I had to mention this thing on here after I saw it. So, a few weeks ago, I professed my love for Sgt. Slaughter, and showed off the Sgt. Slaughter action figure I got from Valaverse. Then, mentioned that Hasbro had announced that they would be making their own official version of Sgt. Slaughter for GI Joe.
Well, they had a livestream the other day where they showed a physical copy of Sgt. Slaughter instead of the mere digital rendering that they showed before. It looks like a pretty good figure, though I'm still fine with the one that I have. I don't think they've quite convinced me to buy a second one.
It did come with a weird accessory, though, that I wanted to show you.
It's hard to see, because it's just a screen grab from the livestream, but he comes with his whistle, his baton, several extra pairs of hands, and then the thing on the left. What is the thing on the left?
It's an action figure version of the action figure version of Sgt. Slaughter. It's friggin' action figure inception up in here.
As an accessory, this action figure comes with an action figure of itself.
What they're going for is the old commercials that had the real Sarge talking about the action figure version of himself in it.
Very meta, right? The real Sarge used to schill for action figures so now the action figure Sarge also schills for action figure versions of the action figure. It's a dream within a dream within a dream.
The accessory has me wondering if I do in fact need to buy me another Sgt. Slaughter though. It makes me think of the toy store that Empire Toy Works has in Rotgut Station. Those are always fun pictures.
If I get the Sgt. Slaughter, and then add it to the dinosaurs that the Hoban Washburne figure I got a while back came with, I'm starting to get a bit of stock for my own toy store.
Last week, I went to Ollie's, which is a half hour drive away, to check to see if they had some GI Joe figures that I'd heard on some YouTube videos they were offering. They didn't have what I was after, and I was a little bummed, but they had other things that made the trip worthwhile to me. So, it wasn't a bad experience, and I was willing to give it another shot this Saturday morning.
This time, I was a little more happy about my experience, because they had one of the things that I had gone there in search of in the first place.
Yeah, that's a case of Sgt. Slaughter figures there on the shelf. That's the guy that I was there looking for. Sgt. Slaughter original cost $33, and I was going to skip it altogether. I'd already bought the Action Force version of Sgt. Slaughter, so I didn't really need one. I wanted one, but I didn't have to have it.
Now that it's shown up at Ollie's, however, I wanted it bad. Mostly because, as you can see down there on the bottom of the box, they only wanted $13 for it. I grabbed it right away.
It's a pretty dang cool figure. Sarge is a really big guy too. I set him up next to my other Sgt. Slaughter. Here's how they compare.
The Action Force guy looks like the Hasbro guy's younger brother or something. I'm particularly happy to have actually found the target of my search here. The best part is the one accessory that Sarge comes with.
Yeah, he comes with a miniature version of himself. This toy comes with a toy version of itself. It's a toy within a toy. It's a toy inception. I actually did a post about this way back when they first announced it last summer. Now I have toy inception in my collection as I always hoped I could.
Oh, since I was at Ollie's, I got the Snake Eyes movie figure as well.
As with Sgt. Slaughter, I already have a Snake Eyes...but this guy was only $5. I couldn't turn it down.
The one I have is not the movie figure, so they're not the same. I was thinking I could pull the Storm Shadow out of the lineup of Cobra figures that I have on my shelf...
And put him together with this Snake Eyes in the middle of some kind of ninja battle in their own little cubby hole.
The new vintage-style version of Firefly is coming out right now, so I could easily swap him into Storm Shadow's spot, so it wouldn't even leave a hole in the line.
Good trip to Ollie's this week. And it looks like it won't be my last. I texted my nephew about how I'd found Sgt. Slaughter at Ollie's, and he asked if I could pick one up for him as well. I was already home, and not about to drive the half hour back to the store, but I told him I'd head over next week to see if I could get one for him still. I could give Ollie's one more chance to have Crimson Guards available to buy, and get my nephew's figure too while I was there. We'll see how it goes.
On YouTube the other day this video came up on my feed:
This guy was going on about how Ollie's Bargain Outlet has a bunch of GI Joe Classified figures on for cheap prices. He had a picture of two Crimson Guards and a Sgt. Slaughter that he'd gotten there. The Crimson Guards were marked at $4.99 and the Sgt. Slaughter was marked at $12.99. Those figures retailed at $24.99 and $33.99 respectively.
I was very interested to hear this. I'd passed on the Sgt. Slaughter because I'd picked up one from Action Force already, and the one from Hasbro was so worthlessly expensive. I was pretty sad to pass it by, though, because the Hasbro one comes with an accessory that is an action figure of itself. It's like an action figure inception, a figure within a figure.
Now, if they're suddenly showing up at Ollie's for much cheaper, I had no reason to turn it down, and a good reason to hit the road and see what Ollie's has. So, that's what I did the other morning.
I was disappointed when I arrived, however. There were no Sgt. Slaughter figures anywhere. There weren't even any Crimson Guards. I already have three of those guys.
But I would happily build the largest army I could of them. Ten, twenty, thirty? I'd buy them all.
What they did have was a load of those figures from the Snake Eyes movie. There were a few Snake Eyes figures, tons of the Baroness, tons of Storm Shadows, tons of Scarletts, and tons of Akiko (the character invented for the movie that doesn't exist in GI Joe lore from the past).
I looked through their other offerings, because they had to have a thing or two that I'd like to buy. It's a big store, and they have a lot of toys. I found several things that I considered getting. Then I came across something that surprised me...Star Wars Vintage Collection figures.
After gushing so much about how they had one or two of them at Ross the other day, I couldn't ignore something like this. They had Kuiil, the ugnaught who helps Din Djarin in The Mandalorian.
I have one of these figures, but I saw somebody do a video on how to use him to make a highly articulated jawa, and I bemoaned the fact that I didn't get more of him the one time I saw him go on sale on Amazon. I could totally buy as many as I want now that they are only $4 though. If only I could find the jawas on for $4 too.
I was thinking about seeing if I could switch out the heads on Kuiil and baby Anakin.
I tried it, however, and their heads didn't really fit very well on the body of the other. Also, they looked pretty silly. Kuiil is much heavier than Anakin, so their bodies didn't swap out well.
They also had a character called Luminara Unduli.
I had the sneaking suspicion that I already had this figure, but I couldn't confirm it from Ollie's. I tried to search through old blog posts on my phone to see if I ever mentioned it, but never came up with any. I gave in and bought it. It was only $4, so if I had it already, it wouldn't be a huge disaster.
As soon as I got home and checked the blog posts on my computer, though, I found the figure in one of the posts I'd made about taking the census of Ankletown Station. Dang.
But it was okay. She comes with enough accessories that if I removed a few of them, she could easily look like a different person.
Makes a pretty big difference, I think. If I had to take it further, I could even put this head onto one of those Valkyrie bodies, and she could be one of those ladies with her helmet off. I don't know that I'll go there, but I could.
Lastly, I also found this old figure of Ponda Baba, known to us older folks as Walrus Man.
It's not actually an SWVC figure. It's from back when they tried doing Star Wars Black Series as a 6 inch line as well as a 3 3/4 inch line. That didn't last long, but there are apparently some figures still hanging around from those days.
I pretty much buy any figure that is an alien, so this guy was a must. He even comes with an extra arm where you can simulate it being cut off by Obi-Wan.
"This one's not worth the trouble."
So, those were my pickups at Ollie's. On the way home, I passed a Ross, and figured I would stop in and see if they had anything I hadn't already seen. They didn't. There was a Target next door, and this weekend was its grand opening, so I figured I'd check it out too.
In their toy section, I found something I'd yet to see in the wild, Cad Bane--the bounty hunting space cowboy that got his live action debut in the Boba Fett show that sucked so badly last year.
Cad Bane was probably one of the coolest things about the show, and I was happy to buy this figure, even though it was at full price. He's pretty nice. He makes me wish that I'd bought some of those old Dime Novel Legends figures back in the day, so I could make them have a high noon confrontation. A stand off between a cowboy and a space cowboy could be pretty fun.
Anyway, these four new figures make a pretty good addition to my population.
After finishing up The Death of Kings and getting back on track with my reading, I was eager to get another book to read. I was talking with Rish a few days ago, and he was mentioning how surprised he was to realize that, even though he knew all about the book, he'd never actually read Stephen King's Duma Key. He's a huge fan of Stephen King, as am I, and he's pretty much read it all, but this one had escaped him somehow.
I confessed to him that I'd never read Duma Key either, and I thought maybe I ought to rectify that too. I got on the Libby app to check it out, but there was a line and I had to put it on hold. While I was at it, I figured I should go through the list of King's books that I hadn't read, and put those on hold as well. I almost always love Stephen King's books (aside from Cujo, which I've tried to read twice, but never managed to finish), so they probably wouldn't derail my progress (unless I tried Cujo for a third time).
I went through and placed holds on more than a dozen books, and the first one that came up as available was The Wind Through the Keyhole, a Dark Tower novel. I read the Dark Tower series through to the end, but Stephen King went back and added this novel into the middle of it in 2012, so I was able to revisit my favorite characters again in an all-new adventure.
Although it didn't turn out to be quite that. There's actually precious little time devoted to Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy. The story takes place in between books four and five, and our heroes are force to take shelter from a crazy storm that blows through Mid-World and kills pretty much everything in its path that isn't sheltered away very securely and warmly.
While they shelter, Roland decides to tell them a story from his past. He weaves the tale of the time he was sent to Debaria to catch a skin-man, which is a shape shifter akin to a werewolf but that isn't limited to just one creature. It can turn into various things. Weirdly, in the middle of this tale, Roland tells another story (we're going deep here. This is the Inception of The Dark Tower. It's a story within a story within a story), this one a tall tale or a myth about Tim, who has to deal with the loss of his father and save his mother from troubles that arise by going on a long quest.
It was an odd bit of framing to make our way through all these nested stories, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. Rish, I gather, is not a fan. Probably because there's no real consequence to the tale, since Roland and the others aren't really a part of it. I didn't mind it. I found it fun.
Not only that, but I managed to make my way through it in only a few days. I stayed home sick from work last Wednesday, and while home, I decided to put up as much of my Christmas toy decorations as I could. I had the audiobook playing the whole time that I worked, and I burned through a huge portion of the book in that one day, only doing a tiny amount before on Tuesday and after on Thursday to finish it. That's always cool to jam through a full-length novel so quickly. It feels like an accomplishment for some reason.
My only gripe was that the finale of the story was kind of weak. Gunslingers are just to capable with their shots, so there wasn't a lot of drama about it, and, of course, since it's a prequel, there's no actual danger to the characters. That's the ultimate problem with prequels. We know damn good and well that the character is going to survive just fine.
It's already time for another book. This time, Stephen King's book that he wrote as Richard Bachman came up as the next thing available. So, in a few, I'll be back to talk with you about Roadwork. I thought I'd read all the original Bachman books, but this one doesn't sound familiar at all, so we'll see how it goes.
It was only a few months ago that I read my very first Neil Gaiman novel, American Gods. It was a great book, a large, sweeping epic-style novel about all the pagan gods of the world that Americans had brought with them when they immigrated from their countries of origin. Now, here I am, reading another Neil Gaiman book, Anansi Boys. It's set in the same world as that of American Gods, but it's a lot less epic in scale. Instead of trying to incorporate every god that ever was, Gaiman sticks with one smaller mythology, that of the Afro-Caribbean god, Anansi.
I really enjoyed Anansi Boys, and I think one of the main reasons why was because it wasn't so far-reaching as American Gods. Instead of trying to work in vignettes with this god, that god, and the other god, we were able to focus more on the main characters, learn about them, get to know them well, and follow a more linear plot from its inception to its conclusion. I cared so much more for Fat Charlie and Spider the main characters of Anansi Boys than I ever did for Shadow the main character of American Gods.
I listened to the audio version of this story, as read by Lenny Henry. Henry is a very good reader. The guy pulled of a serious number of different accents flawlessly. From the characters of the old ladies, who all hailed originally from the Caribbean; to Fat Charlie and his fiancee, who are stuffy and English; to Spider who is very American, he nailed every one of them. The book was a pleasure to the ears. One of my favorite accents to listen to is Caribbean. There's just something so beautiful about the way they speak in the islands. The book could have been a 300 page grocery list, and, as long as Henry read it in that accent, I'd have been happy. But, bonus for me, the book was really good.
If you haven't read it already, I'd encourage you to check it out. It's been my favorite Niel Gaiman novel yet. Sometime soon I'll get to Coraline, and then we'll see if Anansi Boys can defend its title.
Now, for me, up next is another novel by the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Ass-Hat Magic Spider." I will be reading Scott Westerfeld's YA novel So Yesterday.
