Boned

It's easy to plan in advance what you're looking for when shopping on vacation.  When I go to Florida I look for Vinylmation figures and build some droids at the droid factory.  When I went to Japan I wanted to load up on vinyl Kaiju toys.  And when I went to Australia, I figured I'd mostly be buying Trash Pack stuff.  But it's the things you find that you weren't expecting that are sometimes the most exciting part of travel shopping!  These boneheads fall into the latter category.

An Expected Journey

Man, I've been itching to get to this post!  When we were planning out trip to Australia this year, we knew we had to take the chance to pop over to New Zealand, for no other reason than to visit some of the locations seen in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.  Sure, the country is beautiful, I found cool toys like the Darkness Warriors, and the Waitomo Glowworm Caves were amazing, but it's the whole Middle Earth thing that really did it for me.

We were able to visit NZ for a week, so we didn't have time to see all the stuff we would have wanted to see, but we visited Hobbiton, it was fantastic, and I'm going to show off my pics here.  I'll also pepper it with some Hobbit figures, because this is a toy blog after all.

Right off the bat, this is the kind of stuff that greets you when you arrive at the airport in Auckland.  Things start getting epic as soon as you touch the ground!  How can you not think you're in for an adventure when you see something like this?

Give Me Vinyl: Disney's Vinylmation (part 3)

Remember how in my last post I talked about how some Vinylmation figures weren't ones that I went out of my way to get, but I didn't really want to trade them away either?  Well, a lot of those ones will show up in this post, which should wrap up my Vinylmation spotlight.  Until I get more.

This would be the poster child for Vinylmation figures that I wouldn't have wanted, but don't want to get rid of.  I don't know why, he's ideal for trading.  I guess I like his smile.

Give Me Vinyl: Disney's Vinylmation (part 2)

In my last Vinylmation post, I went over the basics, like what Vinylmation is, how you can buy the figures, what they do, blah blah blah.  For the most part, I only try to get the figures that appeal to me most (but since this is mostly a blind boxed series, you end up with some that you wouldn't go out of your way for, but you don't really want to trade away either).  But there are some series that are worth going back to again and again, trying to get as many characters as possible.  In this post, I want to look at some of those series.

STAR WARS

Well, of course I would be excited about the Star Wars figures!  Sure the figures are cute, and you would think the Mickey Mouse shape would take away from the look of the characters, but it all works out.  They use the Mickey ears to add some view of the character's background environment, and it actually comes across nicely.  So far I haven't been able to get a lot of the characters that I really want, but it's a start.  If I can get Admiral Ackbar when I go this year, I'll be happy.

There are actually two Star Wars series:  One featuring the regular Star Wars characters, and one made up of classic Disney characters in Star Wars costumes.  They're both pretty cool, but I still lean towards the regular Star Wars series.

Luke Skywalker