Toys R Me

This week, I wanted to showcase some fun toys I’ve recently received. (Well, some not so recently.) So this will mainly be a short photo gallery while I recover from a frustrating couple of weeks, and prepare for another frustrating week coming up.

When I was a kid, I had a huge collection of Star Wars action figures. I don’t have nearly as many any more, but I can’t resist buying my favorite characters. As I have mentioned previously, one of my favorite versions of Star Wars is the Star Wars Rebels TV series. Hasbro has put out most of the characters from that show as part of their Black Series line of six-inch figures. Just yesterday, I received Chopper, the cantankerous astromech droid from that show, and one of my three favorite Star Wars droids overall. (The other two being Artoo-Deetoo and BB-8. I guess I have a thing for astromechs.)

Here he is, posed in front of the LEGO Ghost, the ship from Rebels. Why there isn’t a cool model kit of the Ghost, I have no idea. (I do have a Hot Wheels miniature of it on my desk at work.) 

With Chopper and Ezra Bridger in a recent Black Series wave, Hasbro has released Black Series figures of almost the entire cast of Rebels, with the glaring exception of Zeb. It’s also frustrating to me that we don’t have a Black Series figure of Enfys Nest from Solo; get on that right away, Hasbro!

When I was a kid, I loved the Bloom County comic strip in the newspapers. I wasn’t alone; the collections of the strips were bestsellers, and plush toys were made of Opus, the sweet, innocent penguin from the strip, and Bill the Cat, the strip’s anti-Garfield. The plushes were okay, but not great.

In recent years, creator Berkeley Breathed has brought back the comic strip as something he is publishing himself online. This is probably wise, because it means he doesn’t have to deal with editors or selling it to newspapers or anything. He’s also begun manufacturing plush toys of the characters, and they are light years beyond anything the licensed companies ever produced, in terms of looking like the characters from the strip.

So far, he has produced four plush toys:

Opus, the penguin.

Bill the Cat

Rosebud the Basselope

(I love all the details on Rosebud, including the dandelion she is holding.)

And, most recently, Opus in his “Brand Spanking New Day” outfit.

Not only are the plushes fantastic, the boxes they come in are fantastic as well.

And that’s about all I have this week. At this point, I am so far behind on my “2000 AD highlights” section that trying to get caught up is just going to stress me out. So I think I will wait until the big end-of-year prog, which is a great jumping-on point, and try to stay weekly from there.

And that’s about all I have this week. See you in two weeks!