Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Looking Back at The Transformers

Does an old toy commercial have the Touch?

Before I begin - since I will be discussing a Hasbro property, I want to bring up the fact that staff at Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, have successfully won a union and are now bargaining for a contract. You should support the union here.
  
                                      

The 1986 Transformers show lurked over my nerd-dom for a long time. I got into the franchise in the early 2000s as an impressionable preschooler who dove headfirst into the 2001 Robots in Disguise show (does anyone else remember that one?), and then loved Armada and was more intermittently into Energon and Cybertron. I got rid of my Transformers toys in 2006ish, and then was left to look longingly and regretfully at the toys released for the Michael Bay movies. Even then, I could tell there was something off about those films (I rewatched them recently and concluded that they’re not terrible but they are seriously hampered by being late 2000s blockbusters but that is an argument for another day), but I enjoyed them as impressionable boys do. All of those, though, I knew ultimately came from this cartoon from before I was born: The Transformers, released in 1983.

I wasn’t entirely unaware of the contents of that show when I was a kid; my parents bought me a video tape of the 1986 movie as well as another with two episodes (City of Steel and A Prime Problem), which together formed my view of that show for a long time. I remember being spellbound by the animation of the movie, and bits of those episodes stayed with me as half-remembered snippets for over twenty years (like Long Haul’s line in the former of the aforementioned episodes “Remove! Remove! Always remove! I didn’t join this outfit to be a dump truck! For whatever reason, I also remembered Mixmaster’s particular verbal tic in that episode and that episode alone). But then, last year, I finally got around to playing War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, both great games that take a military science fiction approach to the basic conceit of Transformers, and I felt that, at some point, I should actually get around to watching the cartoon that started it all (along with the eighties Marvel comics, of course). And then, to my joy, it turns out Hasbro put the entire show, excepting the movie, on one of their YouTube channels. I went on this quest in earnest.

The thing that struck me again and again about this show is how clearly very few people involved in its creation actually gave a shit about it as a work of art. Every comment one of the writers, Donald Glut, made about the show in retrospect sounds like more polite versions of “why do you still give a shit about this?” Glut, whose most prominent work is probably the novelization to The Empire Strikes Back, nevertheless created several characterizations and wrote several memorable episodes, which to me is a sign of how good he is; even his phoned-in scripts are entertaining. The animation is often clearly phoned-in, with many, many obvious errors with little regard to consistency or continuity. More broadly, there’s a sort of slap-dash quality to the writing, not necessarily the dialogue (which is usually serviceable if never particularly deep), but rather the coherence of the world. You have Atlantis out of nowhere in one episode, never mentioned again, and in another episode the main characters are sent back to Arthurian England for no particular reason.

But it’s this potpourri of SFF influences on the different episodes that I think ultimately made the cartoon, and from there the franchise, the success that it was. As I watched it, I came to understand why so many kids came to love this show, as the sheer variety of situations, the sheer diversity of the little nooks and crannies of this universe both on Earth and on Cybertron as well as elsewhere, comes together in a way that feels vast rather than inconsistent. Sure, we have talking, transforming robots at war with one another, so why not Atlantis? Why not time travel to Arthurian times? I have a hard time putting my finger on why, precisely, this worked out the way it did, but it did.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of the time the show is not obviously a toy commercial. Yes, the robots look cool and can do things, but for the most part the fast-paced adventure plots don’t feel too contrived to sell a toy (there are, of course, exceptions). The toy-driven nature of the show is much clearer when you take a look at the broader narrative arcs. The show starts with the Autobots’ ark stranded on Earth, and there is a fairly small cohort of both Autobots and Decepticons for the first season and the opening few episodes of the second season. But, after those few episodes, for no reason whatsoever there are more and more new robots, on both sides of this war, that were never established previously. The cast grows and grows, to the point that the Protectobots, a team of five Autobots that can combine, are inelegantly squeezed into the final episodes of the second season, the last before the 1986 film. This is also at the expense of human characters, several of whom appear only a few times but could have been turned into series regulars to its profit. The one who comes to mind first is Raoul, who appears in two episodes set in New York, a city which is given a certain grotty atmosphere that is ultimately a kid-friendly pastiche of a Scorsese film of that era. He is a product of that particular era in the city’s history and as such he feels rooted in a way that few human characters do. I wish we got more of him. Likewise, I wish we got more of Carly, the girl who eventually gets romantically involved with Sam Witwicky but is ultimately both more intelligent and more daring than he is (it’s why, after finishing the first two seasons, I came to see how Dark of the Moon was a massive character assassination on Carly. She is far too interesting a character to be reduced to eye candy).

Another reason the show has endured as long as it has is the voice actors. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are legends for a reason, after all, and the voice actors more generally are one of two groups of people involved in the production of this show who are clearly giving it their all. It can be very surprising to see how certain actors provided so many voices; both the rasping voice of Megatron and the breathy voice of Soundwave are both Welker! All of these voices are unique, all capable of giving their characters a vibe, which provides a certain depth.

The other group of people who clearly gave a shit about their jobs are the composers. There were but two of them: Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh, who produced the wide variety of background music in the series. What struck me, looking on from forty years in the future, is how much of it is orchestral. You’d think that your giant transforming robot show would have a lot of synthesizers, more electronic music, to go with the artificial nature of the protagonists. There is some of that, yes, but for the first two seasons the score is overwhelmingly recorded via orchestra, which felt like a sixties World War II movie - tell me this doesn’t sound like something out of the golden age of those films. There are even leitmotifs! There are bits for triumph, and for planning, and for panic. The spacier third season changed this, halfway through, to a soundtrack with more synthesizers that quoted liberally from the score of the 1986 movie, which worked for the pulpier feel (the particular sound of the old score just felt out of place in the new setting, feeling less John Williams and more Ernest Gold).

I didn’t binge this show and I think that was the right call; I watched one or two episodes a day, mostly, with the exception of multi-episode events which I watched the whole way through in one sitting. These older series, with less connective tissue between episodes (and frankly a raft of continuity issues), benefit from letting the characters stay in your mind a while, so that the underlying repetitive structures don’t become too obvious. I started in January and ended in April, and remained mostly consistent to the one episode per day rule. It became a ritual I looked forward to, for as long as it lasted.

And this, of course, brings us to the movie, and what a movie it is. The movie is the first two seasons of the show, but more epic - better animation, better voice acting, better writing (none perfect, mind you, but definitely on a higher plane). It’s a better movie than it is a toy commercial, seeing how Hasbro treated its characters like the disposable toys they thought they were, rather than the beloved icons of childhood the children in question did. And so, the deaths of Optimus Prime and so many other stalwarts of the cartoon were decreed with no thought to the fact that people actually loved them, to be replaced with shiny new toys with not enough writing done to make them lovable.

(in fairness to them, Hasbro has tried to make up for it)

I had watched the movie on VHS as a kid several times without the benefit of familiarity with the series before it; now that I have, I realized what I was missing. The conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons in those early seasons is a conflict fought under conditions of utter scarcity; their wars are fundamentally for fuel, regularly raiding power plants and the like for the bare necessities of their continued existence. There is a sparseness to those seasons that doesn’t really come into relief until you compare them with the movie, which begins with a lush view at a fully functional Autobot base on the moons of Cybertron with the stated intention of soon liberating the planet from the clutches of the Decepticons. The music in that sequence, a soaring number by Vince DiCola, is designed to highlight the awe of this new state of affairs, the rough-and-tumble Ark of the series replaced with Cybertronian civilization in its resplendent glory. The same goes for Autobot City, which is more detailed than anything that came before it, and the battle for that city is a crowning achievement of the franchise.

I have a vivid memory of watching this movie as a kid and finding the Quintessons to be terrifyingly fascinating, all through that one scene where Kup and Hot Rod are thrown to the sharkticons. The way that these various scary faces coexist around a central bulb with tentacles, each a personality that bickers with the others, lodged itself in my mind and never really let go. That’s why I found the way the Quintessons were portrayed in the third season to be so disappointing; none of them get a name, none of them really get a personality, and as such they are just sort of a blob.

After the movie, the third season felt like a step down. The movie wasn’t free of animation errors but neither did it look as shoddy as the rest of the cartoon could look. The third season, the one that is the most openly space opera, looks all too fake. This is unfortunate, as the upgraded animation of the movie really sold the vastness of space and therefore the vastness of the story, something that the third season is lacking. You have the growing pains of the new cast; this season has a strong idea for a cast dynamic, with the rookie Rodimus Prime contrasting the experienced, firm-handed Optimus, while leading and serving the more experienced Kup and Ultra Magnus. There’s also one of the few female transformers, Arcee, and the first to be a major part of the cast. Not unlike Avatar: the Last Airbender, Rodimus’ arc is about the burdens of being the chosen one.

In terms of deeper themes, there are two major ones beyond the obvious one of “buy Transformers toys.” Much of this show, if you think about it for a bit, is about anxieties regarding the nature of industrial civilization as something capable of both great accomplishment but also great destruction. This becomes very obvious when you consider the Constructicons; I find it very telling that construction vehicles were chosen to be Decepticons. All six of them have vehicle modes that can be used to create things, oftentimes good things, but together they can combine into a gigantic robot literally named Devastator. This suggests a dialectical relationship between the positive and negative aspects of the second industrial revolution; that which creates can also devastate.

There’s one particular episode in the earlier part of the second season that has a heavy subtext about this, namely The Master Builders. In this episode, Autobots Grapple and Hoist, who turn into a crane and a tow truck, respectively, are possessed by the idea of building a solar power collection device, and in the process of doing so are offered help by aforementioned Constructicons, who claim to have defected. The episode bounces between these two groups, one building for altruistic reasons and the other building for sinister reasons. Again and again, you are confronted with their fundamental similarity. The difference is the choices they make with their awesome powers of creation. Throughout this episode, I was reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai, particularly the character of Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, the British engineer captured by the Japanese whose love of building is harnessed by his captor and used against his own people. Both Nicholson and the two Autobots are entranced by the act of creation, but refuse to think about on whose behalf they are creating, and to the detriment of their own.

The other big thematic category that appears a lot in this show is the cost of warfare on the environment and on the combatants. The conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons is a resource war for their own survival. Their sustenance is energon, and energon can be created from terrestrial sources of energy, such as oil or hydroelectric power. A surprisingly high percentage of episodes in the first two seasons are about raids on power plants and the like, and the results are always destructive to the environment around them. One episode has the Insecticons running roughshod over Indonesia, and another features Constructicons drilling into the Earth’s core. Both sides of this war are concerned with survival, but they differ in what they are willing to justify in its name.

I finished this show with an understanding of just why this toyline became a cultural juggernaut. When you get down to it, the show is simply fun, and in a way that creates a universe that feels like it could be endlessly explored. It’s rough around the edges, yes, and it’s a bit janky, yes, but by the end I found it quite charming if you can stomach something which was obviously created to sell toys. By the end of the last episode, there was part of me, somewhat surprisingly, that was sad it was over.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

On Building LEGO Star Wars after fifteen years

Putting the pieces together on an old beloved hobby

As fortune would have it, I was born on the 27th of December so that my parents could factor my birth into their 1996 tax returns, since the doctor overseeing the procedure didn’t want to induce me on Christmas, my mother’s birthday (“but you’re Jewish!” she said. “Doesn’t mean I want to work on Christmas,” he responded). Because of that, every year my birthday falls into what could be considered an extended Christmas season, falling in that surreal week between Christmas and New Year’s where nothing is real. Because people are traveling during this period, my birthday party is always sometime in the middle of January so that people can get back from their celebrations of profound things so they can celebrate far more worldly, insignificant things (me). More pleasantly, it means I get all the year’s presents crammed together, and it was this year I got something I hadn’t played with in fifteen years: LEGO Star Wars sets.

One is a bust of the head of Captain Rex from the Clone Wars, and the other is a rather large set - over a thousand pieces if memory serves - of R2-D2. During the two nights I built these sets, there was a lot of blue and white. I found myself enjoying the experience just as much as I did when I was a kid. It was an unfamiliar experience, doing so much work with my hands, having graduated to being a faceless bureaucrat among an army of faceless bureaucrats in the Washington DC blob who sits at a desk and presses buttons to earn his pay.

But there is something doubtlessly mesmerising about putting all these little pieces together. On one occasion, I got up to use the restroom and found myself feeling almost dizzy, a feeling I’ve only ever felt after gaming for a long time and then standing up. It also reminded me of my grueling job-hunting stretches after I graduated in 2019, and then had to ram into the pandemic and omnipresent discrimination against the autistic (as I am); I found myself investing more time in various writing projects or other things, because they gave me results. If I wrote a short story or an article, it was there, in front of me, an indication that I had worked. For job applications, it was flushing effort down the drain with nothing more than a confirmation email to prove that I did it. Here, again, was labor in physical form - evidence for Marx’s labor theory of value, perhaps.

One of the things that struck me when putting these little pieces together was how colorful the insides of these sets were, and how all of that color was to be covered up by the blue and the white and the gray. There was something fascinating about all that color, reds and browns and greens, being hidden by a shell for which the real aesthetic value comes in. It was, as I soon figured out, a multilingual way of keeping everything straight. LEGO famously does not use words in its instructions, but does everything with pictures. The colors on the inside of the set is a natural extension; red parts connect with red parts, yellow with yellow, et cetera (this is how the designers had me build R2-D2’s head, making sure each portion is connected to the right side of the set). There’s something sad about all that color being hidden; exposing it may make some sort of interesting abstract art piece, akin to those lavishly drawn books that show you the inside of any number of vehicles (including licensed Star Wars ships, at least one book of which I read as a child).

On another level, it was strange to see a LEGO set be a sculpture and not a toy. I grew up with LEGO Star Wars, Bionicle, and other themes that were designed to be played with. I have a LEGO Star Destroyer on top of one of my bookshelves, serving a purpose as a sculpture, but if I look at it from the right angle I can still see the minifigures inside. The massive R2-D2 set I built have smooth parts on its feet so that you can glide it around, but it still feels larger and so fragile that you just want to leave it there. The head of Captain Rex is even more a sculpture, as I cannot see any way to play with it. I took to calling it the ‘severed head,’ and proudly called it such alongside a picture of the set in a group chat for my extended family. Both sets are now in a TV room, on top of a shelf, looking down at you as if you are a threat.

I have seen those big master builder sets in bookstores and in other public places, where LEGO is clearly angling for the adult market. Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs, as they are called in the fandom) have a saying: you get into LEGO as a kid, then abandon it in an attempt to be more adult as a teenager, and then get back into it as an adult. I lost interest in my freshman year of high school (fourteen years old, for non-Americans). As C. S. Lewis said:

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

But it does feel like LEGO has exploited that; the adult fans are not just going back to something they enjoyed as a child, but rather that LEGO has successfully found a new market for its products, and is happily making money hand over fist because of it. It’s like how a lot of licensed toys for small children (like a buggy shaped like the Millennium Falcon, for example), are really marketed toward their parents, as the parents are the ones who are spending money, and children of that age can only object so much. On some level, it’s another manifestation of how late capitalism has made it even harder to imagine things that are truly new, rather than repackaged nostalgia (writes he who spent eight days catching up on The Bad Batch on Disney Plus, hypocrite that I am - the positive is that I got to see Captain Rex on screen while Captain Rex’s severed head was looking down upon me). We have been given our fantasies for money, and we are all too happy to fork it over.

I can accept that my joy in building these sets is in some sense an act of deliberate regression. But as Lewis says in the above quote, that is not necessarily a bad thing. All too often we allow what is new and ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ and whatnot glom onto our basic humanity, the humanity that we had as children. Likewise, it was good to get back to basics in a sort of metaphysical sense, to do things with my hands rather than via a mouse and keyboard. But if moving away from these things is progress, what does our notion of progress really mean? And, above that particular discussion, what does it mean when that refreshing inversion of oppressive norms comes when a corporation profits from it? There has got to be some French philosopher from the 1960s who has a pithy quote about that which would illuminate the conundrum, or barring that a quote from the works of Mark Fisher. In any case, I enjoyed the experience, as I have enjoyed so much of Star Wars and so much of LEGO. But it made me think of all the things wrapped up in this, all the pieces that make it up, and how they all click together.

--

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Holiday Gift Guide: Toys and Collectibles

Vance - For anyone and everyone

Funko Pop! Vinyl

It probably seems weird to recommend something that has become so ubiquitous, but a new crop of Funko Pop! figures made me step back and really appreciate these things more than I had before. In the early 2000s, when I first became aware of designers producing toys specifically intended for adult collectors, things like McFarlane Toys' Edward Scissorhands and Ash Williams action figures and Simpsons Treehouse of Horror sets began decorating my bookshelves. But while each figure was cool enough, the assemblage quickly began to look ungainly. There was a lot of aesthetic disconnect, and the options for affordable collectibles of nerdy things I liked were pretty limited. Funko Pop! vinyl figures changed that, with a bewildering array of licensed properties and figures -- and at only $10. While I liked them (I mean, come on, they're stinkin' cute), it was sort of easy to make a punchline out of "Well, of course they have a Funko for that now." But here's the thing: I really like Warner Bros. Animation. And when Duck Dodgers, What's Opera Doc? Bugs and Elmer, Gossamer, the Animaniacs, Pinky & the Brain, and way more suddenly showed up over the last few months, I realized that there had been a Looney Tunes-shaped hole in my heart, that only adorably big-eyed collectibles could fill. And with even PBS (Bob Ross!) added to the lineup as well, I know that there's now a Funko Pop! for pretty much everybody on your list. 

Mike - For the nostalgic collector

Action Vinyls by The Loyal Subjects

The Loyal Subjects has really been upping its game lately. Featuring a line-up that included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, G.I. Joe, and Masters of the Universe, the crew at TLS has recently added Dragonball Z, Thundercats, My Little Pony, How to Train Your Dragon and more! These fun little blind boxes would make excellent stocking stuffers and each figure features articulation (so you can actually play with them!) a collector's card, and most include an accessory. I have quite a few myself and I love it when my kids take them down off the shelf and play with them. It allows me to share a part of my childhood with them.

Mike - For the comic book fan with good taste in comics

Saga toys by Skybound

I would be lying (sorry) if I didn't say that I want all of the Saga toys.  I mean all of them.  Look at The Will and Lying Cat! Look at them! In addition to this amazing pair, the Skybound shop has other action figures, a Ghus plush, and Lying Cat statues in multiple colors! Won't someone please buy me a pink Lying Cat!  I think I've been pretty good this year.

Mike - For the Star Wars fan

Anything Porg by Funko, Hasbro and others

If someone on your shopping list is a fan of Star Wars then you owe it to them to give them all of the Porgs.  There are amazing Porg stuffed animals, a Porg Pez dispenser, Porg bobbleheads, talking Porgs, Porg pillows, Porgs that you stick on your car window with suction cups, and more! Porgs are the best and everyone on your list will see their quality of life improve with one (or more!) of these cute little birds in their lives.

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Tip of the Hat: DC Super Hero Girls

Occasionally, there's something that comes along that simply reminds you of the joy of fandom. The execution may not be perfect, but it's nevertheless touching, or thought-provoking, or simply fun. We wanted to introduce this occasional series to shine a light on those things when we find them.

After The Force Awakens came out, there was a controversy over the lack of Rey toys. She was the main character of the movie, but kids couldn't get her action figure because she was a girl. Star Wars toys are for boys, Hasbro decided, and boys might not play with a girl action figure. In an era where toys are more heavily gendered than at any time in the past, that kind of cynical thinking might make sense in a boardroom somewhere, but the internet was quick to let Hasbro know that this absurd omission was not appreciated. She was the main character!

But this was nothing new, of course, and nothing new in sci-fi or fandom, to be sure. After Avengers 2: The Age of Ultron came out, my daughter wanted Scarlet Witch and Black Widow action figures. Happy hunting, dad! It took a while, but I finally found a Scarlet Witch. I never did track down a Black Widow. So when The Force Awakens deal happened, one of our female contributors and I virtually arm-wrestled to see who would write a post about the whole thing. She, because she was an adult woman in fandom, and me, because I have little girls. I won, but in the end, I wasn't sure I could add much to the discussion that hadn't already been put out there.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and this, then, is the happy version of what that post might have been.

As I write this, two of my girls are asleep with their arms wrapped around Bumblebee, Wonder Woman, and Harley Quinn vinyl figures. At this point, those have not left the girls' side at bedtime for weeks and weeks. My youngest daughters have taken to randomly dropping into superhero poses and scrunching up their faces in tiny, tiny impersonations of grim determination in the face of bad guys. We are reading graphic novels together. This is all thanks to DC Super Hero Girls, which, if you've missed it, is a franchise where most of the female characters, even the bad ones, from the DC Universe are thrown together as teenage friends at Super Hero High and its two rival schools. It maybe doesn't make that much sense if you know more about the characters, but that's not really the point.

My family was introduced to the franchise when it launched with a comic issue my oldest daughter picked up at Free Comic Book day two years ago. She read it, immediately told me about it, and told me that she wanted to know how the cliffhanger resolved as soon as it came out. Anything that gets them reading more comics, I'm excited about. We have since picked up all three published trades, and while I can't say, as an adult, that they're the most compelling titles on the block, my girls all love them...even the girls that can't read yet. So I was pulling for the project from the outset, but it seems like, given the volume of DC Super Hero Girls stuff out there now, it's succeeded far beyond just a successful comic book line. There's a Cartoon Network show, two straight-to-video features, DC Super Hero Girls gummy snacks, and...here's the kicker...so, so many toys.

I took a spin down the toy aisle at Target right after Wonder Woman came out. Here's what I saw:

A whole section of nerd toys for little girls! Sure, some of those figures have a distinctive doll-like character to them, but check these out:

That's an action playset and a weapon. For girls. And it makes me so happy.

How's Marvel doing on the next aisle? Well, you can see that next to the Marvel section there's some more DC stuff. Those are legit, non-doll large action figures for multiple Wonder Womans (a pair of Gal Gadot and one of Lynda Carter, just out of frame) and Supergirl. If you want a large Black Widow, you can get her on the bottom shelf in a set with four guys. You can find a couple Rey, and a lot of (dead) Jyn Erso, which is an improvement, but it's still a pretty stark contrast to what DC is doing.

I know somebody had a fight somewhere to make this happen. Somebody at Mattel gambled that you could make an entire action/superhero property aimed at girls and not go broke. And whoever fought that fight, I thank them, and I hope they're enjoying their raise.

My wife sobbed through the entire Wonder Woman movie, because when she was growing up, Wonder Woman was it. She was the female superhero, not the best female superhero. Now, my girls can have arguments about whether or not Bumblebee is better than Wonder Woman because she can shrink down. Or if Batgirl is better than Supergirl because she's not taken out by kryptonite.

It's entirely possible that DC Super Hero girls is about to reach a point of saturation (there's now a LEGO DC Super Hero Girls, too) where people might start getting tired of it. It's possible that it's just a money grab. But my girls don't care. They just dig the show, and playing with the toys.

Three years ago, they wouldn't have had the option. And I think that's pretty badass.

Posted by Vance K — father of children, cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, and musician.

Holiday Gift Guide: Toys and Novelties

Welcome to our annual Holiday Gift Guide where the flock takes a break from talking about all the awesome and not so awesome things to, well, talk about some more of the awesome things that you might want to consider for your Holiday shopping this year. Today we'll talk about toys and novelties, but throughout the week you will see other things to consider as well (games, apps, movies, and more).

And, as you can see from the first item on this list, everything is awesome and Legos are still the best!

Dean: for the gift to put under your tree

Lego: The Batman Movie set pictured, but any Lego set will do.

LEGOS

by The Lego Group

I say this every year, but you can't go wrong with Legos (shaddup about "the plural of Legos is Lego"). No, seriously, you can't. For anyone under 15, and a large number of people over, this is an easy gift. You can get some perfectly good kits for under $20, or if you want to put yourself in someone's good graces forever, anything from the Ultimate Collector Series is sure to impress, with myriad options in between.

Mike:  For the practical collector

Action Vinyls

by The Loyal Subjects

There are a wide range of vinyl collectibles on the market and they are great for the budget conscious collector who doesn't want to spend an arm and a leg.  What sets The Loyal Subjects apart against the competition is the "action" aspect of its vinyl figures.  Each blind box includes multiple accessories, and there are multiple points of articulation to boot.  Not only do you get the thrill of opening a blind box (who doesn't!), but you get a high quality figure that will really bring you back to your childhood.  They pull on all of your nostalgic heartstrings as any good collectible should, featuring Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe and more.  In addition to looking great on the shelf, they are a blast to play with!  One thing my son enjoys on a daily basis is hanging out in my office and playing with my toys. He is particularly fond of my MOTU vinyls.

Dean: For the adult collector

Star Wars pictured, but lines include Marvel, DC, and many more!

1/6 Scale Figures

by Sideshow Collectibles

Let's be honest- those of us on this site (Mike and I, anyway) have not abandoned our childhood love of toys. I have shelves in my office dedicated to them, and am in the middle of a Lego project that is no less than 36"x48". Not every gift has to be of the Lego UCS magnitude, but if someone who likes such things and you want to make their holiday, allow me to direct you to Sideshow Collectibles.  Detailed, high-end figures (read: dolls) for every geeky walk. It will set you back a couple hundred, but I guarantee you, it will be worth the smile on my face. I mean theirs. Whatever.

Mike:  For the gift that keeps on giving

Collector Corps Subscription

by Funko

My love of all things Funko is no secret and I was thrilled when they began to offer a subscription box.  There are other subscription boxes on the market, but only one that includes 100% Funko exclusive goodness.  While I am recommending the Marvel Collectors Corps subscription, they also offer DC and Star Wars boxes as well.  I personally love that these boxes only arrive every other month so you don't get too much stuff, and that if you are a Marvel fan you will enjoy every item.  Other subscription boxes include filler that needs to be tossed each month, but with the Funko boxes you get at least one exclusive Pop!, t-shirt, patch, pin, and more.

Dean:  For the toy to cram into a stocking

Action Figures

by Hasbro

Action figures! There is a certain subset of (sub-)humanity who is boycotting Star Wars because of its emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. I assume you, gentle reader, celebrate this movement instead of oppose it (if not, you are probably on the wrong website). That said, when The Force Awakens came out, there was a problem in the representation among even the most basic of toys. Rogue One is making efforts to correct that, and for under $10, you can stuff a stocking with Jyn, Saw, Baze or any other of the brave Rebels struggling against Imperial tyranny. That sort of ideal might come in handy. You can up to the $20 range for the larger, more detailed "black" series.

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012. 

2013 Nerd Gift Guide - The G

Some of us nerds of a feather have distinct specialties, but I'm the jack of all trades. So it should come as no surprise that I've cobbled together an eclectic array of gift ideas for that special nerdy someone or someones in your life. Follow the links to purchase...

For Music Lovers: Black Metal by Dayal Patterson [Buy the book or download for Kindle.]

If you like black metal as much as I do, and chances are you do not, then you won't want to miss this. I mean, where else can you read the true stories of everyone from Necrobutcher to Necrocock? This ain't no tabloidy bullshit like Lords of Chaos--this is a real history of the "most evil" form of music ever made, in all its absurd glory. Though full of unintentional comedy, Black Metal is written by someone with both an appreciation for both the music's value and full understanding of how ridiculous it can be. This is easily the best music book I've read since England's Dreaming.

For Fantasy/Gaming Enthusiasts: Lords of Waterdeep, a D&D themed board game [Buy the game and the expansion.]

Do you know someone who waxes nostalgic about his/her days as a Dungeon Master, but doesn't have the time or inclination to plan/execute a dungeon drawl? How about that friend who loves both Settlers of Catan and Game of Thrones? Well, you're in luck, because Lords of Waterdeep promises the nerdy goodness of AD&D wrapped in the streamlined package of a European-style board game!

For "Your Kids": Collectible Darth Vader Taking Plus Toy Figure [Buy this awesomenes.]

Sure your kid asked for Rescue Bots/Sophia the First/a pony, but you know what's best for them, right? And this isn't just a gift--it's a hyperspace ticket to a lifetime of awesomeness! And who cares if it ends up in your room instead of theirs? You're just keeping it in good condition for them! They'll definitely appreciate that when they're older. No question. 

SDCC Most Wanted Exclusives

The nerd mecha that is San Diego Comic Con is less than 2 months away and the tension is growing.  The bloggers are busy scooping rumors, studios have begun to make some announcements, and I am prepared to spend four days waiting in line.  I love it! With the Matty Collectory Presale (June 4) around the corner, I thought I would take a look at my top 5 most wanted exclusives.  As a father of two who has established the norm that my kids can each choose one exclusive for me to bring home, I will talk about their selections first and then move to the top 5.

What my kids want:

Catwoman Barbie:

In not too shocking news, my three-year old daughter wants the Catwoman Barbie doll from Mattel.  I try to encourage them to select from Mattel because of the ability to preorder.  With a lack of Polly Pockets this year, it is none too surprising that she was swayed by the Barbie.  I think she made a good choice.

Rokkon and Stonedar:
Keeping with his love of Masters of the Universe, my five-year old son selected the two-pack of Rokkon and Stonedar.  These figures have removable panels for when you want them to either be an action figure or a rock and look great.  I think he also made a wise decision and I hope the presale treats me well.

Top 5:

1. Chew #35 variant - I am a huge fan of Chew from John Layman and Rob Guillory and they have delivered again. While Layman was originally hesitant to go with another homage to Tarantino, I am happy he trusted Guillory to deliver what is sure to be a sell out.  I just hope I can make it to the Image booth before this beauty sells out.

2. Star Wars Black: Boba Fett with Han Solo in carbonite - When you combine the wordsexclusive, Star Wars, Comic Con, and Boba Fett you have something that people will be interested in.  Given the high quality of packaging that Hasbro is known for and the amazing photos of what this toy looks like, it is high on my list.  The only problem facing me is that I don't have the patience to wait in the line to score this before it sells out.





3. Wrath of the Rancor - Hallmark has well established itself as a mainstay at SDCC.  The line for its exclusive ornaments wraps around the side of the floor beginning on preview night and the booth is buzzing throughout the convention.  If I am fortunate enough to make it through the line before this is sold out, then the Wrath of the Rancor will be mine.  I am always a fan of Star Wars ornaments, and if you add in the quality that Hallmark produces with the exclusiveness that nerds love, you have a winner.





4. Jason from the NES "Friday the 13th" game from NECA - I love the retro feel and creativity that NECA took in this figure with very distinct coloring.  A fan of both the movie and the game, this would be a great toy to add to any collection.

5. Hot Wheels® A-Team Custom GMC Panel Van - The fans at Comic Con go crazy for the exclusive Hot Wheels® and this one warrants enough nostalgia to catch my attention.  The notion of playing A-Team with my son is something that I haven't quite wrapped my head around.  I think I will try to pick this one up.