), PLUS already getting out of the way the big hanging thread villain from the Raimi movies (Curt Connors appeared in at least the last two Raimi movies and we never got the Lizard--a shame) shows that this isn't supposed to be the same thing.

In fact, their choice of Lizard--and making him so much significantly larger than Spidey--is part of what sealed the deal for me in this. About halfway through the movie, when Lizard is chasing him through the school, and Spidey is doing all these cool acrobatic moves around him and stuff? You 'never' see that in Raimi's movies, because everyone Spidey fights is the same size as him. Spidey's appeal--for me, anyway--was partially the fact that he wasn't a big huge tough guy. Cut, sure, but he's lean. He's acrobatic. He's got a dancer's figure. Andrew Garfield (and the costume design) nail that in a big, big way that I never quite got with Raimi and Tobey MacGuire's Spidey. He always just looked a little bit too wide--too filled out. Kind of the same way Ben Affleck's Daredevil looked. (You want to see a movie that doesn't work at all, go watch Daredevil again. I love Ben Affleck, dude was the bomb in Phantoms, yo, but he was a really bad choice for Daredevil, physically speaking.) I see Garfield's Spidey whipping around the huge-ass Lizard, and I see future fights against Rhino and Venom and Scorpion, dudes twice his size and half his speed.

Hell, they've already announced the villain for the next movie, and it's not going to be Green Goblin (at least that they've said)--it's going to be

Spoiler

Electro

. (And apparently, Jamie Foxx is in the running to play him. I'm cool with that. Dude's got chops, and I've never seen him play a good villain, and

Spoiler

Electro

is kind of a low-tier enough character that they can get away with changing his race. Black Doc Ock, for example, as much as I'll look bad for saying it, would look and feel...wrong.)

Pretty much the only thing I can bitch about in that movie is...Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Yeah, for real, I'm gonna go there. I just can't take Michael Sheen seriously anymore after Mass Effect 2 and 3 and his role as the Illusive Man. Every time he told Peter he was "disappointed," I just wanted to add, "...Shepard," after it. And Sally fucking Fields as Aunt May? Really? I mean, okay, I get it--distancing from the Raimi films. She was mega-old in those so they're leaning towards a younger one for this movie. But for God's sake, she doesn't even look that old! She looked older in Forrest fucking Gump! I kept waiting for her to tell Peter to use his magic legs and fuck his principal. I'd say they should've cast someone else but unfortunately I suck at coming up with casts--this is why I'm not a Hollywood cast director, I guess. Point is, I still think she should've been older, but who knows.

Basically, yeah, you just gotta see any differences between the films as intentional and not wanting to repeat themselves. I'll be surprised if we don't get Green Goblin until the third movie. (Also, I'm sad that Peter's parents didn't work for SHIELD, but that's neither here nor there, now is it?)

But I digress, so back to figures, is this one better articulated than that "Transmetal" Spiderman they had at Walmart back a few years ago? Cause that had quite a bit. Except for wrists.

I have no idea! I haven't paid attention to Spidey lines in a long-ass time. The only reason I'm even interested in Marvel Universe as much as I am right now is it's got an incredible backlog of crap I can pick up and TF and Joe are practically dead in the water right now. Get me some pics and I can do a comparison.