Review: Defenders of the Earth Garax Ship

It's been quite a good week for me, toy collector-wise. I've finally managed to track down two items I've been hunting for for years.

I'm not saying these things are super rare; I've certainly seen them before for sale on ebay, but they've either been stupidly expensive or I've forgotten about the auction ending, or for some other reason I've failed to buy them. On the other hand they're not super common either. They're not toys that are easily available.

So what are they? Well, one you'll have to wait to be revealed at a later date (mostly because it hasn't arrived yet and I'd look stupid if I proudly named it here and it turned out to be broken). The other, if you have even the lowest level of intelligence, you'll have already guessed by looking at the title of this piece: Garax's ship.

Review: Defenders of the Earth

Before the Avengers there were....The Defenders of the Earth!

Actually, that's not true. The Avengers came before the DotE by quite a long way, but I bring the Marvel superteam up because a) there's a blockbuster movie about to be released, and b) the premise is very similar: a bunch of comic book characters team up to defend the Earth.

And with quite a catchy theme written by comics legend Stan Lee, who was also co-creator of the Avengers, funnily enough.

While I said the Avengers beat the Defenders in terms of team-up date, many of the individual Defenders characters were on the scene before the constituent Avengers. Mandrake the Magician and Lothar appeared in 1934 and The Phantom in 1936 - all creations of Lee Falk. Flash Gordon, created by Alex Raymond, was first published in 1934. It was in 1986, however, when all four characters were put together (along with their new offspring) into a cartoon series to face off against Ming the Merciless (who turned green for the cartoon to prevent any possible accusations of racism).

The cartoon is quite interesting. Unlike a lot of cartoons where such topics are forbidden, Flash's wife 'dies' (in fact she is 'murdered' by Ming), and there were episodes focusing on alcoholism and drug addition.

The toyline wasn't extensive. There were figures for the adult protagonists, Ming & his henchman Garax, plus the dragon-like Mongor and a few vehicles. The figures bare reasonable likenesses to their cartoon counterparts, are solidly built (I've never seen any broken figures) and I love the bright colours, however they are let down by the problem of the eara: action features.