Thursday, November 15, 2007

Episode II - Attack of the Collection

Hellboy


NECA's Nazi Kroenen figure

Sideshow's 12" Kroenen figure - I prefer his Nazi outfit, but the Sideshow version was available exclusively at SDCC (2003?) and I can't afford the eBay prices.



Highlander


I had the swords, so I thought I'd better get a couple of figures. These, again, are Sideshow's 12" figures - Connor MacLeod and Duncan MacLeod.





Lord of the Rings


The Gentle Giant Ringwraith mini bust.

Gentle Giant's Animated Saruman Maquette


The Sideshow/Weta Mouth of Sauron bust, Sideshow/Weta Scaled Morgul Lord's War Mask, Gentle Giant's Gandalf mini bust, and the miniature Ringwraith sword.-


And since it's been over two months since I took the pictures for this post, I've received a few more LOTR items, so I set them all up and snapped a few pictures.

The new additions are a couple more Gentle Giant mini busts: Saruman (with light-up Palantír), and the Balrog (with light-up mouth and fiery mane), as well as the Sideshow Weta Balrog Flame of Udun statue (which I got from a great friend of mine that lives in New Zealand and works for Weta Workshop).


And in an effort to show off the light-up features of Gandalf, Saruman, and the Balrog I took a picture in the dark. Unfortunately, the camera decided it was too dark to focus properly, so the nifty feature that compensates for my complete inability to press the shutter button without jerking the camera didn't work very well.





The Matrix


The first movie was really good; the second had lots of talking, but some cool action sequences (and the Twins were freaky-awesome); the third had even more talking (and it was even more boring talking than the second film, most the time), but again the action sequences were pretty cool. So I have a few Matrix collectibles.

Let's start with the bad ones first: the action figures by N2Toys (which I think is no longer in business). Honestly these figures aren't great, little articulation the sculpts are also not very close at all. Thankfully I got them for really cheap. I'll do a more in-depth review of these someday.

Next we have the good stuff: the Gentle Giant mini busts. The company's recent business decisions have been horrendous (from a consumer's point of view) but their product is still top-notch - at least, in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings lines, I've heard the Harry Potter line is slipping, they'd better do a good job with the Halo mini busts. Anyway. I set these up so that generally you only see three of them, either Neo, Smith and Twin 1 (though I seem to not have taken a picture of that) or thw Twins and Smith. But if you move around a little, it's not too hard to see all four, but they start looking crowded that way.




Star Trek


Since I've always been interested in Star Trek I started actually watching it a few months ago and decided I should have some toys from it - particularly the various incarnations of the Enterprise.

I found a Japanese company called Furuta that makes small plastic 'model kits' of Trek vehicles and proceeded to buy all the Enterprise variations they offered, which at the time was everything except any shown in the series Enterprise - Classic Enterprise, Movie Refit, Enterprise A, B, C, D, E and a future variant of the D. They're about 3 to 4 inches long, and are the ships in the middle of the following picture.



I also purchased a few of the Halmark ornaments, I have the Enterprise D, E, Romulan Warbird (not pictured) and the Classic Enterprise on the base, also in the middle of the above pic next to the Furuta ships.

Additionally, this year Corgi began making Die-cast Enterprise vehicle. At this time only three have been released (to my knowledge) - the Klingon Warbird (as seen in Star Trek IV) the Classic Enterprise, and the Enterprise D, of which I have the two Enterprises. The Classic Enterprise is actually the best, because it is all metal and has a good heft to it. They're quite well detailed, and a nice 6 inch size, not scaled to each other, unfortunately. The disc section of the Enterprise D is plastic however, but it still looks pretty cool. They can be seen in the picture above on the left, the D partly hidden behind the Gentle Giant Animated Shadow Stormtrooper maquette.

Planned for next year are a Romulan Warbird (which I'll definitely get - it's one of my favorite vehicles designs ever), the Reliant (from Star Trek II) and I think the Defiant. I hope they eventually release all the Enterprise variants as I'd love to have them all in a bigger size - particularly the E and A.

Venom


And finally, I was initially very impressed with Spiderman 3, having always been a fan of Venom (without actually reading any comics, or knowing much about him) and really liking how he was done in the movie I picked up a couple Venom items - the Walmart exclusive Venom figure that was actually black instead of purple, the Gentle Giant Venom mini bust (the one on the right) and the even more cooler-er Sideshow Venom mini bust.


Well, that's all for this Episode.

I'd like to try to post at least twice a month, which could get Episode 3 up before the end of this month, and Episodes 4 and 5 before Christmas. However, I'm going to start a little series posting pictures of the figures/items I display at work, since I tend to rotate the figures ever 2 or 3 weeks, and I try to have some vague theme to the display, so I may start interspersing those posts with these, which will delay the end of this 6 part journey - not that it matters, since few people (if anyone) reads this. But it's mostly for my benefit, so I have pictures of my collection, so in an effort to please myself and have pictures to show to people when they ask about my collection, I'm going to try to be more regular about posting here. I may even have to take drastic measures and not buy new things unless I've posted twice in the previous month.


To be continued...

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