I bought this in Asda a while ago for my son's 5th birthday. Being an 'Alien Force' toy and therefore a couple of years(ish) old, it was half price at £15. And for £15 it's pretty good, despite the big disappointment which I'll come to in a minute.
But first a description.
This is Kevin's car, which anyone who's sat through any of the Ben 10 Alien Force episodes will know, features quite a lot. Things can never be straight forward, so as well as being a car this transforms into 'battle mode' with wings and large guns.
In the 60s everything Gerry Anderson touched was gold. Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet - all time classic television. Afterwards, however, things went downhill a little. Space 1999 was...well, there are people who love it, but generally it's held in no where near as high a regard as the puppet series were. Terrahawks passed most people by unnoticed.
Then in the mid-90s, Anderson had another go at a live-action sci-fi series. Space Precinct confused a lot of people as to whom, exactly, it was supposed to be aimed at. Most of the episodes ranged from 'okay' to 'a bit crappy', although the two-part series finale was excellent. But of course by then it was too late.
Do you remember How Do They Do That? A show on the BBC broadcast around the same time as Space Precinct which featured...well, it's kind of obvious really. It answered lots of viewers questions about how certain things were done. There were quite a lot of explanations for the effects done in adverts, from what I recall. At the time the answers tended to feature a lot of camera trickery and clever set-building. These days I suppose it could all be summed up as 'CGI'.
Anyway, one week they featured an item on how a small British company had managed to get hold of an international toy licence for a top science fiction show. It was a very good question, I mean just look at the figures they made...
There's a big problem with Power Rangers toys, specifically the megazords. Be it Mighty Morphin or Samurai it's always the good guys whom you can buy a giant robot for. But the whole point of the zords is to fight bad guys and there are never any large-scale bad guys released, so the question is who are the zords supposed to fight?
We usually settle for dinosaurs. There are a couple of T-Rexs in our house which are around the same size as the zords so they have to suffice. But it'd be nice, just for once, to have a proper large villain for the Power Rangers to fight.
Once.
This turns out to be the amount of times a large villain has actually been released by Bandai. The toy was Lord Zedd's Serpentera and my eldest just received him for Christmas.
There is a tradition in my house at Christmas. Well, there was a tradition in my house. It's not something that's actually been carried out for quite a while, ever since my parents refused to stop purchasing it for me, but this year it's back.
Yes, Christmas afternoon both me and my 5 year old were sat round the dining table putting together our lego. Well, Kre-O, aka 'Transformers Lego'.
ThunderCats is back! You wonder what took it so long really - all the other classic 80s hits had comebacks ages ago. Think about it: He-Man had the 200x line, Ninja Turtles around the same time too, Transformers has been reincarnated thousands of times. But we got there in the end, and with it a new version of one of the best vehicles of the 80s: the Thundertank.
Looks pretty good, eh? Reminiscent of the old version, but more beefed up. On the face of it, Bandai have a hit here. On the face of it.
