Dragon Blaster Skeletor Revealed

June 6, 2012 | Poe

I’m not even gonna bother with the spoiler stuff.

I’m sad to say I’m disappointed. I was expecting something a bit more realistic (and an articulated jaw, which I would have taken over a ball-jointed neck). It’s not that different from the vintage version.

Look, it’s one thing to not go all hog-wild with “anime hyper detail,” but couldn’t we make it at least look a bit less like Goal Eater? Maybe it’ll look better when we get more photos of it. It’s hard to tell how detailed the body is. But I’m not a fan of that head.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being hypocritical what with my support of the style of this line, but I feel like they could have made it a bit more detailed and gotten away with it. (more…)

Interview > Bluefin Tamashii Nations USA

June 4, 2012 | Poe

As many of you know, I’m pretty excited about the S.H.MonsterArts line. That line is being brought to the U.S. by Bluefin Distribution, who have a fairly active presence on Facebook. Bluefin’s Xavier Lim was kind enough to answer a few questions about the company and the brands it distributes.

1.) Many Western collectors are unfamiliar with Bluefin Tamashii Nations USA. Can you briefly describe the company and its connection to Bandai? (Side question: what’s the “Bluefin” about?)

Bluefin Distribution is an official U.S. distributor for 2 branches of Bandai Japan: Bandai Collectors, known as Tamashii Nations, and Bandai Hobby, the division that produces Gundam-related model kits. The “Bluefin” is a reference to the bluefin tuna. (more…)

Interview > James Chillcott of ShelfLifex.com

June 1, 2012 | Poe

When you run a toy-oriented website (or any website, really) with a respectable amount of traffic, you eventually start to receive unsolicited emails. Most of the time they’re either unrelated to the topic of the website, press releases, or just boring. Once in a while, though, I receive an email that intrigues me and I think merits further investigation.

A few months back I got an email from the folks at ShelfLife (www.shelflifex.com), a new website whose three stated goals are:

  1. To create a free encyclopedia of every collectible ever made
  2. To provide the best collection management tools, community features and collectibles news aggregation yet seen
  3. To make Ebay useless to collectors by launching a next generation marketplace that blows that old tech away

Lofty goals, of course, and time will tell successful they are at reaching them. But I visited the site out of curiosity and found something that had been lacking in my previous test-drives of similar sites: an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.

I wrote back to ShelfLife CEO James Chillcott to find out more about the project. (more…)