YAAAAAY!!!!

my lungs are full of fluid and/or hurt! yes! this is AWESOME.

i wish the weather would just pick a fucking season and stick with it. i’m sick of this being cold in the mornings, hot in the afternoons, cold in the evenings, and so on shit. if it was cold all the time, i could stay layered up. if it was hot all the time, i could stay in peter jackson wear.

this constant waffling shit is driving me batty year after year. i want to move to somewhere with real winters.

somewhere like canada.

disney is making a sequel to the emperors new groove. i’m actually interested in that one. and worried. imdb says they have the entire original voice cast, but not the same director. no word on writers, the script is going to be what makes or breaks this one. if the script is as good as the first time, i can’t wait. if not, it could be horrible.

in march the microman figures of an alien warrior, an alien queen, and two different predators hit. i need to get the first godzilla rubbersuit figure, which is already out. i love microforce. tiny figures, fully posable, lots of clear plastic and interesting color schemes, and WIERD armor sets. they’re perfect.

speaking of micro, i got a micro machines transforming star destroyer playset off ebay this week. it is absolutely good. it basically just opens up and has imperial base play features inside. an opening hatch on the bottom for the shuttle bay, several levels to put minifigures on. included are vader choking someone, a half-dead imperial officer being choked, another imperial officer with a blaster, and a fleet trooper with a blaster. there’s a detention cell, bunks for the crew, a moving crane arm, moving turrets, and a launcher that shoots vader’s tie fighter as a missile.

i miss this stuff. looking at all the episode 3 toys coming in may, there’s a fair number i want, and they’re actually trying to bring back micro machines again, so i’ll totally try to support that. but it’s not the same as it was.

it’s all episode one’s fault, of course. some of the best toys designed for e1 never made it to stores because every store in the entire world, toy store or not, had like five cases of the first wave of the basic figures, vehicles, lightsabers, micro machines, microplaysets, candy, notebooks, soda, chips, and etc, and it all just sat there for months and they never restocked with newer product.

one guy on the toy board put it that hasbro must have estimated the demand for darth maul action figures to be ‘two per person who has ever lived, or ever will live.’

it was the retailers fault for ordering so much crap though, and it was lucas’ fault for making a lackluster movie, and it was the toymakers fault for making SO much stuff and saving the good stuff for later.

i did manage to track down the badass queen’s ship microplayset, which is a replica of the chrome cruiser in cut-away, with half a dozen rooms inside. totally awesome, and still my favorite microplayset. although the star destroyer isn’t permanently missing half the hull, it seals up into a complete ship.

there is a fair variety of toys for episode 3, but 90% of it is different kinds of figures. for vehicles, it’s just anakin’s fighter, a wookie boat-thing, a repainted gunship, three packs of micromachines, and all the lego sets. for figures, there’s all the 40? basic figures, some 12″ figures, the unleashed statue-type stuff, the playskool minifigures, the playskool rescue heroes type figures, the ‘attack-tix’ miniature battle figures, and some weird stylized vader/anakin figures with force actions which are like a cross between the large playskool figures and unleashed.

plenty of lightsabers. i still need to get mace, yoda, dooku, vader, luke, and anakins sabers to get a full ’set’. thankfully most of those are back for this movie, and they’ve been reissuing the original luke and vader sabers from like 1995. they could use new versions of those two though. we’ll see how many i actually get though. at $20 apop, and i’ve already got four of the damn things… the random orange bladed jedi saber is actually my favorite, with obi-wans prequel hilt as a close second.

naturally, they’ve bumped the price on basic figures back up to $6 or $7 just in time for the movie. fuckers. $5 is pushing it for most of those characters. some are worth more, some aren’t. at least i’ll probably save some money.

and then blow it on like fifteen superposable clonetroopers. they look enough like stormtroopers this time i won’t bother buying any if they ever do a superposable stormtrooper. wait, actually, they already did, in the votc line. but that appears to have vanished from retail. it was limited run, i hope i didn’t miss out on the jedi wave. i still need the absurdly good yoda and boba fett figures. to ebay, i suppose.

two weeks to toy fair. i guess e3 is coming up too, but i could give a goddamn unless bungie announces halo 3 and promises to include all the shit that got cut out of halo 2 at the last minute.

with my new responsible budget plan accounting for rent and food and stuff IN ADVANCE, i can no longer realistically dream about splurging on things like a gamecube and half a dozen games. hell, i haven’t even gotten around to justifying $130 for the video card i need to play all the computer games I ALREADY HAVE.

clearly toys pwnzzor my soul. if i was bungie’s toy guru, joyride wouldn’t even have gotten NEAR the property. that license would have gone to mezco LIKE THAT and i would have personally done all the control art to ensure good articulation and accurate proportions on all figures.

additioanlly, i wouldn’t have made them so goddamn gigantic. a nice six inches instead of eight means they’re not absurdly large on your desk and they don’t cost $15-20 each. try $10-13, in-scale with actual other toys you might own, and better looking. even the exact same sculpt would look better scaled down. you don’t make your figures gigantic if you’re going to make them look all cartoony and shitty.

not that that’d be a problem with mezco.

oh, and the warthog would have been die-cast metal and indestructible, even if that meant it cost $50-100. we’d do a $20 plastic version as well, but the hog toy needs to be dangerously solid.

there’s an alternate version of the optimus prime/convoy figure from the new transformers cartoon that just got announced that’s supposed to be five inches tall, insanely articulated, fully transformeable, and largely die-cast metal. i can’t wait.

did i mention that said optimus prime/convoy turns into a fire truck? a FLYING fire truck. he has jet wings in robot mode. he looks bad ASS.