PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

LEGO - Time Twisters 1997

For some reason LEGO changed the names of the sets to Time Twisters. I'm not sure what the idea was, there isn't much about the series on the internet, but Timmy and the Doc are gone and some bad guys are piloting the wacky vehicles through time an' gettin' their steal on. The LEGO Collector book shows pictures of the last three sets with Time Cruisers logo's on them. I have all three of the last sets and they all have Time Twisters logos on them. It doesn't much matter, they quit the series after these sets came out. I guess they didn't sell that well. I was happy to get them and I'm still weighting the parts versus sets question. I'll leave them as sets for a while. I don't really need the parts.

     

I didn't find any catalogs or packaging that mentioned the names of these two, except for Brickpedia, who call them Professor Millenium and Tony Twister. I'll have a seperate post about all the Catalog mentions that I found on Peeron. BrickLink calls the minifigs Bad Guy 1 & 2. The guys travel with a ghost and a skeletal fashion victim. The bad guys aren't very fashion conscious either, I mean epalettes, with those torsos. That motorcycle jacket torso has been used on 17 minifigs that appear in 22 sets. Wow, huh. No wonder I see so many of them around. I like that ghost minifig. That's the second version of the ghost, the first used bricks for the lower half of the figure instead of white minifig legs. There was a third version in 2006, the last appearance of the ghost, but it was more transparent and I don't think it looked very good. Here's the bit of story that was on the box of 6497 Twisted Time Train.  

Beware, the LEGO SYSTEM Time Twisters are travelling through the LEGO universe in search of treasures to power their time machines. Will they be successful or will the Time Cruisers catch them. With building sets from the LEGO SYSTEMS Time Twisters collection, only you the LEGO MANIAC, will determine who will rule forever!

That's a lot of responsibility, ruling forever, I doubt these guys are up to it. Here's a look at the last three sets. I actually have all three and have built them a couple of times to look at and move around on some flat surface.

6495 Time Tunnelator

Great name, huh. The $10 set with 80 pieces appeared in two versions, 6495 and 6499, the latter came with a big plastic time machine. I got the 6499 version and haven't ever seen the other. I assume the back of the boxes are different because the 6499 version shows the time machine in use. That's it below and that kid looks pretty happy to have one. I don't think I'm that happy to have one, it's kind of dumb looking, but I'm not being paid to like it either. Mine's packed away in a box on the hope that it might come in handy someday. Only some small hope of that. The ship is the same in both version of course. It's got a nice action feature, the rolling wheels spin the propeller and flap the wings, and Bad Guy 1 is off on his nefarious voyages.

  

I do like the flapping wing action. Those plastic wings don't appear in any other set. The rest of the parts are a pretty good assortment of useful parts. There are a couple of bats in the set. 1997 was the year they were introduced, from the looks of it in the Fright Knight sets. Did I mention I like the bat. He's a great looking piece and right up there in the top 5 of favorite LEGO critters. A pretty silly set all in all but one worth having for the fun factor.

6496 Whirling Time Warper

 

The second set of the trio is a bit larger, 152 parts with a list price of $22. The price sticker on the one I have says $16.79 but it doesn't tell me what store it came from. It's rare for me to leave the sticker on a toy package. I usually remove stickers, from boxes I plan to keep, as the label might stain the box as the glue dries. I don't always think about the possible resale down the road, more I like to keep the packages nice for me. I do the same with books too. The set's got two minifigs, Bad Guy 2 and his ghost pal, who jaunt about in the Whirling Time Warper. It's got some down right silly movement to go along with the silly name. The wheels turn and the propeller spins, the top hat wearing skeleton heads pop in and out of the blue cones, the wings flap and the trans blue cylinder rotates tumbling all the jewels inside while spinning the blue disc with the black spiral printed on it. They really pack a lot of action into such a tiny vehicle. See a short commercial for it on YouTube. There are a good mix of parts, none of them particularly large, but for one. Buried in there is a huge bathtub from this Belville set from 1996. That bathtub would be used in another Belville set in 2002 and none since, yet for some reason I have 4 more of them in my part stock. I have several of those blue spinning discs and the trans cylinder halves behind the blue disc. I wonder if I might have bought more than one of these for the parts. I have only the one box and one instructions but it's a good bet that I could have tossed the rest. It would be a good set to stock up on for the nice mix of parts. The ship doesn't look much better than the rest of the series but it scores better for the nice mechanical workings.

6497  Twisted Time Train

 

They saved the best for last. The Twisted Time Train has 300 parts and a list price of $38.50. It's my favorite set of the series, the three part train is really goofy, and there's lots of moveme nt as you roll it along the floor. The set has one of those boxes with a flap, that's the image from it on the left. When you lifted it up you could see a clear insert in the box that shows off the n ice shiny chrome parts and minifigs you can have if you buy the set. Remember when they used to do that. Sadly I don't have the parts holding insert. Much as I like the fancy packaging it does raise the price of the set. I'd rather have simpler packaging and more parts for the dollar.

 

Both the Bad Guys appear in this set as well as the ghost and the skeleton with the blue hat and black bandana. Like the professor in the Back To The Future series they have a train to ply the time streams. Not sure which train is sillier, this one or the one in the 3rd movie, but the LEGO train has that spinning skeleton  in a blue hat and a bandana. That's got to count for something, but I'm not sure what. The engine's wheels make the smoke stack go up and down, the skeleton turns on his stand and the wings flap on the middle car, and the ghost rotates on the last car while the wheel turning helps rattle his chain. It's got that nice curved stair case that only came in black in three sets, this train and two other castle sets from 1993-4, but came in other colors in Fabuland and Belville sets.  It's a great parts pack, especially if you get it on clearance, and one that I would have bought several of. There are some comments on LUGNET about the set being on sale at LEGOland for $4.99. That would have been great to get some of that mark down action, huh. Oh, well everyone's got their story about that cheap find.

Toy ads from Netherlands Comic books of the 1980's

  

I got a bunch of ads from the Danish Donald Duck comic series. They are from random issues in the 1980's. I was interesting because some were LEGO ads. These are all toy ads that I thought had odd art or goofy toys or were of some other interest to me. Odd art in the HeMan ad. Not a cartoon or toy that I was a fan of. I understand there are people who love these guys. Same for Construx, not a toy that I thought much about. Thought the space ad was marginally interesting. The Power Monsters have claws on their wheels. That's just goofy. I bet the kids liked it.

 

I don't remember the Playmobile space sets. I could have missed it or they were only out in Europe. I never bought any Playmobile but I've always liked their nice figures and colorful playsets. The train looks nice too.

Will Hay in Ask A Policeman

I had watched Ask A Policeman a few days back and tonight I watched a second Will Hay movie called Convict 99. I hadn't ever heard of him before I ran across these two British comedies over at the Internet Archive. Growing up in Canada meant I had a steady stream of British fare to watch on my TV. I grew to like the dry wit as well as some slapstick, though I do draw the line at Benny Hill. Still not a fan. (Six years later I have picked up, but not watched, the Complete Benny Hill.) There's some of both comedy styles in Ask A Policeman. Hay is more of a straight man while Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott fill in the noisy activity around him.

 

In the pic on the right we have Moore, Hayes and Moffatt. In Ask A Policeman they play policemen who live in a small quiet town called Turnbotham Round and for the last ten years they have had no crime. Not that they went looking for any, either. The local Chief Constable plans to evaluate the need of a station, what with no crime. Will and his constables plan to create some crime but they suck as being criminals as much as they do at being coppers. They eventually stumble onto some real smuggling and there's a dumb but half way funny ending. I guess the story is pretty dumb in both movies but there are bits and pieces that I enjoyed, some of which made me laugh out loud. Convict 99 has Hayes get hired as a prison warden while he believes he's going to head a bad boys school. He accidentally gets tossed into the prison population for a few days. He decides to clean up the building and make it a nicer place for the criminals to stay in. Moffatt plays a goofy guard and Moore plays a squirrelly prisoner who's been unsuccessfully tunneling out of the prison for 40 years. They aren't great works of cinema but there's a larf to be had. AAP scores a 7.4 on the IMDb and C99 scores a 6.9, you'll have to be the judge if they deserve that. There are a nice bunch of character actors in the films. Glad I found them. Might watch them again in a few years. Who knows?

Addendum: It's 2016 and there is a nice Will Hay box set available on Amazon UK.

She Wolf of London

I watched the 1990 series She Wolf of London over the last week. It was fairly entertaining for a monster of the week sort of show. Kate Hodge plays a college student who comes to England to study under a mythology professor played by Neil Dickson. In her first episode she's camping out on the moors and a werewolf attacks. It's why I don't camp. I enjoy the peeing on a bush part but the rest just isn't up to snuff. Luckily for me I can pee on a bush in my backyard. Luckily for Kate the bed and breakfast where she's staying is also Neil's home, his amusing parent's, odd aunt and young cousin live there, and there's a great room in the second basement that Kate can be chained up during the full moon. Luckily for the viewer she manages to get out during the full moon. The werewolf doesn't appear in every episode but when she does she's played by Diane Youdale, a Brit tv personality who got pretty famous there on the Gladiator tv series. Her werewolf costume isn't very good. This version of the werewolf doesn't have any hair on her shapely legs. The face piece is pretty uninspired. Luckily for us most of the bad guys fair better with their costumes and make up. There's a good selection of evil doers and monsters, we have ghosts, zombies, a bog man, trolls, wizards, witches, demons, even a trip to a convention for an old science fiction tv series. Some of those fans were the scarest part of the episode.

Sadly some of the stripts were as weak as the werewolf costume was silly. That's probably why the series only ran 20 episodes. The first 14 were filmed in England, sometimes in small villages in the country side, and sometimes in London. Lots of nice old buildings to see. After some of the backers left, the last 6 episodes were filmed in Los Angeles and the series suffered a name change, to Love and Curses, with the 15th episode. Kate returns to LA in that episode after her friend is murdered. Her problem was cursed trolls looking for a place to stay in LA. They didn't go through a real estate agent to get that house and they used a sledge hammer for the down payment. Whap to the noggin. Neil is being phased out of the University so he tags along. He'd written a book that got optioned for a movie in a previous episode and that leads him to his new job as a host of a tv series on the supernatural. During SWOL a romance builds between Kate and Neil but nothing much happens, especially after they find out Kate turns wolfie if she get too excited. Goofy, huh. Rather like Moonlighting, but with monsters. It has something in common with Buffy and Angel and even The X-Files, especially the humorous episodes of those shows, but it's even more goofy. Occasionally it made me laugh. The dvd came out with all the episodes on 4 discs last Feb. I'd watch the series again. It was fun to watch.

Ghost Busters 1954

Some guy named whoiseyevan posted a video on YouTube and some bloggers passed it along until I saw it. I'm passing it along to you.  Whoiseyevan made a trailer for a movie that might have existed if Ghost Busters had been made in 1954 with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Fred McMurray. It's pretty silly, but sillier is the route I took tracking it upstream. I spotted this on Bits & Pieces and followed the links. The first link lead to Miss Celinia, then to YesButNoButYes, which linked to the Laughing Squid, and that led me to I09, and that linked to Coilhouse which has no link to anywhere. One site said there are 17 movies used to create the trailer. I don't know what they are but I could believe it. It made me laugh, hope you'll enjoy it.

Paths to Glory

I was home for the afternoon, taking a half day of vacation, eatin' my Subway sandwich and reading MSNBC for some news and yakkin'. There was a link on the MSNBC front page that lead me to a Newsweek article asking if we are in a narcissism epidemic. Turns out a new books thinks we are.  Let's hope that turns out better in the future. On that page I noticed this head line over at Slate. "Meghan McCain on Karl Rove: Creepy" Who wouldn't like that headline. McCain is John McCain's daughter. He's the guy who ran for President, maybe you remember him. That same writer on Slate had a bit on Susan Boyle and her appearance on Britians Got Talent. It was pretty amazing. I had tears in my eyes for too many reasons to count.

There was a headline on this guy on MSNBC. It said the CIA waterboarded this guy 183 times. You'd think he'd be cleaner looking. I like the way the hair is creeping up over his shoulder. It's like it wants to take a look at what's going on at the front. Not much, someone's puttin' your ass in jail.

You could stab a guy with that bus.

I haven't a clue. What the hell is that bus for? Can a guy drive safely in that head gear. I wouldn't think so. That bear looks pretty fucked up, doesn't he? What's he got to laugh about? I can't make up my mind if it's offensive or just bad. It's one of those gray areas.

Dogs With Wigs

This is from a page by a guy named Gabriel who lives in Albania. He posts pictures of dogs and cats with wigs. He can't seem to tell the difference and his English is a hoot. Made me laugh. I got the link from The Presurfer, another time waster. This dog is so funny looking. He's the spitting image of my neighbor's dog. That is an unattractive dog at best and pimpin' him up doesn't help in any way.

I love Photoshop

This sure made me laugh. I know it's photoshop but you need to see some goofy thing every now and again.

Teledildonics

There was an article on MSNBC.com today about Teledildonics (internet connected sex toys) for a couple to use while apart. Here's a review from Wired. Here's a naughty demo. Contains nudity. I knew you couldn't stay away. The Sinulator is like an early telephone. Still pretty lo-tech, certainly no holo deck. Don't forget to take the test drive. Has to be seen to be stuf...yeah. I think that's enough.