POP! Movies: Tyrannosaurus Rex (Jurassic Park)

Well, articles and reviews haven’t been coming nearly as fast as I might have liked this month. There’s a few reasons for that. One is Lost Tunnels, which is in the process of being edited. Another is that I’ve picked up some freelance work (if you would ALSO like to hire me, flick me a message at lupinebookclub@gmail.com).

But the main reason is that I was actually overseas for a couple of weeks. My wife, myself and some other family members headed to New Zealand on a cruise, to celebrate my mother’s birthday. It was great fun, but it did mean that I ran a bit behind on my usual stream of articles. My apologies, dear readers. 

Nonetheless, things are settling back into a more normal routine now. So on to today’s review!

Tyrannosaurus Rex is my favourite dinosaur, hands down. Sure, I love plenty of other dinosaurs too, but gun to my head, T-Rex will always trump all other contenders. So I was pretty excited when I discovered that there would be a T-Rex as part of Funko’s Jurassic Park line. Awesome! It inspired some amazing toys back when the original movie was released – there’s no way it could be anything but awesome. And surely it would be a 6” POP, right?

Sadly, the final product is not quite what it could be.

The first issue is the size of this guy. He’s much too small! Funko seems to have slowed right down on the 6” POPs in general, and I suspect this guy is just a victim of circumstance. I can understand that, given that they seem to shelfwarm a lot harder than most other figures, but it’s still disappointing. How many other T-Rexes are we likely to get in this format? Surely this was a shoe-in for success.

Second is the fact that he can’t stand on his own – his gigantic head is solid, which makes the whole thing far too bulky. A stand is provided but it only plugs into one foot...the softer plastic of the leg has already warped and caused him to fall over once on a hot day, so I am not super-optimistic about long-term display prospects.

The pricing bugs me too. It’s the same price as regular POPs – $19AUD – but it feels like more of a rip-off. Now I didn’t mention this in my Dilophosaurus review; I’m prepared to pay a premium for a Dilophosaurus because there aren’t a lot of Dilophosaurus toys around, and you need to take what you can get. But for a T-Rex…if you’re going to charge $19AUD, it had better be something pretty amazing. Your average dollar store will offer a far better T-Rex toy, at a mere fraction of the cost. This really lacks the necessary x-factor and feels like it’s coasting on the back of the license.   

Finally, a word about the paint. The teeth are incredibly sloppy, and there’s a big mark across the tongue – neither of which was visible while in the box. This time it’s annoyed me enough that I am actually going to take steps to fix it. I know I say this a lot in my POP reviews, but I think this one is bad enough that it’s actually warranted.

While this POP isn’t a total write-off, I don’t think I would have bought Rexy here if I had my time again. But in the absence of a time machine, I’ll have to live with my decision; hopefully he eventually grows on me. Or at least stays standing up. 

Transformers: Titans Return -- Crashbash

In the 4.5 billionish years this planet has existed, dinosaurs have been pretty much the coolest creatures to ever walk God's green earth. Sure, humans weren't around for their heyday -- but ever since that first Megalosaurus bones were discovered back in 1824, they've had a stranglehold on popular culture, showing up in all sorts of bizarro places -- not least of which was Transformers.

Titans Return is pretty much the reintroduction of the Headmasters concept to the Transformers franchise, last seen in the late 1980s. Basically, the theme introduces the concept of Titan Masters – small Transformers who can combine with larger ones to supplement their power by replacing their heads. While it’s an excellent idea for establishing a play pattern, it’s slightly disturbing in storyline terms – two robots bonded together for the indefinite future, the larger stuck in a useless state when the head decides to pop off and move around on its own. I’m sure that’s not quite how it works, but it’s the version of events that sticks in my mind.    

However, as these transforming heads are intentionally designed to be interchangeable with one another, Hasbro has taken the novel step of selling some heads separately, using it to reintroduce some characters who presumably might not have gotten a release in another form. But though a head that transforms into a teensy robot is pretty cool, it's a little thin for a regular release...so each of these figures also comes packed with some kind of vehicle that can also be transformed into a weapon -- which can then be used either by the miniature pilot or by a larger figure. Pretty cool, huh? 

Considering that Hasbro tends to overprice TFs a little, I expected these heads to sell for $15-20 each, but I found this one at Hobbyco for a much more reasonably priced $11.95. This means they'll probably be $9-10 at Big W/Target/Kmart. The first wave offers some good options, but I was naturally enough drawn to Crashbash -- a purple Decepticon t-rex? Had I died and gone to heaven??? After recovering from this  near-death experience, I seized it tightly and knew that I had to buy it. It would go with my bizarro collection of other Decepticons, which currently numbers at somewhere between "waaaaaay more Transformers than I had as a kid" and "why didn't I buy a Thundercracker when I had the chance, aftermarket prices are redonk now".

Now, Crashbash is a character that was released back in the 1980s, though he was then known as "Squeezeplay" and was a kind of crab-person thing. Pretty cool, but the only real resemblance this modern version has to his 1980s incarnation is in the head mode. The T-rex look is a new one. 

And it's awesome!!! Crab people are cool and all, as South Park taught us years ago -- but T-Rex alt mode conquers virtually all other contenders. It's made by combining the Titan Master and the weapon mode together, Ingeniously, the legs become the lower half of the jaw, while the Titan Master's arms become the T-Rex's arms. You can also cheat a gun mode for bigger figures by fiddling with the legs and tail while using the "cannon" as a gun handle, but I haven't included a pic here.  

The Dragon (weapon) mode, by contrast, is neither here nor there -- it looks kind of like some kind of dino-chicken hybrid, and I don't really plan to make much use of it. It's nice to give the Titan Master something to stand on to. 

And head mode? Well, with the purple colour he might look nice on Galvatron. But I think he's going to stay in T-Rex or Titan Master mode most of the time. Though it is cool that the Titan Master's own head is a miniature facsimile of the larger head.

Now, I do have some minor criticisms. First, the promotional render makes this toy look as though it's kind of lavender in colour, but the real toy is much darker, more of a magenta colour. This isn't a problem -- I prefer magenta -- but the increasing reliance on renders in Hasbro's promotional material is giving a less and less accurate impression of what the final toy is actually going to look like. Going back to hardcopies really would be a better option, even if their paint jobs tended to be a little... questionable.  

Secondly, be warned -- the Titan Masters are a bit fragile, so have a spare or two handy if your kid plays rough. I'm quite gentle, and I've already had a couple of white pressure marks appear on him. 

Overall? If this toy had existed when I was a little kid, I have little doubt that it would have been one of my favourites. There's something indisputably awesome about a gigantic chunky figure like Devastator, but I have a lot of love for figures that are near capsule-toy size too. Ideally, I'd build an army of these guys...but I'll probably limit myself to just to or three. I vote that these separately-sold Titan Masters are a big success!  

The Wonders of Glow in the Dark

The Wonders of Glow in the Dark

Ever since I was quite young, I’ve had a fascination with objects that glow in the dark. It is a love affair that has spanned about 2 decades, multiple houses and many an unnecessary purchase.

My earliest memory of glowing items stems from when I was 7 or 8 years old. My parents had bought me a set of glow in the dark stickers in the shape of stars, which were intended to be stuck to your bedroom ceiling. The packaging came with images of constellations, to provide suggestions on how to replicate the night sky within the confines of your bedroom. As I recall, I followed a few of them, then promptly continued with (clumsier) patterns of my own design.

Photo from OnlineToys.com.au

I don’t remember exactly how things went down that evening when the lights went off, but I’ve got little doubt that it was quite spectacular. A starscape on my roof? INCREDIBLE! Close your eyes and imagine it. Isn’t the effect impressive?

Since then, I’ve been quite hooked. I wouldn’t call it an obsession – but there have definitely been a few things that I’ve bought over the years almost solely because it glowed in the dark. One of the main ways this showed up was in my late primary school years, when a fad for “Glo Caps” went through my school. Glo Caps were very similar to POGs – small cardboard circles, stamped with an image of a character or a scene from a TV show or movie.

There was also an associated game you could play; there were a number of variant ways to play the game, but most of them involved stacking a pile of the things together, then hurling a large plastic “slammer” at them to win them from other people. As with most playground games, cheating was rife and playing “for keeps” was quickly shut down by teachers, just as it had been a number of years before when marbles were all the rage.

Nonetheless, illicit "for keeps" games would still take place, usually among close friends who wouldn’t dob each other in – or sometimes older kids who wanted to take advantage of a younger kid with an impressive collection of the things. In hindsight, it was somewhat similar to an underground gambling ring.

One of the most interesting things that the Glo-Caps exposed to me was the existence of a red glow. Red glowing (and blue, for that matter) items are reasonably common now, but in the mid-90s most of us were only familiar with the traditional yellow-green glow. They glowed a colour that was somewhere between pink and orange, and it was an experience that I treasure even years after the original Glo-Caps have long since been lost to history. They certainly didn’t hold their charge or glow nearly as brightly, but they were impressive nonetheless.

There was a particularly cool TV ad which depicted a kid with an entire room full of the things; I had hoped to find it and post it here, but YouTube seems lacking. If anyone knows of it, please feel free to post it in the comments. 

Strangely enough, I don’t think “real” POGs caught on around the Central Coast; I knew a handful of people who had them, but most of my childhood friends preferred Glo-Caps and their chip-distributed companions, Tazos. Possibly it was connected to the extensive amount of licensed characters featured on them – Glo-Caps not only had the lure of glow in the dark, but featured large Simpsons and Disney sets. Among other designs, Tazos featured Looney Tunes and when the 1997 re-release of the original trilogy took place (much to my excitement), Star Wars.

For a more comprehensive overview of POGs, Glo Caps and Tazos, check this link out. http://wayninginterests.wordpress.com/tag/glo-cap/

When I was eighteen or nineteen, I decided that it was time to make my roof glow again. The reasons behind this are fairly unclear to me, but I was super-keen on the early-noughties remakes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers at the time, so I suspect that it may have had something to do with wanting to relive my childhood. A year or so before, I had also bought a glow in the dark wolf t-shirt (which was as awesome as it sounds. Sadly, it has also been lost to the sands of time), and that may have also played a part.

As I remember, stickering the ceiling followed a fairly similar pattern to the one it had more than a decade earlier. Follow a few of the constellations on the box, and simply wing the rest. When I was finished, it certainly wasn’t the Sistine Chapel, but I was happy with it. Sadly, no photos are known to exist of this particular phase of my bedroom.

For a number of years, things went pretty quiet on the glow in the dark front. Between late ’05 and early ’09 I lived in a number of different sharehouses, and putting stickers on the ceiling of a rental property is usually frowned upon. After a year back with my parents, it was off to Sydney to live in a number of different rentals again. During my phase of heavy comic collecting (’06-’08) I had Flash and Green Lantern shirts that glowed, but the glow was secondary to the character logos.

But the interest was revived in a small way after my then-girlfriend (and now wife) returned from a trip to America in early 2012. She had brought me back a model dinosaur skeleton – a T-Rex, easily my favourite of these extinct but magnificent creatures. This was pretty cool in and of itself, but its coolness factor was instantly quadrupled when I saw those four magic words on the box – “Glow in the Dark.”

Image from Amazon.com

 

It certainly hasn’t been an onslaught of silly novelty purchases since then, but I do get a little thrill whenever I see that something glows in the dark. A few months ago, I found myself searching for Robocop merchandise, and discovered that NECA had released a “Night Fighter Robocop” to coincide with last year’s 25^th anniversary of the film. It’s totally unnecessary, and would probably be looked at all of twice before it went into the cupboard…but I sure did give some serious thought to clicking the “Buy” button. Examine the picture and decide for yourself.  

Photo from Figures.com

One item that did make it to purchase stage was a Super Mario baseball cap. It’s noticeably too small for my head, but that hasn’t stopped me from wearing it numerous occasions – and of course, pointing out that it glows in the dark to all and sundry.  

(Really, I should give it to someone who will be able to fit their head into it properly, and let them enjoy its magnificent glow.)

 

Exactly why I enjoy glow in the dark stuff remains something of a mystery to me. It’s got a vaguely sci-fi feel to it, I suppose, but I don’t think that quite covers it. Readers are welcome to provide their own hypotheses.  

And T-Rex? Well, he sits on our mantelpiece, doing battle with a model ship that a friend gave me when I moved to Sydney in 2010. It doesn’t look quite as awesome as you probably just imagined – a glowing skeleton Tyrannosaurus Rex fighting against a Dutch trading ship from the 16^th-19^th century is quite the mental image, after all. But I still like to think it’s something of a centrepiece in our loungeroom.