Droid Factory

While I was visiting Rish and we had lunch together, for old time's sake, we went to a few stores to look for toys. 

Ross had another one of those Fortnite alien guys, and I was going to buy it, but it didn't have its price tag on it, and the woman running the register didn't believe me that it is normally marked at $2.99. She said she'd do $4.99, but I wasn't about to pay two extra dollars for a figure that I have about ten of, so I left it behind.

We went to another store...I think it was called 2nd and Charles? It had was like a store from the nineties, with books, CDs, and DVDs on sale...except now that those things are generally worthless because nobody uses them anymore, they were very cheap. They also had a toy section, with second run toys, as well as things that people had brought and pawned to the store.

Hiding in the back, away from the toy section were a bunch of droids. Rish said they had been exclusive figures at Target back during the pandemic. They were the droid factory toys that you can generally only buy at Disneyland, but they'd put a few out for the hoi polloi who can't afford to get into one of those monumentally expensive places to buy.

Most of them were BB-8 droids painted in different colors. Those didn't interest me a whole lot. BB-8 was fine and all, but I'm not much of a fan of those films the robot appeared in, so I don't feel like I need any souvenirs of them.

There were, however, two astromech droids painted in very non-R2-D2 colors. I looked at them, found that they were only asking $10 a piece, and decided to go for it.

I particularly like the one with the drink serving tray attached to it.

It's pink, which I feel makes it pretty feminine, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having a girl robot. It makes perfect sense that a woman would want a pink robot as her sidekick, after all. It makes me think of this picture from Empire Toy Works:

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It makes me think of when Twiki met the girl robot on Buck Rogers.

"Booty booty booty"

"Bidi bidi bidi"

 "Booty booty booty"

Okay, moving on. The other robot is a pretty cool black and orange color scheme.

I don't know if it's supposed to be a Halloween robot or not, but it's cool no matter what. It came with rocket legs instead of a drink serving tray, so it's not nearly as good. It will never have those things attached, so it might as well have come with nothing. 

I hate those damned prequels so much that I'd rather have nothing at all rather than something that originates in them. I mean, come on, if R2-D2 had rocket legs, would he just have driven over the side of the sail barge in Return of the Jedi and had to be fished out of the sand by Luke? Of course not. He would just have flown over the side, and C-3PO could have jumped on and clung to him like Lois Lane.

*beep beep boop*

"You've got me? Who's got you? Ohhh my!"

Yes, I'm aware that the drink tray is a really dumb accessory too. If they needed a droid to serve drinks, they could certainly find hundreds that would be more functional than an astromech, but I don't care. That came from the good movies. Besides, I don't think they had Artoo serving drinks because it was the best thing for him to do. It was just that they didn't need an astromech droid, but they'd procured one, so they found a use for it, whatever use they could. He was probably vacuuming the floors in the palace like a Roomba until they all got onto the barge to go for a ride.

Anyway, one last cool thing. The black droid has a clear dome.

Underneath, it has this silver machinery looking stuff. As is, I think it looks a little weird and empty. But, I think with a little weathering to make the details pop, as well as a bunch of little wires glued in here and there beneath the dome, it could look really neat. Wish me luck.