Sleepy Bear

Target had these miniatures for under $1. They're blind packed but they have a hole on the package that lets you see what color the figure is. I found that one of them was Sleep Bear and Sleepy Bear has become my favorite Care Bear due to a combination of childhood nostalgia (I liked the blue colored bears) and my newly found appreciation of naps. So easy choice to get this and set it up near my desk.

The figures aren't too impressive, really they're all recolored versions of the same mold with a different tummy symbol. (There are 3 possible poses and each bear gets 2 figures based on some of those poses. The difference is pretty much which hand they have raised: left, right or both.) I might be annoyed if I got this at full price, but for under $1, it's fine.

Aleksei Sytsevich and Alistair Smythe

Paul Giamatti and BJ Novak as minimates! 'Nuff said!

Seriously, this might the best thing to come out of Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Clearance Blast

Hey, the Toys R Us Clearance Blast is now at the stage where everything in the blast is at least 80% off. So a lot of things are under $2, which is a magic price where I realize it's cheaper than me buying a hamburger so why not. The downside is that what's leftover isn't very good. But here's some stuff I picked up this weekend.

Heroclix from those app games which also come with figures. Final price: $0.60. I pretty much just wanted these for the X-Men HeroClix, especially 90's Cyclops. Hell, I don't even play HeroClix, I just like them as tiny vinyl statues.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. K'Nex figure. I feel like I knew they made Nascar K'Nex, but they never appealed to me. But the chance to get a minifigure for under $0.50 was too strong a pull. I have no idea if this actually looks like Dale, but I doubt it. Meanwhile this minifigure sucks. The Pac-Man, Super Mario, and Angry Birds K'Nex figures are much better. I guess they need a video game license to make a good minifigure.

A $0.40 pez dispenser? Sure! That's how much 3 columns of Pex normally cost. So I'm basically getting a free Pez Dispenser. And it's a Muppet. Even better!

$0.80 for minimates? I already have two of this set, and I'm totally going to get it. That's like $0.80 for a Cardassian army builder. Score.

Hey, BattleBeast minimates! Better known as the minimate property that made me realize I don't need every minimate property because the more intricate with unique pieces the figure gets, the less like a minimate it looks like and the less I want it. But for under $2 I wouldn't mind seeing how they do a four legged minimate.

I've been thinking of getting this Kre-O Cityville set for a while, and now that it's under $1 I have no reason to not get it. I'm really impressed by the mechanics of the claw. I'm also really impressed by how well this building set works. I'd totally be up for buying more mechs in this scale, but they don't make them.

It's a World of Warcraft Pandarian on a mount. The Pandarians are a race in the game who have a mystical Far East kung-fu society which is why this post is getting a Toys Depicting Asian tag. I'm actually pretty impressed by the mount, especially since it's a giant turtle and you can take the shell off and put other bricks in its place. It's like a hermit crab, but with a horned turtle instead of a crab.

Oh, and I also picked up some Muppet Whatnot kits because at 80% off they're now $13. Well, the blue ones are. They're keeping the other colors the same price, and I think I know why. They're re-releasing them but with new accessories and new UPC codes. I saw one of the new one, instead of a black goatee you get a brown Magnum PI mustache. Instead of the black wig and green wig you get a white wig and rainbow wig. Stuff like that. Weirdly, based on the cost of individual eye and hair parts ala carte, it's still a better bargain to get the new set rather than the individual parts separately (parts that are near impossible to find online since FAO Schwartz doesn't like selling Whatnot stuff unless you buy a $100 custom made job from their New York Whatnot shop) since you get a free body with them.

AMP: Episode 96: The One Where Mario Hosts

Episode 96 of the Articulated Monster Podcast is up. I should have posted this a week ago when other James put it up, but I haven't been on the internet for longer than five minutes over the last week. Unless you count playing video games on Steam. But hey, Mario hosts an episode!

Also, for some reason other James named this after a Friends Episode.

Enjoy!

Catman and Spider-Girl

I've begun to open a lot of the figures I've put aside in the last few years because I need to make room. Let's start with these two.

Originally introduced as Araña, the character Anya Corazon was rebranded as Spider-Girl because damned if Marvel was going to let a franchise go to waste. When she first debuted she got some press for being a teenaged latina superhero... and now she's a supporting player in the Spider-Man comics wearing a hand-me-down costume from the 80's Spider-Woman. Whatever. The character had/has some potential and that's why I'm celebrating that they made a Marvel Legends figure of her, even if it is in the Amazing Spider-Man Legends wave listed as "Skyline Sirens" so they could use the same packaging for the Black Cat figure. Ugh. Why would you call her a siren? She doesn't sing and no part of her powers has anything to do with music or noise.

Then there's Catman, which I got back when I was trying to build a comprehensive 6-inch set of Batman villains. I've given up on that and have moved on to trying to do that in the 1:6 scale, but I'm still amused they made a Catman action figure, so I opened the toy.

Glen Rhee

It's Glen Rhee, the popular Korean-American survivor of the zombie apocalypse as depicted by Steve Yuen in the AMC television show the Walking Dead. I don't watch that show, but I've read the comics their based on and I don't care it's an action figure of a heroic Asian-American male. The fact that it's so rare in this culture is... you know what, rant for another day.

This is a Macfarlane toy, and these days that means a lot more than it used to. Pretty good aritcuation, everything I would want except the lack of a torso joint. But damn, this is a really good likeness of Steven Yuen. It also comes with some great accessories, like a bloody pipe and an alternate head of Glenn's beat up face for when he gets tortured and stuff.

He comes with other accessories, like a couple guns, a knife and a flak jacket, but what I really love is that these figures are actually in scale with the 5" line of Doctor Who figures, which means they can share accessories.

Peri is ready for anything.

Penguin

Hmm, looks like my 4th of July post didn't go up. Ah well.

Anyway: they made a Danny Devito Penguin in the 1:18 scale. What am I going to do, not buy it?

Pfft, no. Then I wouldn't have a tiny Danny Devito Penguin. Batman Returns was awesome, what with it having less gruesome burned out skeletons than the first movie.

It has pretty good articulation, too. If Mattel made all their 4 inch figures as good as this one maybe the DC Universe Infinite figures wouldn't have been an abomination against all that is good with the world.

Imaginext blind bag series 3

Found some Imaginext blind bag figures and decided to go with radiation guy over  Barbarian Santa (he comes with scimitars that have candy cane hilts) because I like hazmat suited figures. It seems like such an unlikely profession to tell kida about.

Anyway, when you open it up the helmet isn't onthe figure so you get to see the dude's face... And it seems like they designed thia preschool toy to look like chemist/drug kingpin/killer Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Weird.

AMP Episode 95: Mario Sounds Like Crap

I really ought to post this before I turn into Mario and pretend the podcast doesn't exist.

So here's the link to episode #95! Next episode is a Mario hosted episode, so send in any questions you want us to pose to him, like what toy could make him speak more than fifteen words about it?