Otaku – Page 37 – Robot Claw

Ultraman [B Type]

August 27, 2019

The new Ultraman series on Netflix is fantastic. It adapts the recent manga which has updated the series for the modern era whilst not rejecting the past, and in my opinion succeeds tremendously.

When I first learned of it I was wary of one of the major aspects: the combat suits. Ultraman was no longer a being, but a human in a suit. However – and without giving anything away – by the end of the first season I loved the suits, and happily and eagerly picked up the two model kits recently put out by Bandai.

That’s the first one. It was a little pricey compared to a Gundam, but it’s a very high quality kit with a very nifty feature.

This is not a beginners kit. The metallic gray is painted on, which means cutting from the runners leaves white (the colour of the underlying plastic) edges that need to be cleaned up. There’s also a lot of tricky-to-remove tabs on the red pieces that require a lot of patience. Cleverly Bandai has designed the kit to hide almost all of these after assembly but I needed a silver paint pen to fix a few spots.

Secondly the kit has a lot of stickers that in some cases were fiddly to attach. I’m not a great fan of stickers, but found them particularly unusual in this case since they were the same colours as the runners. We’re this a higher-priced kit I suppose the stickers would have just been extra pieces, and I don’t know why the cheaper Dragonball kits can do this level of detail sans stickers but this one couldn’t?

That said – and despite occasionally interference from a fuzzy thief – assembly wasn’t difficult and it looked great once finished:

As usual I was happy with just the figure, but there’s a lot of Ultraman’s various energy (‘specium’ to be precise) weapons that can be assembled and attached. But even without any accessories this kit is special for an extra feature; a first for one of my kits:

He has lights! His eyes and chest light up, and the chest can be set to blue or red. It looks incredibly good, and the simplistic but effective interior design (with light pipes and a sticker-mirror running from an LED unit) is charming.

An amazing kit therefore. He looks and can be posed like a high-end action figure, but he was assembled from scratch. I can’t wait to make the other one 🙂

Two Treasures

August 22, 2019

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

In The Cards

July 28, 2019

As I mentioned in this post, I bought a bunch of packs of old trading cards at a recent convention. Today I opened them, and I’m here to share the joy…

These American Gladiators cards were released in 1991 and feature shots of the gladiators and the various events. The sticker isn’t great since it’s not die-cut, and after 28 years has adhered to the backing so isn’t usable anyway! Overall this seems to be a boring set. Rating 5/10

I bought a bunch of this set when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 and probably have all these cards somewhere in a binder. The screengrabs on the cards are a little blurry and the stickers should have been die-cut but when it came out it was amazing due to the widescreen size. Rating 8/10

Series two of Space Shots was released in 1991, and is evidence that back in those days almost anything got a card set (series TWO?!?). The cards are well made but very boring, and it’s difficult to believe anyone ever bought more than one pack of these. Rating 3/10

Dinosaurs was a criminally awful sitcom featuring ‘dinosaur’ puppets. I hated every second I ever saw of it and surprise surprise I hate these cards as well. For starters they don’t even include any shots from the show (just puppet photos), the ‘jigsaw’ cards are garbage and why on earth are there trivia cards?!? Not worth the cardboard they’re printed on. Rating 0/10

Speaking of dinosaurs all I know about the 1994 The Flintstones film I learned from the cards in this pack. And boy does it look bad! The card set is the usual no-effort trash that so many films received (that’s the sticker card above) and as with many in this post I find it hard to believe people actually bought these packs. Rating 0/10

If you had told me the Barbie cards (from 1991) would be amongst the best I would have guffawed and called you a jackanape. Turns out though you’d have been correct! Lovely design and well written text make more a nicely done set. My pack had cards from 8 different years but the set is a massive 196 cards so I wonder what the other designs would be? Rating 8/10

That’s Zoffy helping me with this blog post. Her assistance was of course invaluable…

I’d never heard of Bingo, a dog film released in 1991. Critics hated it but based on amazon reviews it’s so-so for kids. That said I doubt even a sleuth as skilled as The Shaggy D.A. could explain why they made a card set. These cards are, of course, not good, not bad… just nothing. Rating 0/10

I bought all these card packs as a set, and of course took the bad with the good. The only comment I’ll make about these I Love Lucy cards from 2000 is that surely that must be a typo on that card name? Rating 0/10

The printing on the wax-pack of these Wizard of Oz cards from 2000 turned the cast into a nightmare freakshow! The cards are shockingly low quality for such a famous film, but will make good tinder when the fossil fuel runs out. Rating 0/10

At NYCC years back some guy offered to sell me a case of these Dick Tracy cards for a song. I declined, which was wise since even opening this single pack was excruciating. Bad cards from a worse film, and a travestic mockery of the Topps vintage design, these deserve to be encased in concrete and sunk in a harbour. Rating 0/10

And now we move into actual vintage Topps! This set – Back To The Future II from 1989 – follows the by then established formula: bold colours, dynamic movie shots, well-written backs. But the stickers were no longer die-cut and (controversy warning!) in this particular case the movie is boring. The gum had long since turned to hard plastic. Rating 5/10

These Saturday Night Fever cards from 1977 are tied for the oldest cards I got and it’s quaint to think of a time when a dancing film was so big they sold trading cards to kids! However I had to toss these in the trash since:

The gum was moldy! The mold had (visibly) spread to one other card and was inside the packaging. Maybe it was long-dead since it’d been 42 years, but I wasn’t taking the risk. Rating mold/10

E.T. was – and is – a creepy film. For each of the three times we rode the E.T. ride at Universal earlier this year we were slackjawed that it was the phenomenon it was. I can recall buying these cards back in 1982 as a child, and I wonder what I did with them? It’s a good set – every card in my pack features E.T. – but the real surprise to me was the sticker:

Sixteen tiny stickers on a single sheet!!!?! As a kid I must have loved these. Alas now after 37 years the adhesive has all but evaporated and they flaked off the backing. No E.T. stickers to look forward to on your California postcards then. Rating 7/10

I hardly have to say it: these Close Encounters of The Third Kind cards from 1977 are the best I got. Timeless classic Topps design, great picture selection and an amazing (die-cut!) sticker easily lifts these above the others. I’d love a whole box of these but alas they are pricey and very rare now and this is likely the only pack I’ll ever open. Also note the ‘Skywatchers Club’ had annual dues?!? I wonder how many years it lasted? Rating 10/10

There was one last pack that you may have seen in the photo in the original post, but I’m not opening that one now. Maybe I’ve got better plans for it…