Lego Purchase of the Droids!

Now that the new Sandcrawler is out, or even if you have the old one, it's a good time to recreate this classic image, which was always one of my favorite moments in the original film.

Like the bounty hunters, Lego has kept us two short in being able to have a complete line-up when it comes to the Jawa's droid sale.  Luckily, this can be easily remedied.

The two you have to make are the ones at each end of the droid display.  On the far right is a LIN-series mining droid.  I am a "credit where credit is due" type of guy, so I should disclose that I searched around to see if anyone had made this droid, and found Baron Sat's amazing Lego site, where he had done this exact thing.  I only made a minor change to his design, in that his is based off of the Hasbro figure, which has a huge claw that the droid in the film doesn't have.

On the far left is (what somebody has decided is) a "KPR Servant Droid."  He is pretty basic, and not too difficult to make out of bricks at all.

I have a secret hope that somebody will start a series of You Tube videos, making versions of the original trilogy using only Lego sets...you should just about be able to do the whole thing, with 15 years of sets.

1994 Godzilla ("Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla") NECA, 2014

Thank goodness for Amazon, because I don't think this figure was ever coming to a Toys [backwards R] Us near me in my lifetime.

This is the second figure in what has now become an official series by the action figure powerhouse that is NECA.  Let's take a closer look at whether it's awesome or not:

Like the first NECA Godzilla (the Legendary Godzilla), the figure's sculpt captures the look of the source design well.  Starting with the 1994 "MogeGoji" suit was a safe idea, since it is usually the most-preferred Heisei Godzilla design.  Until I compared the sculpt with this photo (below), I thought NECA's figure was a bit bulky:

Also like the previous figure, this one has all kinds of articulation--even some that you really can't use very much because of the sculpt, or just because of Godzilla's basic shape (much like the  Pacific Rim figures).  You realize this mostly on the arms, which seem like they should move a lot more freely than they do.  The ability to close his hands is nice, though, and helps for posing.

I have read complaints about the tail (which comes unattached, like the last figure), and they are right, but before we look at that, I should point out that it now has some "rings" of articulation, just like the SH Monsterarts figures by Bandai...I thought this was very interesting.  The last third or so is still one segment (with a wire inside, also like before).

Also, this is just bizarre to me, but the feet have peg-holes.  I don't recall if the Legendary figure had them or not, and I haven't yet looked, but out of all the 6-7" figures you have, I'd venture to say that Godzilla has the least chance of falling over.  Don't get me wrong, my biggest complaint with ANY action figure company today is the lack of included stands, but I can't imagine ever, ever needing one for this figure.

As I just happened to own the 1994 Godzilla that Bandai made for their SH Monsterarts line, I thought a comparison was in order! 

First off, NECA's is obviously a bit taller, but considering this just made me notice what a strange lean the Bandai one has.  This looks completely right on my shelf, paired with my Heisei Mechagodzilla, because it looks like he is realistically reacting.  However, just standing still, it looks strange, and even causes his dorsal plates to be askew.  While NECA's head might be a bit too big, I think Bandai's is a little bit too squashed, but has better articulation than the newer figure.  NECA's blue-green for the claws and toes is a strange choice, as Bandai's extremities are more film-accurate.

I waited to discuss the tail, because this photo makes it all clear.  NECA's tail comes to a point, instead of the rounded end we are all familiar with, and that was a rookie mistake (Again, I haven't compared, but don't tell me they just re-used the tail end from the first figure...).  Also, Bandai's is quite a bit longer.

And you can have too much of a good thing, as posing the Bandai tail often leaves me with some overhang, and I have to creatively curl it to sit on my shelf correctly sometimes (mostly because the Children are always messing with it).  And look at the hips of each figure in the above photo.  For some reason, Bandai's figure has a bad case of "Dunlap's Disease," where NECA's blend more seamlessly.

I think the paint job is slightly better on the Bandai figure, but it may be because I prefer the dry-feeling plastic to NECA's shiny rubber-feeling figure.  That's not to imply that both of NECA's figures aren't sturdy or solid-feeling figures.  In fact, truth be told, I think they would better survive a fall than Bandai's, every time. Also, this is probably just personal preference, but I prefer the color of the dorsal plates on the NECA version.

 All in all, I think that NECA has launched an excellent series here, and it's certainly one I never thought we never see in America.  Not only will I be supporting it, but I'll be looking forward to the next two figures, which are GODZILLA 1985 and 1954, and should be nice indeed.

They are already light years ahead in price--I have a hard time ever telling what the actual retail price is on the SH Monsterarts figures, but they are never close to $20, so NECA is way ahead of the game there.  In fact, while I've had to be very choosy with my high-dollar Bandai purchases, and only have three, I will be buying all of the NECA ones.  I'd like to see them allowed to branch out with some of Godzilla's friends and foes, as well.

One thing that puzzles me though, is why the packaging uses the same image and color scheme as the Bandai Creation vinyl figures? Did Toho make them do that? It's odd:

Insert card (front)

Insert card (back)

Inlay

 

Engrish With Ultraman Ace (part two)

The Malaysian subtitlers continue to beguile us with entertaining structure, daringly-misused tenses, and vocabulary lessons:

Some context: a mother has grown extremely weary of her son raising pigeons. (Reminds me of the old Tom Lehrer joke, "he practiced animal husbandry...until they caught him at it one day...")

The alien is taunting Ace and the team, telling them their efforts are futile.  This is either a proverb or just bizarre translating.

It's not what? Once again, I had to consult the dictionary.  This French word is a noun meaning:

"(in the French Revolutionary calendar) the fifth month of the year, extending from January 20 to February 18,"

so my guess is that Hokuto is telling his teammates that their current discussion has nothing to do with the weather in Revolutionary France, when people had messed-up calendars. 

This was a bit more confusing to figure out, but the word means "the object, itself

inaccessible to experience, to which a phenomenon is referred for the basis or cause of its sense content."  I think the point here is that the alien is projecting an image of itself, but the alien is, in reality, somewhere else. (They could have just said that.)

I don't know if I explained this last time, but in ACE, a "choju" is a special kind of kaiju.  Also they are filled with delicious meat, apparently.

Once again, the Malaysians have taught me a word that at first glance looked like it simply couldn't be real.  The word "oppugn" (pronounced like the word "impugn") means "to assail by criticism, argument, or action; to call in question; dispute," and comes from the same Latin root as the word "pugnacious."  You can even be an "oppugner."

GODZILLA SHREDS Bubble Gum (Amurol, 1988)

Good things come to those who wait, and in my case, that means petrified Godzilla gum from 1988 (with a Woolworth's price tag, no less).  This is the mate to the GODZILLA HEADS gum that was made the same year (see other post for photos), and I'm not sure which came first, but I'd be willing to bet that the "Heads" preceded this one, as this is basically just "Big League Chew" in fruit punch flavor, but there's no way to really know.

For those interested, this company also made King Kong and Wolf Man gum, so somebody went to some trouble to pay for licensing, I'm sure.

One Tiny Observation About GODZILLA (2014) and the Future...

I got to rewatch GODZILLA over the weekend, and I paused the action long enough to get this screenshot, which I've been wanting to do since the film was in theaters.  I have read lots and lots of discussion about the Mothra reference on the aquarium (when Ford and his dad revisit their old house, there are overlapping pieces of masking tape on the aquarium that spell out "MOTHRA"), but I haven't heard a peep about this brief scene in Ford's classroom near the beginning of the film.  It's possible I've just missed it, but I wanted to include it here just in case.

Now that we know that Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah are all up for use in the next film(s), this little allusion is even more amazing.  And speaking of, I've read comments where people suggest that these new three are going to ALL be included in the next film, and I'm not sure that was promised, exactly.  I can't lay hands on the original quote right now, but I took it to mean that they would be spread out over films, as at first a trilogy was being discussed.  And why is it that if one Hollywood film is successful, it means you get a trilogy these days? I'm not complaining, just curious.

Lego Diorama Updated!

I overhauled and improved my Lego Diorama from 2009, and have replaced all of the photos in the original post.  Enjoy!

Thrift Store Gamera!!

After (damage corrected in Photoshop)

Here's a little project I finished over the weekend.  I finally found a thrift store painting to work on...except that it wasn't a painting, it was a really old print glued to cardboard, which ended up getting "distressed" from the (removable?) painter's tape I used.  But anyway, it worked too well for what I wanted to do, so I couldn't pass it up. Enjoy.

Before

And then finally on my wall!

Some of My Personal FAILs... (part eight)

Continuing an ongoing series of occasional bizarre lameness that I personally encounter:

It's Halloween Costume Time again, and if you go as "Video Game Guy," then you deserve the pantsing, egging, and throwing-off-a-bridge that you will surely get.

Now I see why SENTAI was such a short-lived publication.  They sure didn't believe in proofreading.

All I can think of reading "Ultra Mam" is this:

Those of you with children will understand (I think that's the title of a Bill Cosby album, if memory serves.)

Finally, this isn't so much of a FAIL as one of these--

--but the other day, I was looking over the statistics for this blog...you know, the usual stuff, how many visitors per day, et cetera...when I happened to glance at the "Search Keywords":

I mean...really? Of course, the real question to me is, what post do I have that matches this criteria?!?

New Godzilla "comic" Discovered from 1994

Don't know how I missed this, but there really isn't a complete checklist out there, which I why I've tried to make one.  You may have seen another Antarctic Press issue on my Godzilla: American Comics Chronology page (the one with GODZILLA VS. KING GHIDORAH artwork on the front).  It turns out, Antarctic launched another title later, called SENTAI, that ran for only a handful of issues.  Luckily, the first issue had a great Godzilla cover, and lots of coverage for the two newest films at the time, MOTHRA and MECHAGODZILLA.  This comic-sized magazine had some decent (for the time) articles, and lots of behind-the-scenes photos, although they are quite small, and black-and-white.  There's also an informative article on the newest Ultraman (which was the American-made snooze-fest THE ULTIMATE HERO), so at the time the magazine would have been one of the only sources for information, even though it died after the second issue.

Antarctic tried to include some actual comics in this magazine, but what was included was a bit confusing.  It's some sort of post-apocalyptic biker gang thing that had more language than WOLF OF WALL STREET, so I just tuned out pretty quickly, as suddenly all of the Japanese content had vanished!

At any rate, the Godzilla American Comics Chronology page is updated now.

Amazing Guillermo Del Toro Quote

One of the books I'm currently reading and enjoying is MAN, MACHINES & MONSTERS, the making of PACIFIC RIM.  I had barely started when I encountered the following:

"When I was about eight years old," he [del Toro] told fans at Comic-Con, "I took a bus to the other side of town to see THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS.  When I arrived there, it was one of those things we call in Mexico a 'brick cinema,' because they give you a brick to smash the rats that run through the theater.  I sat down; I started watching the movie.  Somebody threw a glass of pee on my head from the balcony--and this is how much I loved Kaiju:  I stayed and finished the movie."    --Guillermo del Toro

Wow.  As amazing as that quote is on several levels, I have to admit I've seen a mouse in an American theater probably once in my life, and that was just a mouse.  I don't want to take away from the meaning of the quote, but it reminds me to be thankful.  And now, I can watch the greats from the past in my own home.

In 1980, Spidey Would Come to Your Birthday Party!

He will come to my birthday party? Oh crap, I'm too late...but if you did win this contest, Spidey would bring you and 20 friends special "mystery" gifts! I wonder what they were? I imagine they were the pens also pictured here, which were second prizes......but more likely, it was a tube of AIM.

I say this because this unique ad is from the back of a unique comic, which was "FREE WITH THE PURCHASE OF AIM" in 1980.  I was all over grocery stores during that time, but I never saw this, or I would have been begging for AIM.  There was also a second AIM-Spidey comic a couple of years later, featuring Doctor Octopus, that I also have.

As much as this comic should have been hilariously bad (I was expecting "Spidey Super Stories" with dental hygiene), it wasn't.  It was written by Marv Wolfman (who was no slouch), and sort of plays out like a silver age Batman story, as the Goblin, intent on stealing a "laser drill" from a inventor dentist, flies around leaving various clues for Spidey to figure out.  The art is by Alex Saviuk, who handles the many lines of the Spidey costume (which gave even Jack Kirby fits) very well.

I think the creators had just the right awareness of the subject matter's hilariousness to keep it from going campy (or worse), and while it's 32 straight pages of story with no ads, it was very enjoyable.

Oddly, it seems to take place in a weird universe, even for 1980, where the Green Goblin doesn't know Peter Parker is Spider-Man.  In fact, we aren't even sure which Goblin it's supposed to be, because he's never out of costume.  Peter Parker is commanded by JJJ to take Jameson's nephew to the dentist, and the fun goes from there.  Later, they visit a dental "convention" of some sort, featuring giant teeth, fancy exhibits, and other bizareness.

Things really were so much easier back then!

Wha? TARO?!

Internets, you are supposed to keep me informed about these things! Accidentally on E-bay (which is a Bob Dylan song title I think), I discovered this newly-released DVD set, hot on the heels of the last one (so much so that it's almost running right over poor Ace).  And I haven't finished the first disc of Ace yet.

Of course, I ordered it. 

But, Malaysians, you have got to slow it down, just a bit.  Just give us a few months to get caught up on our tokusatsu-binging.

Ugh, I just broke one of my own rules, and used "binging" to describe watching TV.  I hate that word...next I'm going to be calling my screenshots "screenies." 

Taro is unusual, because up to this point, it's actually been "totally" "available" in English-but-not-really-English.  In other words, it's one of the early Ultra shows that was dubbed by Malaysian TV into really terrible English.  The sound is muffled, uses some words that aren't even real, and at times is impossible to understand, resulting in lots of rewinding, which is often futile.  I'm assuming they just took people off the street, asked them if they spoke "English," had them read some lines, gave them a Big Mac, and sent them home.

The strange thing is that all 53 episodes are available this way, which wasn't true for the earlier shows.

Now, I have endured all of these episodes in the past, and here are some random memories I have about Taro:

1) In the first episode, we see him being born.  I think.  The Ultra Brothers stand around a large glass dome in a darkened room, there are some noises, and a fully-grown Taro appears inside the dome.  (Years later, in 1983, came the ULTRA STORY movie that showed us Taro's delightful childhood, so make sense out of that.)

2) Taro is about as silly as it gets, taking the series full-circle from the early days of hard, Tsuburaya-controlled sci-fi/horror/mystery to giant floppy alien turkeys and lots of sped-up film for "comic effect."

3) Taro is a simpering dolt, and is constantly getting his red and silver backside handed to him.  When this happens, he invariably has to be healed (sometimes resuscitated) by his Mama...at one point she has to restore him from a decapitation.  Imagine Ultraseven in such a position.

4) Taro's human host is a boxer, and, if I understood correctly, just gets tired of having to deal with Taro (but then again, I might also), and just asks to be un-united so he can go do something else.

5) Taro's human team is ZAT, and their uniforms and helmets follow the tradition of growing more garish and ridiculous with each series.

6) In recent movies, Taro has been portrayed as a caped past-master of Ultra badassery, but in the last completed series (Ginga), he was relegated to a goofy talking action figure.  I kid you not.

All of this results in one good thing:  Leo is next.  Leo (whose personal trainer is Ultraseven!), in all my years of trading and scouring the Internets, has never been available in English, dubbed or otherwise, so this should be exciting.

Engrish With Ultraman Ace (part one)

I'm afraid I've been slow in my progress through the new Ultraman Ace boxed set...in fact, I'm not quite 1/3 of the way through.  But let's get right to what's important here.

This set doesn't seem to have as many "bwa-haaa!" moments as Jack, so far anyway, which means one of two things:  the subtitles are getting more coherent, or my brain is just finally accepting the mangled English and substituting a meaning.  (I'm leaning toward the second possibility.)

While this is still an amusing sentence, once again we have Malaysian Engrish teaching us an archaic word.  "Complot" is indeed a real word, from the 1500's, although today we would say "conspiracy."  As a side note, one can even be a "complotter" or participate in a "complotment."

Nothing to see here, just a long-lost father coming home and tucking his son in to their floor-pallet-bed....then leaning over and asking him nicely to, in the name of all that's holy, please control his bladder.

You can figure this one out, but the lady was just asked how she was feeling about her important job launching a missile.

Supposedly, girls will distract our hero from his work....I couldn't find a definition for "deliquium" and instead got, "Did you mean DELIRIUM?"

This is quite simply the funniest sentence you've seen this week.  What's even funnier is that it is exactly, precisely, and perfectly accurate with regard to the episode's plot.  I kid you not.  Also, if MST3K taught me anything, it's that there's always a Kenny.

While this....just makes no sense whatsoever.

Scalpers Can SUCK IT...

You aren't funny, whoever you are.

This was the scene moments ago, at my closest Walgreen's.  As you may, or may not, know, Walgreen's has several "hot" action figure exclusives this year, which are currently showing up, giving some of us a reason to finally go in there.  They have one Spider-Man, and one Star Wars, both six-inch, overpriced figures.

Now, I don't give a tinker's dam about comics that Jack Kirby didn't do. (That is actually a bit of artistic hyperbole...what I mean to say is, I am not familiar with modern comics.)  I didn't know what an "Agent Venom" was, until my ten-year-old told me, and I still don't exactly understand...but he wants one, super badly.

So, instead of finding one, this is what I see on the pegs.  Now, for the benefit of the uninitiated, here is what it's supposed to look like:

Notice any differences? Oh yes, you do.*  

Some scumbag switched it out with a black Spider-Man, and returned it.

Now comes the really great part of the story.  I decided to do two things: 1) report my findings to the store employees, and notify them that they had been ripped off, and 2) use the good deed to ask if there were any more in the back somewhere.

So yes, I had motives, but at least they were honest motives.  

Well, proving the maxim I live by, which is "NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED," I was reminded why people get away with these sorts of things.  Quite simply, it's because retail employees can be new kinds of exceedingly stupid.  Not only did I wait 20 minutes for the manager to look and not find anything, but while I'm waiting, the worker decides that it simply CAN'T be a switcheroo, because after all, people don't DO that, right?

My energy and stamina to deal with doltery rapidly depleting, I gave it one more try.  I told him to compare the figure to the photo on the back.  Then I told him to notice how the figure didn't even fit into the tray properly, and left unfilled space.

Suddenly, he decides it must have been some kind of factory error.  "See, they just forgot to put the shell on," he said.  The SHELL? The WHAT???! Godfrey Daniel! Shades of Ninja Turtles!?

My friends, if we learn anything from this debacle, let it be two things:

1) Every day, people are leaving the school system in this country unable to write their own names, or form sentences with actual words.  For these people, there is retail.

2) Walgreen's is completely unqualified to sell exclusive action figures.

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*Don't notice any differences? Don't worry, just click here.