Remember the Boryoku Genjin (Violent Caveman) that we’ve posted about a bunch of times on the Bloglin? Yea those amazingly ugly but somehow beautiful chunks of vinyl? Well this is the guy who made them. Not the guy on the right, that’s Lamour Supreme of course… But the guy giving the big numero uno on the left. That’s higeru, the mastermind behind the Boryoku Genjin, Nag Ball and his newest creation the NZOMBIE!
Shigeru made his first trip out to New York last week as our guest for Comic Con where we unveiled the NZOMBIE and satiated countless kaiju crazed fans clamoring to get their hands on brand new NagNagNag toys. And those disgusting and amazing creations are probably fetching an arm & a leg now over on eBay. Only seems right.
We are happy to announce another of our toy exclusives for sale this weekend at New York Comic Con. This is one our collaboration with contemporary artist Carlos Enriquez-Gonazalez and his Hierophany vinyl figure. Once again these are all hand painted by Lamour Supreme.
This is the first time Carlos has collaborated with anyone on this figure and it is only limited to 5 pieces. Carlos even told me that he plans on destroying the mold for the Hierophany so only a limited amount will be produced, ever! Pick one up now while you still have your chance.
New York Comic Con: October 13th – 16th Javits Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY
Мишка Booth #680
Have you decided to go to New York Comic Con yet? No?!? Well then you are missing your opportunity on the newest Мишка x Adfunture x Lamour Supreme Bootleg Kaiju figure. This one is inspired by your favorite neighborhood web slinger. They are limited to 10 pieces all of which have been hand painted by Lamour Supreme.
New York Comic Con: October 13th – 16th Javits Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY
Мишка Booth #680
We are proud to announce that we will have our own booth at the upcoming New York Comic Con (NYCC) October 13-16th at the Javits Center. We will be in The Cultyard section which is bringing the underground worlds of art, design, collectible toys, pop-tech and fashion together at the convention.
We will be selling quite a few toys and exclusives, one of which is a brand new Мишка x The Cure Boogieman with art direction and header card design by Lamour Supreme. Therewill be painted as well as an unpainted black vinyl versions of the figure. Both are super limited and will be available Thursday during preview night until supplies last (which won’t be very long)!
But that’s not all! We will have some other surprises and exclusives available at our booth and will be throwing up some more previews here on the Bloglin leading up to the convention. I’ll also say that there will even be a few special guests and exclusives that you’ll only be able to find out about and purchase if you come to the con. Hope to see you all there!
New York Comic Con: October 13th – 16th Javits Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY
Мишка Booth #680
One of the coolest features of action figure packaging back in the day were the little bio cards on the back that you could cut out. Pretty much every line had them on the back bottom right of the packaging. I used to keep all mine in a shoebox. I don’t know if figures come with these anymore. I bought a Star Wars A7-R7 figure the other day and there was no card. It did come with “battle dice” for use in some kinds of galactic battle game. I threw everything out besides the actual figure.
I started looking at old G.I. Joe bio cards from the ’80s the other day and as a kid I never realized how hilarious they were. It never registered with me that any of my Joes or Cobras were chronic gamblers, womanizers, or failed MCs (see: Major Bludd above). Imagine how awesome it would have been to be a copywriter* for Hasbro back in the ’80s?
Much thanks to YoJoe.com and their extensive gallery of vintage filecards. Here are some of my favorites:
Barbeque, a “basic party animal,” can “wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart of Coke.” Would you really want that in your government file? It sounds like Barbeque has no sense of duty, he just gets off on riding on the back of a fire engine and, “the icing on the cake,” breaking windows with his axe.
Footloose was an academic champ when all of a sudden he dropped out and became “quite weird” for three years. I can only assume this means Burning Man. Then a cosmic messenger told him to join the Army. The narrative thread of Footloose’s life makes perfect sense.
Clutch actually sounds pretty awesome.
Floridian swamp vehicle operator Copperhead joined COBRA to pay off his bookie. That seems reasonable. The best part of his card is the quote from Gung-Ho at the bottom – the part about having a “heart fulla gimme and a mouth full o’ much obliged.” I’m stealing that for my headstone.
So have you forgiven me yet? Or are you completely and forever numb to the sound of my voice? Has my inexcusable ignorance of mighty mighty giants like John Romita, John Romita Jr., and Sal Buscema completely blacklisted me from your bloggy wiles? Or do I live to fight another day as you turn a sympathetic mouse toward my tenuously temporal and peevishly personal writeuppery?
I suppose that, either way, I’m still just that Yahoo From Nowhere who gets up here from time to time and starts spouting about mildly strange and unassuming stuff. At least, I guess, when you take into account that I’m in my thirties.
And so fear not! Love or hate (ho ho), slice or grate, here I am on some super-duper Niche Fetish bullstuff, son. Back at ‘em.
A couple weeks ago, my wife came home and dropped a couple of foil packets in my lap. I thought they were poprocks or something. She had been at Target, plumbing the depths of their baby department for diapers and such. Oh, and, by the way, for clothes for 2-year-olds as our 8 month old kid is in beast-mode. #beastMode.
They were not pop rocks, friend. They weren’t even trading cards. They were random chase LEGO minifigures. I’ll save you the suspense: even though you will very much want to, you cannot put them in a pipe and smoke them. You will want to.
So went my addiction. Aw shit dog, gotta go to Target to get socks. And some minifigs.
Damn girl, gotta go to Target and get some Ghost Dots. And some minifigs.
Yo pahtnah, boutta jump out to Target and stock up on Armorall and some Ni-Cads.
And some minifigures.
Then I found out that while Target had Series 5 (of which I was starting to get dupes), there was a Toys R Us in the next town over that had some Series 3 shits. It was on.
Fast Forward a week and I was on Amazon Marketplace #primeSteeze straight creeping on the hazmat dude. And Mr. Mariachi. And Small Clown. Cheating. I’m not even sorry about it.
Blackout. Lose a day.
I’m up in my attic, digging through bins of LEGOs looking for all the Star Wars dudes that I KNOW I have somewhere. How did I get up here? Where did these brand-new minisets of Pharaoh mummies and space aliens come from? Who assembled this motorcycle?
You get it. These little photographically-confounding, shiny-faced bastards were haunting me. Full time. So I worked through my issues. I stole their souls. Dropped ‘em in a hotbed of microzags and glow bugs and creepy as fuck #lurkers.
So yeah. It’s not my best work, but I had fun playing with these little dudes, and I hope you have fun watching. Enjoy.
Until next time, friendz. Love, Your Friendly Neighborhood Hateball.
Over the weekend at Power-Con, L.A.’s He-Man and Thundercats convention, Mattel held a panel to talk about their 2012 MOTU Club Eternia releases. Amidst exciting reveals like Slushhead, Griffin, and a Goddess exclusively available at cons, they announced a drop that had my nostrils flaring with greedy nostalgia: a Stinkor that reeks of his original funk!
The first Stinkor figure figure, aka “The Evil Master of Odors,” was released in 1985 and was basically a Mer-Man mold painted like a skunk. But the plastic poured into the mold was mixed with the signature scent of hippies: patchouli oil – trapping the stank in Stinkor figures forever.
Mattel also announced the release of The Mighty Spector, a character rejected by Mattel 30 years ago. Spector was designed by Scott Neitlich, Mattel’s Associate Brand Manager, for the original MOTU create-a-character contest. The figure was designed from a sketch made by Scott 30 freaking years ago. Kind of fitting that Spector is a time traveler, amirite?
What I want to know is: anyone out there with the OG Stinkor figure? Does he still stink?
Have you strolled through the action figure aisle of your local Target, Toys R Us, or Wal-Mart lately? It’s fucking depressing. All the Star Wars figures are either Clone Wars characters I’ve never heard of or that repackaged “Legacy” junk. Other rehashed dregs from our generation you’ll find include boring wrestling figures, Power Rangers, and GI Joe. I have no idea what kids are playing with nowadays. I’ve seen those awful Mighty Beanz and Heroclix and I’m sorry kiddos, but those aren’t toys.
Coming up in the late 80s and early 90s, there were tons of amazing mass market toy lines to get into. Most of them were tied into cartoon series produced for the sole reason to sell toys, but screw it. None of us cared about marketing back then – the toys sold themselves. Nowadays shows are still used to sell figures, but the output is either mined from existing Japanese cartoons or just plain dumb. I’d like to see Ben 10 square up against one of the Valorian Dino-Riders.
As we got older, toys gradually became shelf-jockey statues. I remember the first time I realized toys weren’t for playing with anymore was when McFarlane released their first Chapel figure. I broke his arm off just trying to put the gun in his hand. Basically, the more detailed figures became, the less you were able to play with them. And by the mid-90s, after nearly a decade of domination, Ninja Turtles figures were getting strange and insulting. I passed on Farmer Mike and those Turtle Troll Dolls.
Part of the Turtles’ legacy is a legion of imitators – dozens of anthropomorphic crime fighters with adolescent tendencies. Most of them were garbage (Cyboars may have been the worst), but some of them were pretty sick. Even if the cartoons weren’t great, the action figures were fun.
Below are my five favorite anthropomorphic action figure lines. And before someone can call me out in the comments, I was never a Thundercats fan.
(I could only find dig up this “sports pak” commercial above. At least it shows some of the cool villains) Don’t ask me anything about the Biker Mice cartoon show – I never watched it. The toys for heroes Throttle, Modo, and Vinnie came with motorcycles though, and that’s awesome. The bikes were a good size to use with other figures as well, meaning my Casey Jones drove a motorcycle.
The mice’s arch enemies, the Plutarkians, led by Lawrence Limburger, had great figures too. You can see a few of them in the commercial above.
Playmates released this unique line 1989, with a cartoon the following year. These were like vinyl toys before they were cool. They were non-poseable, made of a hollow plastic shell. Each figure came with a huge weapon the fit over them. The story was ridiculous enough to be fun, especially when you’re seven years old. A ditched military experiment left behind radioactive materials, that were then consumed by farm animals. They mutated into raging assholes that got off on blowing each other up.
The two sides were the R.A.M.S. (Rebel Army of Military Sheep) and the P.O.R.K.S. (Platoon of Rebel Killer Swine). I remember learning Pig Latin from the back of one of the P.O.R.K. cards. Man, these toys were cool. I’m gonna hit up eBay right now.
The reason they put choking hazards on toys nowadays can be attached, almost singularly, to the existence of Polly Pocket. Manufactured by Bluebird Toys, an independent company based in England that would later be acquired by toy goliath, Mattel, Polly Pocket consisted of a shrunken-down, stereotypical, “valley girl” character (Polly) along with her miniature accessories and interchangeable outfits packed into a dreamscape that folds right up, into, what resembles, a makeup case. The tiny pieces within the outer shell, once misplaced, left the toy completely worthless causing parents to bear the brunt of a discontented or dead child, depending on if the pieces slipped through a crack in the sidewalk or down a throat becoming lodged in the air passage. Polly actually underwent a recall in 2006 for this very issue.
And now, a little something for the boys. Polly’s younger and more daring male counterpart Mighty Max, something, due to my gender, I’m way more knowledgeable about and keen on discussing, hit stores in 1992, also manufactured by Bluebird, playing off of the “eww” factor that young males so voraciously bought into. I was no exception to the rule and was set on snatching up all of these “spooky,” “scary,” compact toys, down to the last, highly-losable figurine. Mighty Max toys were pocket-sized worlds in the shape of snakes, skulls, and other creatures of the night, offering in the jaws of the beast, an environment and a chance to roleplay and plot interactions between hero and villain. Each plastic landscape had the coolest names too, so rad they made me wonder if someone’s job there was to come up with the titles of each individual snap-case.
The toys were categorized into Doom Zones and Horror Heads and, if my memory serves me, the only difference between them was the shape and look of the exterior carrier. My personal collection included Mighty Max Conquers the Temple of Venom, Mighty Max Escapes From Skull Dungeon, Mighty Max Challenges Lava Beast, Mighty Max Pulverizes Sea Squirm, and the list goes on and on. Now, when I say the pieces were small, I mean miniscule. I managed to lose the figurines within a matter of weeks and after going through a trunk of my old playthings a few months ago, I had only the cases left, a timeworn skeleton of my Mighty Max intrigue, with no movable pieces in sight.
A mint condition Mighty Max set, if any kid could keep one that way, is comprised of a Max figure along with two or three enemy figures. Once those are gone, all fun is lost forever. To promote the toys, a shitty cartoon was developed in the early ’90s about an entitled, blonde-haired brat who finds an enchanted baseball cap. Nobody really knows how he acquired the cap, I’ve heard theories about Max’s dad leaving it to him, Max breaking his mother’s statue and finding it inside, and Max discovering it in his mailbox, but, regardless the process, the hat allows him to timetravel, fight monsters, and embark on a quest to fell the perpetratin’ Skullmaster.
The damned things are on eBay as we speak, going for upwards of 200 smackers. If i’d have know I might not have……well no, I woulda still abused the shit out of them and misplaced everything.
