Robot Claw

Recently I saw this in the shop:

Collectible items?!? $50 in value for only $15?!? I’d have had to have been a fool to ignore this. So of course I bought two immediately. One for me, and one for Bernard who also appreciates a bargain.

In this post I’m going to reveal almost all of the contents. Now I’ll be upfront and say it wasn’t all great, so I’ll separate it into three categories from worst to best. You can ask yourself: is this product the bargain it claims to be?

Let’s start with the Utter Trash…

With two exceptions every item inside was a ‘blind packed’ product, which meant a bag containing one or more of a series of randomly packed goodies. The above photo shows the items that were essentially worthless. Beyond garbage. Refuse.

The mini NFL caps were sub-cereal-toy quality and it’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting them. As you can see the box contained two packs of them and they were so awful I only opened one and saved the other to use as a future gift for the only NFL fan I know who would appreciate them (Adam).

The minions armbands almost literally made me weep with how much I hated them. The Spongebob dog tag was just a waste of metal and paint and the (five year old!) Skylanders ‘puzzle eraser’ didn’t go together, didn’t stand up and didn’t even function as an eraser. Also it was hideous. And trash.

Naturally this irredeemable trash was thrown in the garbage at light speed. Surely the rest of the contents would be better?

Let’s now move onto the Probable Trash…

An eclectic mix we had here. You’d be tempted to look at most of this and say “Surely this is utter trash as well?” And you’d probably be correct. However there was a chance that the contents of these packages – randomly packed as they are – could be acceptable. Even worth keeping?

Spoiler alert: most weren’t.

I hate Garbage Pail stuff so much I wish I could delete them from reality. I only included these stickers in this category since I predicted a tiny chance some could be useful for postcard hilarity. I was very, very wrong and gleefully binned them all.

The ‘hubsnap’ is a weird and utterly useless piece of trash that sort of functions as a ‘clicker’ noisemaker. They were very badly printed with Marvel character graphics and – let’s be real here – are utter trash. Once again I took joy in discarding one and stashing the Punisher one away for a future gift for Florence, who mentioned she was a fan.

As you can see the Yokai Watch pin is trash, the Guardians and TMNT dogtags utter trash, and the Yokai Watch dogtag a few atoms shy of trash since it was sparkly gold.

The last item though… the Walking Dead dogtag and sticker. That was – ahem – borderline not trash. I’m intentionally not showing it since it may also become a future gift.

So of thirteen items so far the tally is twelve are trash and one is borderline ok. It’s a good thing I saved the best for last!

And so we arrive at the Hopefully Not Trash…

Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Hobbit! Some high-quality licenses here, so the hopes were high. Did I hit the jackpot?

No, no I didn’t:

The Star Wars erasers are – what’s the word? – oh yes, they are trash. Hideous, not-puzzling and not functional erasers, I questioned the need for their existence as I stashed them away in my ‘random Star Wars trash’ box never to be seen again.

I was hoping for the cute spherical little owl toy in the Harry Potter bag but got that silly ginger instead. He was dense and heavy and somewhat spherical himself and made for an easy projectile as I hurled him into the garbage across the room.

And finally the Heroclix figure. Well, it’s total garbage. A common fodder figure from a tabletop RPG that no one plays anymore (and I never did)? There’s a word for stuff like this, and that word is ‘trash‘.

Sixteen items therefore, and almost all of them are total or even utter trash. One may conclude that had they any actual value they may have sold for their original price and not at the savage discount I bought them at. But that would ignore the joy of opening them all, none of which I actually experienced.

So in conclusion this product contained literal garbage and was a total waste of money. However since the contents are random, then perhaps the second one I bought – the one I sent Bernard – was very different. Perhaps he hit the jackpot, and opened a cornucopia of delights? Hopefully he’ll share in the comments…