However, the point is my snobbery around
Action Figures is cursory and half in jest, but my feelings for these are not
printable! Deforms and super-deforms . . . what the very, actual, fuck?
You want to make some toy figures, right?
You get some sculptors in, have them talk to the CAD guys, send the whole product
of their creative co-operation to the CAM guys, they programme the pantograph milling
machines, meanwhile you purchase a lorry-load of vinyl pellets, cost up-front,
have the engravers clean-up the tools . . . and spend a week churning this
shite into the warehouse! You sir - are nuts.
A waste of an opportunity to make normal
figures, that's what deforms are all about!
DC's
Justice League, these are both deforms and simple
action figures, having three or four points of articulation, and with three
figures per pack and a single piece of a forth, you have to buy all of them the
make the missing figure . . . that used to be called racketeering!
Another thing about 'Deforms' is that there
is no consistency to the genre, some are big-heads, some have stumpy legs,
others have giant hands, these have steroidal shoulders, some are funny (haha) looking, others are
cross-over (Star Wars - Angry Birds), yet others are pretending to be cars or
spaceships, I don't mind all sorts including cartoon characters, but deforms
manage to be everything, yet nothing.
Marvel's much-loved gang (not by me I've decided that if I'm anything: I'm a DC man!) get it in the neck from Hasbro under the resurected/old Playskool label, I'm sure the
bean-counters at Marvel are grinning
all the way to the bank, but it's not progress! These have a big-hand meme, we
saw a similar non-articulated 'Spidey'
last time we looked as superheroes here.
Ohhhhgod's bodkins and lawks-a-lardey . . . there's play-sets as well,
it doesn't rain but it pours this shite! This is like a scaled-up Micro Machines play set! And yes, I can
see, it's aimed at little kids, but - to me - that just makes it worse! There's
a moral cynicism involved, no?
Back to DC
and to prove I'm not ungrateful to Brian Berke who sent-in the above shots, I
took these shelfies myself, in WHSmith,
where there's currently a part-work for DC
characters (Batman and the DC Super
Friends), now, choices, choices . . . they are £5.99 . . . each issue . . .
or you can find a pink (for 'girly girls'!) Kinder
egg and get a realistic figurine for 59p? You shouldn't need to think about
this one!
And - just to prove what a hypocrite I am -
if this was the bendy toy it half looks like, I'd have no problem with it, but it's not; it's a
wasted lump-of-shite-moulding that doesn't look anatomically like the known
character!
This one (also from Brian) is going for the
Japanese Astro Boy look we were
studying the other day, and while it's called a 'super deform' doesn't look
that deformed to me, just a robot version of a human character.
Of more interest is that A) the main
artwork-logo bears a striking resemblance to the Skylanders range of Electronic toys, while B) the wacky language
points to those Wild West sets Peter Evans sent to the blog; "The Excellence Design", "Collect it All!" and "High Speed Soldiers" being all odd
phraseology?
It also has the for-Arabic/Middle Eastern
market consumer panels of those other sets . . . but no bag of chalky sweets!
And - following a comment on those earlier superhero posts - looks to be of the
same tinny plastic type and vaguely similar press-together construction as the
horses from those sets?
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