Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Forgotten Toys of the 1980's Volume 1!

Hiya kids! I'm gonna switch things up here for a minute and take a quick break from the custom Wheel of Time action figure stuff to bring you some talk about some other toys. Last year I did a couple of articles on "Forgotten Toys of the 80's" for my boy Mike D's blog; Cultural Compulsive Disorder. If you're a fan of movies, TV, music, sports, toys, games, or just popular culture in general, you need to check out CCD, its definitely the spot to be. I'll be writing a third volume of the article over the next few days (an all He-Man knockoffs edition!) which you'll be able to read there soon (and here eventually).

Anyway, without further ranting from me, here are 5 cool toy lines from the 80’s that I’m pretty sure nobody but me even remembers...

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Wheel of Time Action Figures Part 5: To Make A Trolloc

Hi kids, welcome back! I hope everyone had a fun and festive holiday season and that 2011 is treating you all well so far. I have a late Christmas present for all of you, another entry in my custom Wheel of Time Action Figures series - a special one this time! As I alluded to a few weeks ago, I was going to devote some of my free time during last week's mini-vacation to creating a new Wheel of Time figure and also try to do some sort of "making of" feature along with it, possibly in real time here on the blog. Now I had taken the week between Christmas and New Years off anyway, but the free time I ended up having during my "mini vacation" was greatly multiplied by New York City being buried under a metric shit-ton of snow; our wonderful Dept. of Sanitation leaving us that way for two or three days for whatever reason, and the fact that at the slightest hint of inclement road conditions, Joey's Beemer only drives sideways.

Also, I'm not quite sure how I expected to do a blog post in real time, but regardless, the post is here now. I know I also said I would be doing the "aborted and abandoned figures" article first, but I decided I'd do this one instead. If this bothers you, what can I tell you, deal with it.  Oh, and if you're new here, you can check out the previous articles here, here, here and here.

So yeah thanks to the snow I ended up with even more free time than I planned on having last week, and despite Santa bringing me a whole bunch of new books and DVD's I managed to pry myself away from my Christmas presents long enough to create a brand spanking new Trolloc figure. Actually I pried myself away long enough for two marathon sessions of painting and sculpting on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively; from 10pm to 4am-ish both nights. And I guess I didn't really pry myself away either, the first night during the sculpting I finished off The Simpsons Season 13 (which was much better than I remember it being) and Flash Gordon (which was fucking ABYSSMAL... I mean really, what the hell was that?). The second night during the painting it was all Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 1, which I have to admit is a surprsingly excellent little show, despite being based on the... ugh, prequels. Why you care what I was watching while I created this figure, I'm not quite sure, but I'm just trying to give you all the total experience of what went into this toy's creation process. Wait, should I tell you what I was wearing too?