On Saturday, January 2, 2016 at 4:05:31 AM UTC-7, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> I've got lots of toys I forgot about. A closet of legos, a closet of
> transformers, a closet of just stuff.
I never knew you were into LEGO. I don't recall ever hearing you even mention it.
> Most of it, though, if I remember that it exists somewhere in the world, I
> remember that I have it.
I think perhaps part of the problem is that I am not consistently committing new toys to long-term memory. This includes their names, how to transform them, and, apparently, whether or not I own them. I can dig through a box of G1 toys and identify any missile or gun immediately, but show me a box of modern-era toys and I would be hard pressed to identify a single accessory. I have to keep missiles loaded inside their launchers or else I am completely helpless. Unless it's a really distinctive missile with, like, a fish head on the front of it or something. I think it's because they're so damn homogenous. Every missile, now, the same length, the same diameter.
> Not sure if I have TF:Universe Smokescreen though, as I didn't like the
> TF:Universe Prowl or Bluestreak, and would like to think I learned my lesson
> before buying him.
He really was one of the worst Universe toys. Not just because of the problems endemic to that design, but his color mapping was all wrong. Like, no part of that toy was actually the same color as G1 Smokescreen. The Henkei toy looks so much more preferable. It's really the only Henkei toy on my want list (I wanted Cyclonus for a while, but then Hasbro came to my rescue).
> That's one that never made sense to me. Sure, it was kind of cute, but there
> wasn't much else to it. The toys didn't seem interesting, so once you get the
> beloved characters, you should be done.
I really don't have any favorite characters from Cars. I just kind of like the universe that they exist within. All these machines running around (well, rolling around) but always dancing around the issue of who built them or why. So, it's like Transformers before the big Quintesson reveal.
Like I said to Banzaitron, I was enjoying the collecting aspect of it. Tracking down new cars was fun and exciting, and they were coming out at a fast enough pace that there weren't these long, dry spells like we get with Transformers sometimes. Kmart would have a Cars collector event every year, so my son (who was about three or four at the time) and I would make the drive and get some exclusive toys. Some of them had rubberized tires.
There were about six years between the release of Cars and Cars 2, and the second movie just really soured me on the toy line. It seemed specifically and callously orchestrated to be merchandise-driven and yet I couldn't be bothered to care about the characters the second time around. For the first movie, obscure characters like Vinyl Toupee or Transberry Juice were a joy to find and own in toy form. The second time around, it's like they crammed as many background characters or alternate versions of characters in there as possible just to keep Mattel busy for a few years (witness the long string of potential toy versions of Mater... Mater as a vampire, Mater as a funny car, etc.)
To this day I really don't get why people collect Hot Wheels, but I totally got sucked into the car-collecting aspect thanks to Cars.
>> Zob (what the hell kind of a name is Hooman?!)
>
> Persian. It means "benevolent".
To me, it just sounds like a Ferengi mispronouncing the word "human." And it makes zero sense to give one of the Cars characters the name Human. (Bert, Jamie, or Andrea, sure, but...)
Zob (when I was packing up my Cars toys, I found a Mater in the package upside-down that I forgot I'd bought)