A Time To Celebrate

But first, a little back story. My father and I are both fans of Hopalong Cassidy. He got into the show when he was a kid, and it was originally broadcasted. I was luckily enough to grow up with WBNX, a local television station that showed Westerns every Saturday afternoon, including Hopalong Cassidy.

Of late, my father has a re-kindling of his love of westerns, pursuing DVD releases of all the Hopalong shows, and we watch them all together, remembering back in the day when television was actually entertaining. Recently, I wrote a Hopalong short story for my father. It was he who suggested that he submitted it to Hoppy Talk, the official fanzine for Hopalong fans.

And you know what? They published it! They serialized the story into 3 parts. (Part three has not been released yet.) I know it's not much, and I certainly didn't get paid in any way, but maybe it's a sign, or at least a start of something...

Mother Soundtrack Review

Click on the picture to read my review of Mother soundtrack. Special thanks, as always, to Larry for posting it on his site, Godzilla Monster Music.

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Brown)

3-3/4" is the new 6". At least, according to Hasbro, a company that's already cornered the 3-3/4" market with their long standing Star Wars line and the newly revived G.I. Joe line. With the economy as it is, what better way to help cut costs than to create their new Marvel toy lines in the smaller 3-3/4" scale. And when I mean their new lines, I'm talking about the general Marvel Universe line and the specific X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie line.



For the first wave, all of the Wolverine figures are inspired by classic comic book counterparts instead of the upcoming movie. This may be to help warm up fans and collectors to the new line before unveiling the actual movie figures. The figure I'm reviewing tonight is Wolverine in his classic brown/orange costume. This is (or not) a variant of the Wolverine figure in the usual yellow and blue. (They share the same body type except for the head and boot sculps.)

The nice thing about the figure is that he has the same amount of articulation and detailing as some of his larger counterparts. This is something Hasbro's been really excelling at with their Star Wars figures. Good ol' Wolvie here has double jointed knees, ball hinged head, shoulders, elbows, and ankles. The one thing I'm not a fan of is the ball hinged hips. Didn't like 'em in the larger scale, still not a fan now.

I don't have any real complaints about the figure. It's nicely done, faithfully to the comic book costume. (It's actually brown and orange, not brown and yellow as it's mistakenly done in the past.) The paint ops stays inside the lines, though the brown on his chest doesn't quite match the rest of the figure. Two things I'd like to point out are his head and his claws.

I wasn't really thrilled when I first saw his face. I'm still not liking the tiny white dots for eyes, but the feral grin makes up for it. His claws, this time around, are a single piece of plastic with black stripes to give the illusion that they're separate. What's nice about this is no more bent or deformed claws. Unfortunately, it also come off a little cheap that they couldn't make them separately.



In a perfect world, the figure would come with alternate non-claw hands and an alternate head with no mask. Unfortunately, all Wolverine comes with is a samurai sword (the one from Wolverine Origins, of course) and that seems a bit redundant, considering that he's already got claws.

Overall, it's a solid figure for a costume that doesn't get the attention it deserves. I wonder what the movie figures will look like? B

Preview: "The Forbidden Temple of Khyber Gorah"

The world is like a giant chess board to Dr. Zeitgeist, the mastermind behind the secret Cabal which hordes and extorts advanced technology. Dr. Zeitgeist is convinced that on a sole planet in a dead galaxy lies the the lost temple of Khyber Gorah and, even now, has one of his pawns searching the desolate planet for clues of its location.

There is only one person in the universe who knows what Zeitgeist looks like: Zoey Walker, the only survivor of his human experiments. She too will be drawn onto his playing board, used as bait to lure another to the temple, one with the skills to bypass all of its dangerous booby traps.

Sara, now older and wiser, has retired from her high profile job in order to investigate the strange Solid Matter Phenomenon, (known as SMP), that she and Zoey first encountered in Tokyo years prior. She is still haunted by Rick Daring's vow to uncover the Cabal, even though he mysteriously disappeared a year ago...

(This takes place 5 years after "Rick Daring and the Brilliant 5" serial.)