Post-Holiday Superhero Shopstravaganza, ... or, If I Were Famke Janssen

I don't know about you, but Boxing Day usually finds me staggering through the aisles of Rite-Aid or Sav-On or some other misspell-hyphenated all-nite drugstore, looking for cold pills or scarfing up rejected holiday cards and candy. Then I buy a bunch of discounted toys and wrap them in discounted wrapping paper. This way, I can pretend it's Christmas all winter long.

Actually, that's a lie. I spent Boxing Day in airports. I was in the local drugstore getting a prescription filled months ago when I took these pictures, and it was only the image in Gerry Canavan's New Year's post that reminded me to put them up on the blog.

You see, I am unreasonably interested in crummy superhero toys, though not interested enough to purchase them. I usually take crummy picturephone photos of them to send to Mike.

For example, here's a picture of a smug-sarcastic-friendly Batman, and his super friend, a dopey, doe-eyed, L'il-Abner Superman:

Ready the Bat-Smirk, Robin! I've got a doofus Kryptonian to mock!

And then there's the atrocious "Phoenix" I spotted. Now, Famke Janssen is generally considered to be a fairly pretty lady. She was even a Bond girl, you know.

But here's what happened when she went through the action-figure machine:



"Jean's Fen-Mask" is an anagram of "Famke Janssen," by the way.

Here is a page where the product packaging allows you to compare movie screenshots with the action-figure sculpt. What can I say? I think If I'd spent years of my life playing Cyclops's dead-again-alive-again ladyfriend, I'd be fairly miffed.

Swansea Find #2: Super Stupid Spidey Stickerbook

On another of my rambles through Swansea, that "ugly-lovely" town, I wandered through the Swansea Market, vaguely hunting for souvenirs. It's an odd institution, this indoor market. Their website says they were established in 1961, and some of the shops may not have changed since then. It gave me an overall feeling of updated Victoriana, rather than anything quite so modern as Six Flags, JFK's inauguration, or Hemingway's suicide. (You see, I can read Wikipedia, which also informs me that 1961 marked the demise of the farthing as British currency.)

Where was I? Right: at one of the market's dingy stalls, I saw a slim book that came with a sheet of fairly cool Spider-Man stickers. I like to put stickers on the occasional outbound piece of comics-related mail,* so I decided to pick these up:



You never know when you'll need a sticker of a camera or a thundercloud or a pair of balloons.

But part of the fun in this stickerbook is how egregiously off-model the characters are, in terms of their concerns and their abilities. The story makes no sense, even if you know nothing about Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus, but I have to assume that most of the book's target audience would know more than nothing. Here's what you get around your stickers:

Spider-Man is in New York, and a pleasant sunny day turns cloudy and stormy, so he figures something bad is happening. A garbage can flies by him while he's swinging toward the storm. Then he sees the storm is being caused by his old nemesis, Doctor Octopus:



Yep. Doc Ock is making lightning.



Many cephalopods are known for their weather-manipulation abilities. (Cuttlefish, for instance, can cause sleet.) So it's not surprising that the writer (uncredited) would make this mistake about good old Doctor Octopus. But in fact he's just a guy with extra mechanical tentacles. (Okay, I see the irony of using the phrase "in fact" to talk about Dr. Octopus. Sorry.) He doesn't have any mollusk powers at all! Why, he can't even change the color of his skin, or shoot out a cloud of ink!

I don't know why the writers didn't use Electro instead. He can't make storms, but he can at least make lightning; it's not a stretch. I've seen him on stickers here in the U.S. But maybe they figured Dr. Octopus was more recognizable, and they couldn't think of any way for him to be a menace other than making it rain on Manhattan.

Once he sees Spider-Man, he's in a hurry to get away, I guess, or to taunt Spidey from a safe disance:



Oh, yeah: did I mention that this guy could fly now?



Because, as everyone with a pool noodle knows, whirling a few flexible cylindrical tubes in the air is going to give you plenty of lift. Fortunately, Spider-Man realizes that there are only a couple of pages left in the book, so he snags his enemy on some webbing:



(I really like that look on Doc Ock's face, actually.) And that's the end. Never mind that none of those four mechanical arms are restrained in any way. Octavius's dignity is broken, and he surrenders meekly. The police come and take him away, for the heinous crime of weather manipulation, I guess. Or maybe there was a warrant out for a previous spree of cloud-seeding.

This reminds me all too much of the ending of another sitckerbook, Stick with Hulk, that I've been meaning to write about. The story's not important, although it's equally dumb. Here's the penultimate page:



Hulk wraps the Abomination in a chain-link fence and offers him a massage. Then, the stunning conclusion:



Hulk changes back to a fully-dressed Bruce Banner and effortlessly retrieves the radioactive macguffin from the snarling, super-strong Abomination, who is still struggling to free himself from his chain-link fence. It's for pleasures like this that I often linger in the toy aisle at the drugstore, or in shabby markets in little Welsh seaside burgs.

* This is the sort of postal goofery around that I'm talking about. See Spidey hop!

RipRollerz at Walgreens

One of the small amusements that I allow myself from time to time is a look at the toys in the toy aisle at the drugstore. They're mostly pretty cheap, and pretty garish, and I think it has been a long time since I was tempted to buy one. (I did buy a sticker activity book featuring the Hulk and the Abomination; I'll have to blog about that some time.)

The last time I was at the drugstore, I found one of the worst licensed Marvel superhero products I'd ever seen. It was so lame, and had such amusing mistakes, that I snapped a quick picture with my cameraphone. If I were a real pop-culture blogger, I probably would have bought the decorated plastic ball* to bring it home and make a proper scan of the packaging. As it is, I may have to do a little interpretation of this blurry closeup from the back of the package.


What you're looking at, there, are a handful of the characters available on the various individual balls. This one was Wolverine, I think. Notice that all of those fellows have been in Hollywood movies lately. Clockwise from lower left, there's Wolverine, that scrappy Canadian, and Spider-Man, one of the two times he appears in the dramatis personae. And then there's this famous guy...

You know, the, uh, ... something to do with fire.

And then you have this well-known hero, coming soon to a theater near you:

It's not easy to read, but I assure you, that drawing is labeled "Iron Man." (As played by Ben Affleck.)

Probably they're all just Skrulls anyway, right? Isn't that where this is heading?

* Yes, as far as I can tell, RipRollerz are balls with the image of a superhero decorating them and sort of puffing out from the sides. I think you play with them by pulling a ripcord that makes them spin. I'm not sure how that works, exactly.