Child Sized Coffin: January 2017

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Transformers: Titans Return Hot Rod

In my article on Breakaway, I said I was going to review the Titans Return Wave 3 Deluxes in order from least to best. Trust and believe, Hot Rod coming in third place is not an indication of weakness or inadequacy on the part of this figure.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this story before, but on release day back in October, I remarked to my wife that I felt a mix of relief and sadness at the lack of Rogue One exclusive Black Series figures. Shortly after saying this, like three hours after saying this, I learned of the Toys R Us exclusive tank pilot, the Target exclusive three pack. Later that same day, I found out about this set. The 2016 Entertainment Earth exclusive Black Series set consists of four repainted Phase II Clone troopers, and has nothing to do with Rogue One at all. Like 2015’s Imperial Forces set, the Order 66 set is straight repaints of an existing figure, although this time, it is a four pack of repaints of a figure that was exclusive to 2015’s Amazon exclusive Black Series set.

Fansproject Saurus: Dinoichi

Well, here it is. The first ever third party figure review from Child Sized Coffin.

The Fansproject Saurus team is a set of modern takes on the Japan-only Dinoforce, featured in the animated series Victory. The Dinoforce themselves are Pretenders, whose outer shells are dinosaurs, and whose inner robots all transform vaguely into monsters. Dinoichi is the 3P version of Kakuryu, or as he was known in the US as part of the Monstructor team, Slog, and forms the upper torso and head of Dinoking, or as the Fansproject version will be called, Ryu-oh, which translates as “Dragon King”.

Grave Considerations: Third Party Figures

A few months back, I mentioned that one of the things on the list of goals for the Child Sized Coffin was to try out a third party figure or two. Subsequently to be referred to by their common fandom moniker of 3P, the 3P market was one that I had always glanced at from afar, but never dove in to. That changed with our trek to TFCon 2016, and while I have been behind in my writing on the figures obtained, allow me an amount of time to talk about the 3P market in general before I get more focused.

With no intended slight at Titans Return Breakaway, Masterpiece Thrust is the review that I want to use to usher in 2017 at the Coffin. Released (and received) in October of last year, Thrust is one of the more unfortunate casualties of my lack of blog time in the closing months of last year.

Thrust is the second of the three Conehead Seekers, the G1 Season 2 trio of Decepticon air warriors. He is also the second modification of the MP-11 mold, this time labeled as MP-11NT, the first being Ramjet. Thrust is quite a bit different from Ramjet, sporting an impressive pair of new wings.

Transformers: Titans Return Breakaway

I’ve decided that I’m going to go through the Wave 3 Titans Return Deluxes in order from least to best, and while that is not a solid indicator of their value or goodness, it does mean that the straight up repaint goes first.

I had originally said that I was not going to buy Titans Return Breakaway, because I was largely underwhelmed by the Chromedome mold and didn’t think an almost all white paintjob was going to change my mind. Then one afternoon, on my lunchbreak with my wife, we stopped at a Target that had all four figures in the third wave of Deluxe class figures. I immediately snagged Twinferno and Triggerhappy, and then my eye caught something interesting: instead of the more regular $14/$15 price tag, these figures were listed as $9.99. Within seconds, and without a first thought, let alone a second, Hot Rod and Breakaway were in my basket.

The second Dodheimsgard album, 1996s’ Monumental Possession, is a total step back for a band whose debut album showed moments of promise and brilliance.

Kronet til Konge was that, despite a handful of sit-up-and-pay-attention moments, I could not quite put a finger on anything concretely solid about the album. I listened to it over and over, and was always pleased, but was never able to define the things that caught my attention. Monumental Possession is easily quantified though. This is the album wherein Dodheimsgard tried to make a straightforward Norwegian black metal record, the same kind as the majority of their peers, veering away from the experimentalism of contemporaries and first wave Norwegians like Isengard and heading for the territories already staffed by Darkthrone. Even the artwork is "another Norwegian black metal record" artwork.

Second wave Norwegian Black Metal was a hell of a scene. For a while there, everyone played in everyone else’s band, so that the first albums from Mayhem and Burzum and Darkthrone and Emperor and Immortal all sounded sort of similar while maintaining enough distance between them so as to prevent them from all being ‘the same band’. But the cross pollination of musicians is a difficult thing to keep straight, as so many of them participated in one recording for a band that was not their own, primary outfit. This was due to there being so few Black Metal musicians at the dawn of the Norwegian scene, and is honestly pretty cool, lending a real clubhouse type vibe to those early records, knowing they are collaborations between not-yet-but-soon-to-be legendary figures.

Happy 2017!

Well, here we are again. A new year. That last one sure was something, huh? Something that at times was very much not good. And in addition to the tire fire nature of the year itself, a familiar capstone was placed on 2016, allowing it to end in the same way that 2015 ended, with the death of a beloved persona in its final hours. This time, it was Princess Leia, Carrie Fisher here on earth, who we lost literally days away from the merciful end of the year, followed the very next day by Debbie Reynolds, her mother.

I’ve been MIA owing to the usual set of end-of-year matters – holidays, an adventurous journey, life developments. This year, my wife and I drove to Colorado and spent a few days hiking around the beautiful Rocky Mountain National Park, and when we got back home a few days ago, we adopted a cat, a soon-to-be three year old named Butters, our first pet together. These things along with trying to get some rest and back on track with all manner of things in the vacuum created by the end of the semester a couple weeks ago have left me a bit strapped for time for the Coffin, which is something that I always dislike.

So, here I sit, with a few half completed articles open on my computer, with a few folders of pictures taken on toys yet to be written up, with a pile of new, unphotographed, unwritten of toys just waiting to get the Coffin treatment. Half written articles are hard to work with, because I was, at one time, typing away at them with a full head of steam, but then whatever happened, dissipating the momentum while leaving behind the hopeful idea that “I can come back to this later.” Which you never can. I’m two albums in on the second Mass Burial project; I’ve got a handwritten list of my top figures of the last year, but I haven’t been able to photograph and review all the entries yet, so I feel slightly odd publishing the list itself; I have a pair of think pieces in stages of half completion, one which I feel should be completed before a slew of new articles on figures go up. One of the gifts my wife got me for Christmas is a backdrop for photographing objects, like a photo box or stage of some sort, and I have yet to get any time to test it out. So, I have a new addition to the evolving Child Sized Coffin picture taking set up, having begun on a turntable before graduating to an actual table; now, the highest quality, most professional set up in Coffin history is available to me, but I haven’t gotten to try it out yet. It will come, hopefully this weekend I’ll give it its inaugural workout, but there are a few articles soon to come that will feature toys on the ol’ table yet again. But going forward, man. Professionalism.

I tweeted this when it happened, but I got a pair of Detolf shelves, the popular (and again, professional!) IKEA glass shelving units, for some of my more awesome toys, and also in preparation for our cat. So I spent some time putting figures into them, and then ever since have been thinking what I should take out or rearrange. And while that is kind of work, it is never a bad thing for a collector to spend time with their collection. Speaking of the general state of the collection, prior to Christmas I engaged in a pretty successful round of weeding out unwanted things, and as is the usual result, I can’t say things are leaner at all, but my collection does feel a bit lighter for the eliminated elements. I mainly sold off live action movie style Transformers, because they are not, in my opinion, very good toys and they don’t really fit in with the overall aesthetic of my collection very well.

Most of the time, my live action movie buys post-2007 have been motivated by them being the only available Transformers at retail; but now, I think that I’ve found a far better (and more expensive) substitute in the Third Party scene, so I am prepared for 2017 to be a movie year. Another horrible live action movie awaits us this summer, with Hasbro only recently stating that they are working, now, after four of those tragedies, at constructing a cinematic universe. I’m sure that this translates into a terrible, barely comprehensible movie that retcons and paints over whatever tripe it needs to in order to cobble together some type of cohesion, since the official line from the company for nearly ten years has been that there is no cinematic universe, and that there is no narrative throughline for the tire fire summer movies bearing the Transformers name. But, you know, Marvel Studios sure has been successful with their cinematic universe, so now Hasbro wants a piece of their own. More on that later in the year, for sure.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough of an intro, so I’m going to end here and get to work on some new articles. A whole lot of stuff to get through on my end, so I should be excited. I’m mainly worried that I’ve gotten so far behind, and feel like I won’t get caught up quickly enough for it to matter. Again, I’ve got things waiting that were brand new when I came to possess them, and by now, they’re old news. And, even when I get this first wave of articles done and posted, I will still have a slew of things that haven’t even been photographed yet. Whatever. Happy New Year, hopefully a better year than the last, and stay tuned for more from Child Sized Coffin.