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Archive for the ‘Toys’ Category

Antipodean Bricks

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

As you know, Australia is a land of ancient mystery and dark secrets. Often on my trips to this Great Southern Land I try to uncover some of these, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found yesterday.

I speak of an entire range of officially licensed and absolutely not bootleg LEGO kits based on popular brands. I was slack-jawed as I stumbled upon these; why aren’t these in the LEGO store in my local mall?

I speak of such things as Deformation Armor:

And Dinosaur Crossing:

And New Hero:

And even Marvelous Aengans:

Note that a couple of them are from a company called ‘666’, which must be some sort of southern-hemispherean LEGO shell company ~~managed by Satan~~.

Anyway I was trying to decide which one to buy when I found this hidden at the back of the shelf:

Holy Moses it’s Ultraman! I purchased it faster than you can down a small frozen coke and scurried out of the store. This, I knew, was a find of the century!

Obviously this is an officially licensed and not at all bootleg LEGO Ultraman kit, and specifically one of four available:

But what’s the subtitle under the ultra logo?

Ah yes, it’s obviously based on the ~~obviously nonexistent~~ ‘Star Body Sucking’ series. This may explain why the included minifigure is a weird hybrid with the head and chestplate of Ultraman Taro, the body design of no existing ultra, and who wields the Sparklence from Ultraman Tiga!

But this is a trifling distraction since I absolutely love this little bugger! Surely he’s now risen to the very top of my collection of officially licensed and absolutely not bootleg LEGO minifigures 🙂

Oh and there was a ‘spaceship’ in the kit as well but it was absolute trash so I binned it immediately.

Posted in Australia, Toys, Trip | 1 Comment »

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Sunday, April 23rd, 2023

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai is probably the most famous Japanese work of art:

It was a woodblock print first made in 1831. About 8000 copies were eventually printed, of which about 100 remain. The remaining copies are shockingly valuable now (one recently sold for almost 3 million), but their (relative) abundance means you can see an original in many galleries around the world. We’ve seen one in Japan, and another at The Met in NYC.

And here’s a LEGO kit I bought last week! It’s the second in their LEGO art series, which seeks to reproduce famous works of art in LEGO form (the first was The Starry Night by Van Gogh).

The set has over 1800 pieces, but a few hundred are small flat circles to make up the sky and clouds! You build it in six plates which then go together to form the full image. Here’s a shot before the 3D surface elements are added:

The ‘wave effects’ cleverly use white flower and bird pieces, and it makes a clever illusion of a frothing wave, especially from a distance:

Here’s a comparison between the original print and this set, showing Fuji and some of the fishermen:

About half of the finished piece is the frame (which is optional). All told it took me about five hours to finish, and while a very easy set, was enormously satisfying and relaxing to build. It looks beautiful complete:

It’s designed to be hung on a wall, which I intend to do, but it’s somewhat large and quite heavy so I need to think carefully as to where I’ll place it. I like this even more than I expected I would. I wonder what art sets LEGO will make in the future?

Posted in Animals, Art, Toys | Comments Closed

Conkers, Milkies and Cats-Eyes

Sunday, March 5th, 2023

I got the usual things for my birthday (games, books mostly) but here’s something KLS got me:

It’s a little bag of marbles! Not new ones, but vintage ones from the 1980s. These are more or less identical to the ones I used to play with 40 years ago 🙂

This arose from me reading about an auction recently in which individual marbles from the 1950s – 1970s sold for thousands of dollars. Aside from the fact these once ‘worthless’ items can now be very collectible, reading the story triggered a lot of memories about a hobby I’d all but forgotten!

Back in primary school marbles was one of the go-to games at school. We’d all bring little bags of marbles with us to school and play endless games of marbles with each other. Rain or shine this was a game that could be set up and played very quickly and it was so easy to learn that anyone could participate.

Kids all over the world played marbles, and a quick google search shows the rules varied everywhere and in some cases were different enough to almost be a different game! Here are how we played our schoolyard tournaments:

– Select a hole in the ground, a gap in a wall/fence or if nothing suitable exists choose a big marble (we called them ‘conkers’) and place it about 2 meters away from where we’d roll the marbles.
– Each player selects the same amount of marbles from their collection. They need to be the same sizes and the same assortment of glass or metal ones.
– Each player takes turns rolling their marbles until they get them all in the hole or all of them hit the conker. The first to accomplish this is the winner.
– If playing ‘for keeps’, the winner chooses one of the losers marbles and it becomes theirs.

A search online suggests this is a variant called ‘marble billiards’ but as far as I remember this is the only way we played. I wonder if this was just the Newcastle rules, or if this version was popular throughout Australia?

Everyone seemed to have marbles, since they were able to be purchased inexpensively almost everywhere. We had names for all the different types and styles: ‘milkies’ were opaque glass, ‘cat’s eyes’ were like the ones I got for my birthday, ‘steelies’ were metal balls (usually just repurposed bearings), ‘tiger’s eyes’ were orange and black cat’s eyes. There were others as well that I forget, and again a quick search shows the nicknames were as regional as the game.

Marble collecting seems to be a popular hobby these days, and an entire industry has arisen around identifying and trading rare marbles. Although we had our favourites, we were never precious with ours and after we got a bit older aside from using some of them as ammunition in slingshots I don’t really recall what ever happened to our marbles?

I suppose we gave them away to younger children? Maybe we just threw them away? Maybe Bernard still has them to this day? I just don’t know. Marbles were fantastic in those primary school days, but then they just seemed to fade away very quickly. That said, I think it’s a perfect children’s game, and maybe it’s time for the worlds children to rediscover marbles 🙂

Posted in Blog, History, Retro, Toys | 4 Comments »

Japan Pickups: Ultraman

Monday, January 23rd, 2023

Some more items I got in Japan; this time Ultraman figures!

Before arriving in Japan, I didn’t even know Zoffy was in Shin Ultraman. So my amazement when I found out, coupled with how beautiful his design in the film is, meant I absolutely wanted this figure.

This is the ‘S.H. Figuarts’ version, and was very difficult to find! I never saw a brand new one, and ended up paying ¥7700 for an ‘opened but unused’ version. As it turned out the only part that was opened was the box, since the figure was still sealed in the plastic trays and had the factory plastic on its joints.

Isn’t he wonderful? I can’t wait to see the film and his role in it, but I hope/assume it’s the same as his appearance in the original Ultraman series.

Speaking of Shin Ultraman I also picked up this metal figure made by toy car maker Takara Tomy. It’s small and cute, and will sit on my desk (next to a metal Rilakkuma!) forever 🙂

There’s an astonishingly large amount of inexpensive plastic Ultraman figures (over 200 I believe) targeted at kids, and the range is so large it’s a bit difficult to choose. I already had a few of my favourites but picked up Ultraseven, 80, (another) Shin Zoffy as well as two others for their visual design: Kaiser Belial and Dark Tiga. I love these little plastic guys, and I can’t imagine not buying more next time I visit.

These are just the figures: I picked up a few other Ultraman items during our recent trip, such as cards, a tin, a book and one other item you’ll see an upcoming pickup post.

Posted in Toys | Comments Closed

Let’s Assemble Lion Knight’s Castle

Monday, December 19th, 2022

I bought the above a few months back, and at the time assumed I wouldn’t get to it for a year or more. But I’ve recently been on a LEGO-making bender and my backlog is almost empty. It was time therefore to open this magnificent kit.

With over 4500 pieces, this is the biggest LEGO set I’ve ever built. The pieces filled 35 individual bags, and the instructions were split between two hefty manuals. Happily the kit contained no stickers!

Construction took me many hours – more than 10 – over about a week. The engineering was incredible, and there are many unusual uses of pieces and assembly tricks to create the walls and turrets of the castle. It was enormously entertaining to put together: one of the funnest builds I’ve ever done.

One example of the creativity is shown above. This is a hinged section of the wall, above which is placed a triple-jointed crenellation. When the building is opened, the crenellation straightens and a section slides into a cavity in the leftmost wall. It’s smooth and seamless and an amazing achievement using just LEGO.

The castle is made in two halves, which connect together to make the whole. It’s massive, and no, I don’t know exactly where I’m going to display this thing!

Here’s photos of the finished model from front and back:

And here it is opened up showing the interior detail and all the minifigs:

The interiors are no less impressive than the exterior, and the rooms include a bakery, mill, blacksmith, music room, dining room, bedroom and more. Here’s a couple of detail shots:

Oh and the castle has many play-features as well, including dungeons with opening doors, a few trapdoors, a water wheel, a movable wall, a drawbridge that can be raised or lowered and a portcullis:

But my favourite little secret concerns one particular room high in the tower. Once called a garderobe, this room features a single seat above an opening in the wall, and down below at ground level a brown frog piece sits directly below the opening:

Hint: it’s not a frog!