Toyland
One of the dangers of writing a thinly-veiled Transformers ripoff is that I really want to see these characters as toys! I'm building up to the big reveal of a combiner and holy crap is going to be cool. Plus, I feel like I've done some interesting things with the team that the kids at Hasbro and IDW haven't even touched.
Speaking of combiners, have you checked out the Prime Wars Trilogy toys? The middle series, Titans Return is kind of unremarkable (but not bad!), but Combiner Wars and Power of the Primes are stupidly awesome. Part of that whole gamification approach I spoke of in my pevious entries has been centered on collecting most of those lines because oh my god!
On a related note, so the Combiner Wars and Power of the Primes figures are awesome. Cool. I've also seen my interest rekindled in an older line called Battle Beasts. These were tiny (1.25") anthropomorphic animals in armor. They had the gimmick of a rub sticker that revealed an element in typical paper-rock-scissors fashion (water beats fire, fire beats wood, wood beats water...somehow). The figures were nicely sculpted but barely qualify as toys. They had two shoulder joints and that's it. While in Japan, they were part of the god-awful Transformers Headmasters line (WHICH DIDN'T MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE), in America, they had no appreciable backstory, characters, or setting. And yet!
And yet, like the Combiner Wars, I find myself trolling eBay to see if I can find some for sale at a reasonable price. There isn't a single one in the series I wouldn't pay at least a dollar for. They're all awesome! But even Fisher Price toys have more articulation, so what's the deal?
Cultivating this sense of anticipation has been wonderful. Building these goals and tracking progress towards achieving them has been great. Yeah, I'm still not sure how I'm going to afford any of it, but dammit, it's been fun!
Speaking of combiners, have you checked out the Prime Wars Trilogy toys? The middle series, Titans Return is kind of unremarkable (but not bad!), but Combiner Wars and Power of the Primes are stupidly awesome. Part of that whole gamification approach I spoke of in my pevious entries has been centered on collecting most of those lines because oh my god!
On a related note, so the Combiner Wars and Power of the Primes figures are awesome. Cool. I've also seen my interest rekindled in an older line called Battle Beasts. These were tiny (1.25") anthropomorphic animals in armor. They had the gimmick of a rub sticker that revealed an element in typical paper-rock-scissors fashion (water beats fire, fire beats wood, wood beats water...somehow). The figures were nicely sculpted but barely qualify as toys. They had two shoulder joints and that's it. While in Japan, they were part of the god-awful Transformers Headmasters line (WHICH DIDN'T MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE), in America, they had no appreciable backstory, characters, or setting. And yet!
And yet, like the Combiner Wars, I find myself trolling eBay to see if I can find some for sale at a reasonable price. There isn't a single one in the series I wouldn't pay at least a dollar for. They're all awesome! But even Fisher Price toys have more articulation, so what's the deal?
Cultivating this sense of anticipation has been wonderful. Building these goals and tracking progress towards achieving them has been great. Yeah, I'm still not sure how I'm going to afford any of it, but dammit, it's been fun!