In what has happily become an annual tradition here at PGPoA, the Four Horsemen graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions about DC Universe Classics, Masters of the Universe Classics and their own FANtastic Exclusive figures. Read on to get the latest from Santa’s not-so-little helpers, Chris Dahlberg, Eric Treadaway, Jim Preziosi, and H. Eric “Cornboy” Mayse. (more…)
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care… by Greg Easton Photography
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care...
1.) Tom-Tom asks: How expensive would it be in the short run to switch to an alternative-source plastic like Thermoplastic starch biodegradable plastics? That way, there’d be lower production costs and lower MSRPs in the long run.
A cool suggestion but not something logistically we can switch to.
Toy Aisle Trolls is a feature highlighting acts of vandalism to in-store toy items. If you find a ruined package, a stolen figure, a swapped-out figure, or any other such acts, take a photo (cell phone photos are fine if they’re not blurry) and email them to poe AT poeghostal.com. Also, please note: I’m deliberately being over-the-top with my condemnation of these people.
Octane sends in these photos from a Walmart in San Antonio, TX.
So not only did this scumbag score a Beast Boy and a Power Girl, but he was so goddamned cheap he swapped in other figures and returned them to get his money back (and naturally, Walmart threw them back on the shelf…sigh). No doubt in his mind he was “sticking it to the Man,” but all he was really sticking it to was his own soul.
Karmic Payback: His water heater breaks at 3:30AM on Christmas morning, flooding his living room and thoroughly soaking all his presents under the tree.
If you’re a G.I. Joe fan, the Official Joe fan club is kind of neat. You get some nifty newsletters and pride in the fact you’re an elite nerd that loves G.I. Joe. Each year the club offers up two “free” figures to it’s members. You get to pick between either an old school 12″ sized Joe or a 3 3/4ths style figure. Last year I joined to get a pimped out gold Undertow figure, one of the most bad asses water based figures around. This year you can color me disinterested at best (which is a light shade of blue). For the 3 and 3/4ths figure we get Big Lob.
More like Big Yawn. Get it? I’m sure someone has been clamoring for this figure, but I have no use for him.
It seems like every geek franchise has at least one mysterious, badass-looking character who gains a cult following despite having done hardly anything or had any characterization at all (at least at first). Star Wars’s Boba Fett is the classic example, though the franchise also produced Darth Maul, who had even less screen time. In the world of G.I. Joe there was originally Snake Eyes, but now he has more history than you can shake a stick at; fortunately, the likes of Mercenary Wraith and Agent Helix have filled that void. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics has gotten so much mileage out of this sort of character it’s become something of a joke (it began with Wolverine in the 1980s, followed by Cable in the ’90s and then a plethora of characters since).
But when it comes to toy lines, the reason an obscure character becomes so popular is often because they have so little background. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar and a professor at the University of Southern California, has made a living examining the social trends of what we’d call geeks. In his essay “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?”, during a discussion of fan filmmaking, he notes
Fans, for example, note that the Boba Fett action figure, far more than the character’s small role in the trilogy, helped to make this character a favorite among digital filmmakers. The fans, as children, had fleshed out Boba Fett’s intentionally murky character, giving him (or her) a personality, motives, goals, and conflicts, which helped to inspire the plots of a number of the amateur movies.
In Masters of the Universe, the role of the mysterious-yet-badass character is filled by Scareglow. A late addition to MOTU as it lay dying in 1987, few fans ever owned him, having moved on to Transformers or G.I. Joe or some other fad by then. He was produced in smaller quantities than earlier MOTU figures, and so between that and the utter lack of characterization beyond a single minicomic appearance, Scareglow became somewhat legendary among MOTU fan circles.
There seems to be a contingent of fans out there who hold it against such characters that they’re popular, considering them to be cheap fanboy sops undeserving of the attention. To those fans I say: lighten up–and maybe think about using your damned imagination, for a change.
But I digress. In what was arguably a crime against fanity, Scareglow never received an updated figure in the 2002 MOTU line–hell, he never even got a “staction.” And so the Masters of the Universe Classics Scareglow arrives amidst much anticipation. (more…)
Along with Eldor, one of my most-wanted Masters of the Universe toys that never made it past the prototype stage was Gygor, a yellow gorilla intended to be another beast-steed for He-Man (made from a re-purposed Big Jim toy, just like Battle Cat). While Roger Sweet described the creature in Mastering the Universe, I’d never seen a photo of it–until now: He-Man.org got their hands on some phototype shots.
I don’t know about you, but I would have loved this thing when I was a kid. Click the thumbnail for the full-size pics.
Mattel recently registered the Gygor trademark, which could mean we’ll be getting a Gygor down the line. While at one point, the figure was intended to be larger than He-Man and feature a saddle for him to ride on, I’m thinking a MOTUC Gygor could be a Beast Man repaint with some new tooling. Or, of course, it could just be another trademark feint by Mattel to keep us all guessing. Which would be very disappointing.
