PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

7571 The Flight Of The Dagger

 
I was interested in getting one of the camels. The camels come in two shades of tan. Crap! Now I'm interested in getting two. Ohhh, it's like a sickness, yet it feels so good. This set has the dark tan version and the larger set has the regular tan version. I like the boxes on a stick that he carries. It's a bit of a market place and doesn't seem like too bad a playset. I'm mostly interested in the parts, though I did build it before I parted it out. There's a pretty canopy that could become a hot rod's rag top or a blanket at the beach. There's some great pearl gold bits on the roof and 16 white cheese slopes. That should come in handy, huh. A guy can always use a set of stairs. Lots of nice tan in both shades and some nice new arches in medium dark flesh. Great color, huh. The arches do look nice with that bit of point in the middle and there's 20 of 'em. The new department store set has them in white for dentils. There are 13 of those 1x1 bricks with the flush stud in the side. Those are the new rage.

      

I like the camel better than the new ostrich. I like the shape and the color. Better to have a toy camel than a real camel. I am told by tv that camels aren't near the top of the fun animals list. They bite and spit. I don't need that. I do need one (many!!!!!!) of the fancy new dagger and the shiny new sword. Neat, huh. Dastan has one of those double sword behind the back holders. It's called a Scabbard for two Katanas on Bricklink, where it ranges in price from 60 cents to $2.49. The box says 258 pieces and Bricklink says there are 5 extra ones. That's about 12 cents a part. That's more like the new average on many sets, or anything not Star Wars. Many of those pieces are small, and I'm looking at you cherries (6 in the set), but many of them are nice additions to a guys building stock. I'm partially on the way to stocking a cherry tree, or an orgy. Someday, only time will tell.

 

The minifigs are pretty nice too. I think Dastan looks too much like Indiana Jones. I already have enough Indiana Jones faces. There's new dark brown hair, done up in a ponytail, on Princess Tamina, who's also sporting a nice white cape. More pearl gold on that guard and a nice headpiece on the merchant. I like their costumes and there's a fairly interesting set of accessories to detail out the playset.There's a nice D Basket, a couple of jewels, some weapons, and you get a lot of food in this set, besides those cherries. Three apples, a couple of fish and a pair of turkey drumsticks. Yummm!!

     

So, mostly a nice set. The little partial building has a trap door and a balcony that breaks spilling the minifig right onto the ground. Oww. Luckily that can be cured by a quick trip to the imagination. All better.

The Atlantic Ostrich by Titolian

  

I really enjoyed seeing the new ostrich head being used as a sea monster. There's a nice little sailing ship made from only a few parts including two of the Indiana Jones shoulder bag. Rubber bands hold tiles on for sails and a couple of minifig hands add some detail. It's Titolian's tribute to Nnenn who passed away earlier this month. Nnenn was a champion for interesting parts useage. Nnenn wasn't afraid to modify parts or use clone elements either. People did take umbridge with some of that. There's a lot of clone brick haters in the LEGO community, I don't have a problem with that. I kept a bunch of nice accessories that came with the Mega Blok's Dragon sets back years ago. Why limit yourself. That was one of Nnenn's messages. It was a good one. 

7199 Indiana Jones - Temple of Doom

 
For some reason this set never showed up in the LEGO Imagination Center when it was released. I wanted to get one and take advantage of the VIP program. So I waited and waited and it disappeared. I thought I might have missed getting one. I was sad, as a collector, it's always nice to complete the set. Some finally showed up at Target again and I picked one up. Then they showed up briefly at the LIC. Typical. Missed getting those points. Recently I got a second set at Target that was marked down to 62 bucks. That's not too bad, I'd miss my VIP points for that saving. There's a lot of pieces in this set, 626 plus the 6 minifigs, but at that $90 price it's a poor average, just under 15 cents a piece. Some of the pieces are large and the minifigs are a pretty good lot.

     

    

Indy's naked arm is a bit of fun, though it would be nice to have a corresponding flesh colored arm for the other side. There's some bare navel and cleavage on Willie. Short Round has a nice jacket and some short legs. Both handy. Mola Ram's hat is the bomb and the temple guards are certainly colorful enough. Their printed on knives sort of limit their torso re-use.

 

There's a lot of good useable grey and tan parts in the set as well as some brown pieces. All those colors come in two shades. Some good number of minifig accessories and odd specialty parts. There are a lot of the  2 x 2 x 10 Support, 8 of them in black, 4 in reddish brown. The reddish brown ones have made their way into my undersea project. The bits of track are smaller than the power function track, two studs less in width, so they aren't much good without more of the same. There are only six pieces of track. Four of a curved flat piece and two of a straight inclined piece. Sort of limits the use for them. The little ore carts are a nice design. I actually built the set. It's sort of fun to push the cart down the track. At least for a couple of minutes. Then I took it apart. It takes up a bit of space when all stretched out there. Better the parts get sorted and stored. Looks like it's the last of the Indiana Jones sets out there. I saw one at a Target the other day. Most of the other Indy stuff is gone from just about everywhere. There were some good parts in those sets. I'll miss some of them. Not those plane ones, not those at all, they just didn't have the parts that I wanted.

Science Fiction 74

 

I watched all the Space Academy episodes today, but I watched them at 1.5 speed to shorten the experience. There are 15 episodes spread over two 2 sided discs. That's about 5.5 hours plus some commentaries, a featurette and some still galleries I didn't watch. I watched all that in about 4 hours. It's part of a three pack of science fiction shows that I started watching last weekend. Space Academy is the show that preceeded Jason of Star Command. ArkII preceeded SA and hopefully I will watch that next week. They use the same sets and models in JoSC that were created for Space Academy. Even the robot went from one series to the other. Jonathan Harris plays Commander Gampu. He's 300 years old but hardly looks a day over 63. The rest of the kids aren't very well known, other than Pamelyn Ferdin. She was a child star that had been in tons of tv episodes, and the occasional movie, mostly in the 60's and 70's.  The show has some space cadets in various adventures. They meet aliens, the occasional monster, even a ghost, often bringing them home with them. Occasionally something blows up while they're solving the problem of the week. One guys likes to stiffen up and smash his way through the ships doorways. They carried that tradition onto JoSC. The scripts are nothing special with the usual moral lession you'd expect from a kids show. There's even a visit from Robbie the Robot. He's got a different head but it's the same guy. All in all not much of a series but still something to fill in time.  People who saw this series as kids would have a more favorable view of the show. I was sleeping in on Saturday mornings in 1977 and missed them. It was a good thing. Here's a nice model of The Seeker that you can buy and a few of the cast.

   

Friday Night Movies 267

I had wanted to watch Universal Soldier: Regeneration. It's the fifth of the Universal Soldier films. I liked the first one well enough and picked up a copy when the dvd got cheap enough. The second is not as good and the two made for TV movies are supposed to be pretty poor. Number 5 might be a step up for the series, Joe thought it was better than the second, but I'm not sure. Jean-Claude Van Damme returns as Luc Deveraux and Dolph Lundgren returns as the crazy Army guy who was ground up at the end of the first movie. They were both Unisol's, the enhanced super soldier that's so full of drugs he's nearly unstopable. This movie is supposed to be a direct sequel to the first movie of the series, ignoring the other sequels. That's a good idea. People should ignore many sequels. Some terrorists take over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and plan to blow it up unless a bunch of political prisoners get released by the Russians. To add a bit of incentive the terrorists kidnap the Russian Prime Minister's son and daughter and take them to the power plant. Turns out the terrorists have a Unisol of their own. It was created by a doctor from the Army's secret Universal Soldier program. He's gone rogue and taken advantage of the terrorists Ca$h for Evil Acts program. I heard it's very popular. The Unisol prowls the power plant, killing anyone without the special microchip. The Army brings in the last of their unisol's and all 4 get slaughtered. Now they have to bring Luc back from his rehabilitation. That program hasn't been going to well for him. He just can't seem to slip back into mainstream society. The leader of the terrorist group gets his way and all his pals are released, but the crazy science guy with the Unisol doesn't see it's over yet. He needs more cash for his Unisol clone army. He's started with Dolph and Dolph's crazyness from the first movie came with the clone. Nearly everyone dies as the three Unisol's battle to the death. The action is ok. Nothing outstanding or jaw dropping. In fact there isn't enough super soldier action until near the end when Luc and Dolph fight their way through some walls. The story isn't any great shakes, and the characters have little going for them. The movie is directed by John Hyams, the son of Peter Hyams. Peter is the director of photography on US:R and has directed a few good movies himself. Most of the movie was filmed at some old abandoned building in Bulgaria which I am sure was choosen to keep the production cost down. I don't think they saved enough money. The Wikipedia page for the movie says that the film cost $14 million and as of April 7 it hasn't grossed a million yet. Worldwide. That can't be good. Sadly they won't be makin' any money off of me, now that I have seen the movie, I won't be picking one up.

I had seen High Plains Invaders before. It ran on the SyFy Channel a while back. I thought it was better than most of their normal fair. Maybe because I like James Marsters, Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and he was the main guy in this western alien invasion movie. He's not blond and he's about to be hung when the aliens come. Things go bad for the townies who start shootin'. There's a sub plot about a pitch blend miner and a bit of a past romance between James and a lady who lives in the town. The aliens are big and bug like and the CGI is fair for the most part. The critters like diggin' and have projectile shooting tails. They want the uranium in the pitch blend. You can kill the aliens with a revolver if you are a great shot. Dynamite will finish one off too. Things are looking good for the holed up humans until the big silvery mother ship shows up and dumps a lot of them on a hill. Surrounded, the last remaining humans, who passed up several good opportunities to escape, devise a plan to kill all the aliens and their ship.

 
It worked fine. Everyone is dead, but James and his gal pal, and the town is blown up. Well, guess that's a sign for them to move along and get a second start. That's one of the nice things about that time period. You could hide your identity real easy, just move a 100 miles or change states. So not a bad movie but not one that I would need to buy. I probably don't need to see it again. Kind of a nice alien ship.

Fordlandia by Mark Bauer

 
That's Mark's new Castle. It sure looks darn cool. Lots of nice details and even more disturbing interesting a stuff to see on the other side. Here's Mark's Flickr repository.  Here's some Atlantians come to get some of the women. Worth a gander. Have fun.

 

7414 Adventurers - Orient Expedition - Elephant Caravan

 

A set that's in a subset of a theme. The Adventurer series had different adventures in various places around the globe. I liked the Orient Expedition line the best of the lot. I didn't get all of them. I did get a lot of a three of the smaller sets on clearance, a half a dozen of the impulse sets, one or two of the others, and the big Castle set. I never picked up a copy of the Elephant Caravan. I didn't figure I needed an elephant. You never know how wrong you can be, huh. I got an elephant on ebay a couple of years ago and used it for a Tarzan scene called Mushroom Hunting With Tarzan. I had to make my own Tarzan minifig for that build, including his loincloth. It had to be leopard skin, so I used an old yellowish t-shirt and a magic marker. Throw on a genuine white LEGO brand rubber band from the Technic line and you're good to go. Tarzan in the Jungle. Tarzan's elephant friend was Tantor and N'Kima was the monkey. It's one of my favorite MOC's and I still have it sitting on a shelf. Since that elephant is sort of tied up I figured to get a couple more.

  

I think it was a $20 set when it was new in 2003. I missed buying some for about half price in 2004 when tons of LEGO sets were on clearance at the, now long gone, Kay Bee Toys in the Mall of America. I was busy blowing my money on all the Harry Potter sets that were populating their shelves. There was always something good to suck my wallet dry, then as now. Back in January I wound up bidding on a few different ebay auctions and winning a couple. Both were unopened sets and they averaged about 35 bucks with postage and shipping. The elephants are getting scarcer on Bricklin and they rarely appear for less than 30 bucks US. That's the way it goes. If you don't pick up some stuff at the time it's out you just have to pay more. Unless it's vhs tapes, then you can't even give them away. I have several cases of them out in the garage. Someday the garbage men will get them.

      
I like the minifigs. That's Babloo, Pippin Reed and Lord Sam Sinister. Not the best names perhaps. Babloo has a good costume with a nice red turban. This is his only appearance. Pippin appears in 3 other sets but in different costumes. In this one she looks like an adventurer or a tourist. I could go either way there. She's got that nice pith helmet and Sam's got that top hat and a hook. Sam appeared in 8 sets in the Adventure series.

 
 
I do like the elephants blanket, and the elephant is interesting in a weird sort of way. You could use that blanket for a rug. Too bad it has a hole in the middle and two on each end. The rest of the set has some average parts and a couple of odd ones. The red lance has only appeared in one set. This one. Yet the part is readily available on Bricklink, at 5 cents a piece or less,in quantity, from mostly European dealers. I don't know what it means. But my philosophy is to wait, the answers will come to me. I'll let you know if I hear anything.

Dementia - Daughter of Horror

 

I stumbled on this over at the Internet Archive. It's a 1955 film by John Parker that's kind of odd. There's no dialog in the movie, only a narration by Ed McMahon. This woman wakes up in a shithole hotel and her nightmare begins. She moves from one dimly lit place to another, finally ending up in the hotel with a severed hand. The IA has the recut version which is called Daughter of Horror. It's a couple of minutes shorter than the original which seems to be on a Kino DVD. I haven't seen the original. I did read it got censored over at these guys webpage. They also have a good synopsis and some other rather interesting info. There's a pretty good score with some gal singing all ethereally. It's pretty interesting in a novel kind of way. The quality of the print is fair most of the time though sometimes it's hard to see what's going on clearly. Scenes from this movie were shown on the screen in the movie theater that we see in The Blob starring Steve McQueen.

 
 
There's another shorter version of the film on the IA. There's a new score by Tom Fahy. I hadn't heard of him that I recall. The music is ok, there is no narration, and the film only 44 minutes long. Both are worth checking out, especially for free.

The Buccaneers

 
That's Robert Shaw in the 1956 UK tv series The Buccaneers. As you can see there are 39 episodes in the complete series from the public domain kings Mill Creek Entertainment. You can usually find it for under 20 bucks at Amazon. There's a few other dvd editions out there and you can watch or download many of the episodes at the Internet Archive. That's where I saw them first. I enjoy many of these old tv series from England. This is no Robin Hood but it's ok.

       
Robert Shaw is the main guy in the series but he doesn't show up for a couple of episodes. He plays pirate Dan Tempest. The opening episode has Woodes Rogers, the new Governor, come to Nassau or New Providence as it was known in the 1720's. He brings a pardon for the pirates from the King of England. Dan is out at sea when the pardon's deadline passes and he's arrested by the soldiers of the port. The Governor, a smart guy, figures out there's a good man in Dan and loads his ship with cargo. He tops that off with Lt Beamish and sends them to the American colonies to sell the goods. Their encounter with still practicing pirate Blackbeard is the first of many. That's Shaw with Lt Beamish in the left pic below and Blackbeard in the right pic below.

 
Shaw is entertaining and energetic, young and handsome, and already showing his acting chops. The guys in his crew are all good character actors who do a good job with some fun scripts. They might be a bit shy of the historical truth but the stories are still entertaining. The good guys will out and the bad guys get their lumps. Once in a while something blows up. I tell you this series was like watching Shakespeare when compared to my earlier watching of Jason of Star Command. The two shows have a bit in common, people on ships fighting pirates, but The Buccaneers is so much richer. There's often a moral and some comedy as Dan and his crew help out someone in trouble each week. They visit the America's pretty often and are treated pretty poorly by the port's overlords and merchants. They do make some good friends among the citizens of the new states. There's lots of sailing but sadly not enough ships to go around. They use some of the same shots often enough to recognize them. Still the shows are entertaining and that's all I ask. Just the thing to watch while sorting your LEGO or relaxing in front of the tube. Besides, who doesn't like Pirates?

7570 The Ostrich Race

 
I wanted to pick one of these sets for the ostrichs. I'm a big fan of the LEGO animals and I liked these. There's a bunch of other good parts. Need some Reddish Brown Bar 4L Lightsaber Blades for wands or to poke into something? There's a dozen of them. Poke away. There's 28 of the 1x1 reddish brown cones and 7 droid arms in dark tan. Useful? That's your call. Nice handfull of plates in tan and some tiles in dark tan, including 4 of the new part, a 2x2 tile with a stud in the middle of it. Good for desert or sea bottom mocs. Buildings too.

   

The minifigs sit directly on the back of the ostrich. That's the new tile, kind of interesting, you could stick one of those reddish brown bars in there. There's a new whip, not all rolled up. The rest of the parts are mostly a good selection of things that will go into the building stock. The set was pretty quick to put together. Came apart real fast too. The ostrich gates swing open with a mechanism created from a couple of those droid arms, a 1x1 brick with a handle on it, and a sliding plate. Then the birds run I guess. It's sad, living in the desert. Not for me. The scorpions are huge out there! They could sting right through a guy's arm.

   

That's the bare chested version of Dastan, there on the left, lookin' all buff. That shirtless torso is the same one that was in the Indiana Jones plane set. The guy in the middle is the ostrich jockey and next to him is Sheik Amar in the nice dark tan turban.The other guys have nice costumes and there's a bunch of nice accessories to round out the set. The box says there are 169 pieces. Not as great a piece count as some sets for 20 bucks but there are those two nice ostrichs.