February 9, 2012 | Poe
- Just a heads-up–for a variety of reasons, I won’t be attending Toy Fair next week like I did last year. I will, however, be offering my usual armchair coverage, and I will have someone representing PGPoA–JediN8–who will be taking photos and tweeting from the Mattel and Hasbro collector events, as well as the Fair itself.
- I also won’t be able to attend the Four Horsemen’s now-annual show, this one called Toypocalypse II: Futuretro, on Friday night at Toy Tokyo in NYC. It’s looking to be quite an event, though. In addition to the Horsemen and Outer Space Men creator Mel Birnkrant, there are three visiting artists: Sucklord, who may already be familiar to many of you; Abdi Farah, who won the first season of Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” and Kymia Nawabi, the winner of the same show’s second season. As I understand it, all of them will be presenting their own Outer Space Men customs. Speaking of OSM, they will also have a set of four OSM with new paint jobs designed by OSM creator Mel Birnkrant himself, signed by Mr. Birnkrant and the Horsemen, as well as a print of the above painting by the superb Nathan Baertsch (you can get the whole shebang–figures and print–for $125). It looks like it’s going to be an awesome time, and I’m hatefully envious of everyone who gets to go.
- Speaking of Toy Fair, Paul Nomad of the blog Idle Hands is doing his usual thing where he gets all the pre-Toy Fair scoops through whatever mysterious black magic (or maybe just blackmail?) he employs. There’s lot of interesting stuff there, so be sure to check it out.
- Mattycollector.com has added the long-awaited subscription manager to their website, though be aware that it won’t really work yet, since–as was explained months ago–February subs can’t be combined. Be aware that (as far as I can tell) you actually shouldn’t have to take any action to combine your subs. That should happen automatically. However, if you want them separate, you have to adjust that in the settings. You can also update your credit card info for each subscription from this new section.
- It seems that Snout Spout‘s foam trunk may have a tendency to break or tear. Of course this is unsurprising, and again, I don’t get why Mattel couldn’t just use the hard rubber from the vintage figure of twenty-five years ago.
- In addition, it sounds like the foam giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Men are turning yellow. Mattel’s response was “Yes, totally aware of this issue and we have the CPI team looking into it. We hope to have an update soon.” This, after they just answered in December that “[a]ll of our figures, no matter what the material, go through extensive internal simulated aging and humidity testing. If product does not pass, we do not ship it.” Nonetheless, I give credit to Mattel for admitting to the problem, though I have no idea what they can do about it. Unless there’s a really easy fix for it, the only thing they could do would be to offer a refund, and I have a hard time seeing that happening.
- Anyway, all of this QC/foam stuff led fans to create a thread on He-Man.org pleading for Granamyr to be made of plastic and not foam, to which Scott Neitlich replied that Granamyr would not be made of foam and would be made from the same plastic as Tytus and Megator. So, some good news there.
- He-Man.org has posted the first part of an interesting interview with Nathan Bitner, the boy who invented this month’s MOTUC 30th Anniversary figure, Fearless Photog.
