PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Dead Smurfs

  
I recently scanned in some pictures of Dead Smurfs that I had made back in the 1980's. I had been wanting to make some sculpture back then and was out looking at self hardening clay at the craft stores. I found could buy a half kilo brick of Das for $2.50 or I could buy a Smurf Molding Kit for 99 cents. It had a half kilo of clay in each kit. I can't remember which store it was but I think it might have been KayBee. They were in the Malls, they had a craft section, and there were plenty of them back then. Besides the brick of Das clay in each package, there were some accessories and a smurf mold.

 
 
I got about 20 of them. I drove all over the Twin Cities over the weekend. I didn't keep a box that I know of and most of the molds are gone. I still have a couple of them and the Pac Man. I had a girlfriend at the time, Karen Trego, who hated Smurf's for their bad grammer. It was like a death sentence for anything Smurf. I always thought they were cute but like a rabid dog I turned instantly to slaughtering the little blue guys. There were plenty of instruments of destruction in the kit. Knives, swords, ski poles, bindles, clubs and ice picks. More than 50 ways to kill your smurf. We made some for Christmas and people seemed to enjoy them.

 

Not content to use just the supplied accessories I started using other action figures and their accessories. I found a bunch of Rocky's cheap and soon he was blasting or chopping or slashing some poor smurf. I made a half dozen with Rocky. I must have made more than 100 pieces. Some were given away and many were sold at science fiction conventions. I don't know where they went, hope people enjoyed them. There were even earings. Someday I'll get the slides scanned. You can see the rest of the pics over at Flick'r. 
  

I got more elaborate, using doll house furniture and other toys, to create scenes of mass destruction. Then I stopped with a few unfinished. They are still in the box. Maybe I'll get them finished some day, probably not. I don't miss the sanding and painting. I never was a good painter. I like that you don't have to paint LEGO.  

Red Shark by Andrew Colunga

The whole title is Red Shark - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter Thompson. I think it looks pretty darn cool. I love the eyes on Hunter and the way the car seems to be popping out of the picture. You can see more pictures over at Andrew's MOCpages post. I read that book back in the 70's and a couple of other Thompson books. Haven't read anything since. Never felt much need to. It's almost better in my memory. I like the movie versions, both of them for different reasons.

Jade Mountain

The Jade Mountain is one of the reason's I still occasionally visit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. One of the biggest pieces of carved Jade outside China, at least according to the sign. You can see more pictures at the new Photo Album that I created. My pictures do not do the color of the piece justice. It's a more subtile green in varying shades.

Alice In Legoland by Legohaulic

This guy sure can build the heck out of his parts. There's a wild assortment of interesting parts here. I'm so much more literal in my parts useage and this twisting of the pieces into something amazing is thrilling. There's power miner helmets, a chrome lightsaber, space helmuts, hair pieces, tentacles, skeleton heads, a batarang, tan legs, hydraulic hoses and a gold colored bowl. Alice is partly brickbuilt with odd parts including white rubber bands and lots of minifig hands. The caterpillar sure is fun to look at. Every now and then someone comes along and pushes the envelope a bit. Makes my head hurt. Be sure to check out Legohaulics Brickshelf gallery and his Flickr page.

Color Your World - Erik Smit

Every now and again someone makes something more artistic with their bricks. Erik Smit pulled this rabbit out of his hat and I'm not sure what it all means but it's a good trick. What the hell, it's entertaining to me. You can see a few closeups on his Flickr page where he goes under the name eti. It's hard keeping all these people and their fake monikers straight. Here's his MOCpages page and his photoblog.

The Bumblebee Building

That's the Bumblebee Building. It's a Micropolis building originally built in the 1920's for The Faternal Order of the Bumblebee, a local businessmen's group. Long gone. I had been wanting to build a building with yellow. I had seen several buildings over the last couple of years and recently Brian Kasprzyk had built his Micropolis version of The Empire State Building. It won the Reasonably Creative Micropolis Bad Day contest. Then Matija Grguric posted his yellow building Art Pavillion - Umjetnicki Paviljon - Zagreb. You can links to them on my MOCpages page.

Aliens, and Agents, and Robots, Oh My! Part 1

Tis the season. The LEGO Imagination Center had some new sets in last week. Some are for existing lines like Agents, Castle, etc. There is a new series of sets for an old line. Space Police returns with four new sets. I picked up the two cheapest ones of the bunch. I also picked up the cheapest and the second most expensive of the new Agents series offerings.  Neither are themes that I am that excited about.  Usually I think of the sets as part packs to be sorted out in to my building stock. There are some new parts and new minifigs. Might be useful. Since I picked them up the thurday before the TCLUG meeting on saturday I decided to build them and bring them over to Brian's house. I have mixed feelings about them.

Squidman Escape is set 5969 for those that are all about the numbers. It's the cheap set. $5.99 for 42 parts. Not a great cost per part but two of them are minifigs. The Bricklink Inventory lists 33 parts, two minifigs with 9 parts between them, and four extra parts. There is the new alien minifig - Squidman. I would think he'd have some tentacles if he is supposed to be a squidman. And his eyes point up! What's up with that? You get a new Space Police figure. It's Officer #1 according to Bricklink. Squidman has a name, even if it's Squidman but the poor officer has no name. I'll call him Simon. For no reason. Simon's got a little vehicle. Some sort of space scooter. It's not too bad looking. Simon has to lie face down on it to drive. Weird, huh. Remember that tv series from years ago called Space Rangers. It only lasted a season after it debuted in 1993. It had Marjorie Monihan on it. A 6 foot tall blonde woman who could kick my ass. You might remember her from Babylon 5 where she played Number One, the leader of the Mars resistance. She seduces Doctor Franklin, when he makes the trip to Mars with Marcus, in a rather comical manner. No matter, it just endeared him to the ladies, and made him the envy of every red blooded fan boy. That's her in the pilot seat of one of the star fighters the Space Rangers use. The pilots have to lie down on their fronts to pilot their spaceships. Which is stupid. I thought it looked lame, and it seemed unnatural to have to keep your head tilted back. Ever heard of fatigue.

   

Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 AD, the great 60's comic book by Russ Manning, had flying cars that had the same problem for me. Just doesn't make any sense to be lying down like that. I still liked the series. It was fun, interesting, and action filled science fiction. The human society had gotten dependant on robots. The robot pampered rich were hidden away in the tallest parts of the city, while the poor got the dirt, with an extra side of no sun. Not much has changed from today, huh. The city of NorthAM covers the whole of North America and the buildings are miles high. Along comes Magnus, a guy who can kick the ass of most robots, to bring a change to society. But what really made the series so memorable was the Russ Manning art. I loved it then and still do today. Manning wrote and drew the first 21 stories starting in 1963. It came out quarterly. There was a reprint of the first issue in #22, then Dan Spiegle and some other guy did new stories for issues 23 to 28. Those stories aren't so good. With issue 29 reprints of the Russ Manning stories started and the mag folded with #46. You can get a 3 volume hardcover set of the 21 Russ Manning stories from Dark Horse. They list for $50 a volume. Volume 1 is now pricey on Amazon, which lists volume 2 and 3 for $33 each. They are a mixed bag. They were nicely made books but the comic art was scanned from actual comic books. Not as nice as some of the other reprint books, that use the black and white art and add new coloring. I got the Dark Horse series when I had a bunch of nudey magazine credit at DreamHaven and I wasn't using my own money. I had another minor issue with the Dark Horse reprints.They did not reprint the Russ Manning backup feature The Aliens. It was a 4 pager that had some humans and aliens meet in a first contact situation. Some of each crew go with the other ship and each race heads back to their own homeworld. It was a good series too. I remedied this lack by getting on eBay and finally filling in the gaps of the real comic books I needed. They weren't more than a few bucks each, but that was three or four years ago. There is a series from the 90's, don't bother with that. Looks like some people are selling scans of old comic book series on dvd over at eBay. I know there are plenty of sites that have comic scans.

I'll get back to reviewing the other LEGO sets tomorrow. It's getting late and I'm due for a snooze.

Poker Playing Dragons

 

I got a card in the mail today. It was selling Poker Dragons. That's them up there. Normally I like dragons. They're cool. I don't know that these are cool. Might be, but I don't think so. They are smoking and we know that isn't cool anymore. The Hamiltion Mint has a lot of crap that looks like this. Small dust collectors to fill up shelves. I am no stranger to having nick nacks and little statues that populate the flat surfaces of my house, and I certainly have no judgement when it comes to buying crap like this, but I don't think I'd ever have a reason to buy these. So many other things that are better.

   

Here's a Flickr pic from someone who's kid got the first statue for his birthday. It doesn't quite look as good as the painting. They are small dragons, 3 and a half to 4 and a half inches. The poker table is about 4 and a half inches. I was looking for a pics off the internet and found this colorful painting, by some guy named Thomas Patrick Reidy the III, of dragon's playing poker. Not a style that I care for that much but not a bad painting. Then there's the LEGO version. Not the best picture. More of SavaTheAggie's LEGO at Flickr.

My Neighbor Totoro

I just wanted to mention again what a wonderful movie My Neighbor Totoro is. I was looking at some blog that I hadn't been to for a time. They had a couple of pictures of a Totoro pumpkin.

That lead me to the Wiki page on the movie. One of the links at the bottom of the page was Roger Ebert's review from 2001. It's a good review. Ebert likes this beautiful world as much as I do. Too bad we can't live there. People, what'a ya gonna do. Watch the film again. It's like comfort food. I was just watching Hide-Out with Robert Montgomery. He's one of my favorite actors, and here in this 1934 comedy he's a gangster on the lam. He gets shot and is taken in by a farm family in a small town. Not too far from New York, where he was in the protection racket. He falls in love with Maureen O'Sullivan, the farmer's daughter, who falls back. Unfortunately, he's got the great Edward Arnold after him. Arnold and the always enjoyable Edward Brophy are New York City cops working the rackets. Mickey Rooney is an enthusiastic kid. It's directed by W. S. Van Dyke, who's previous film was The Thin Man. He'd direct 90 films when he was done, some pretty good ones. Hide-Out ended happy, even though Robert had to go to jail for 18 months, and I put the new English dub of My Neighbor Totoro from Disney on the tv. I still like the English dub of the Fox version and I also watch the Japanese version. I mix them up. The Fox dvd is not widescreen, the Disney version is and on top of that it sure looks darn good. I love that cat bus.

Tales of the Rat Fink

Greg lent me a copy of Tales of the Rat Fink. It's a documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. If you were me, you'd know who that is, and you would have had a flirtation with the car scene as a teen and young adult. Then you would have moved on to something new. Something always falls by the wayside as you move forward into the future. It does for me. Every now and again you get to revisit some aspect of the past in a nicely packaged media presentation. Here's one of those times. This 2006 documentary by Canadian Ron Mann is very Ken Burns like, being told mostly through old photographs and film clips. In between are bits of wildly colored animation and shots of the cars as they are today. John Goodman provides the voice of "Big Daddy" and several others, like Dick and Tommy Smothers, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Tom Wolfe, Robert Williams, Matt Groening, Paul LeMat, Jay Leno, Ann-Margaret, Billy Gibbons of ZZTop, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys all provide voices for the cars that Roth designed and built. It was those cars that I was interested in. As a model builder in the 60's I built those Ed "Big Daddy" Roth kits with the crazy cars. I read CarToons magazine. It's that outlaw design that shaped my impressionable young mind. That Rat Fink was one crazy monster. The movie credits Roth's design influence that still lingers today. He's also credited as being the first guy to put images on t-shirts. That sure lingers on today. It's debatable, in my mind, if that was a good thing, you know, when all is said and done. Roth is done, he died in 2001, but his work lives on. Here are a couple of his kits.

 

 

I built those, and then probably blew them up in the alley. Or chopped them up and made other cars out of them. At some point I stopped model kit building, but it would resurface later on when I went through my robot phase in the 80's. LEGO is model building, just no glue. Roth built the cars from fiberglass, shaped by hand and mind. No one had seen anything like it. Hit of the car shows. Money made from modeling built more cars. Then it was over, kids weren't into cars anymore, at least not in the numbers they were then. Sound familiar, tend of the decade, movin' on. It's a nice documentary about an interesting guy who added a nice touch to the color of the world. Who doesn't like Candy Apple Red.