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: Star Wars Micro Machines

You know that moment at the start of Star Wars? (or 'Episode IV: A New Hope', if you prefer) After the yellow text has flown up from the bottom, a little Rebel ships flies across the screen, following by a much larger ship that keeps going and going and going and... You think it's going to stop. How big can this thing be? Yet it continues on...

It's HUGE.

Which is a problem if you want to sell a toy of it. The Star Destroyers, AT-ATs, heck even the Millennium Falcon or an X-Wing - all of them are BIG.

Big = kids unable to play with them properly = few sales.

Big = storage problems = few sales.

Big = expensive = few sales.

This is why Hasbro (or Kenner at the time, before Hasbro bought them) started making the figures in a 4" (ish) scale. Before that time action figures were generally big doll-like things, but at 4" it's possible to make a Falcon that Han can actually sit in and fit into the average living room.

But even at 4", there's still a problem. The Falcon is still very big. How does a child lift the thing and fly it round the room? How does a fleet of TIE Fighters fly after it?

To achieve this you have to drop the size of things much further. Luckily, Galoob (before Hasbro bought them. Hmm, bit of a trend here) already had a very successful small-scale toy line and was looking to expand.

And thus we had Star Wars Micro Machines!

Review: Micro Machines

"Micro Machines come in collections of 5!" said the guy on the advert, followed by him balancing a centimetre-long car on his finger - a trick that would keep children entertained for hours as they tried to copy him (turns out its much easier as an adult due to increased finger size).

Coming from the Golden Age of Toys (the 80s) Micro Machines were like every other car line out there, but micro. The line began with cars, then expanded to other vehicles, then onto lines such as Star Wars vehicles, Star Trek, and even the Aliens films.