As a kid, I loved playsets. Dinosaur ones. Western ones. Exploding bridges. Playsets were just super cool.

Military playsets were always my facorites though. I didn’t have this one but I am sure I would have loved it if I had. The set has 145 action filled parts and a cool looking set to act out all sorts of battles.

The dealer selling this particular toy only wanted $20 for it, and it was I’m awesome shape, but it was MASSIVE! So even at $20 they couldn’t sell it.

Still cool though.

This was a new find for me. I am a big fan of Zeroids generally, and have several, but have never encountered an Alien Zeroid.

The Alien is unique among Zeroids. First, it explodes! Not literally of course, but in the manner of all wonderful 60s and 70s exploding toys – it falls apart. The head and several of the parts pop off when it reaches the end of a path that is programed into it.

Second, you can prorgram it! Sort of. When assembling it from the parts that will eventually blow off, you place a gear inside that determines the Zeroid’s course.

And lastly, the thing is a cyborg alien. All the other Zeroids are just straight up robots.

A very cool toy, and one of the nearest Zeroids I’ve seen.

I have a shot of this on the Battlestar Galactica page, but I ran across an unopened one in excellent condition. I have always wanted one of these but they’re damn big. This one was also damn expensive. They wanted $200 for it.

It is based on a plane launching toy and sends small vipers into the air via a rubber band powered launch pad. I have found the toy before, but the vipers are usually pretty “battle damaged” from a few too many flights. A very cool toy!

For the toy loving executive who has everything, today I bring you a deskset to inspire envy around the board room -a Batman desk set.

Included is a Joker stapler, a Batman pencil sharpener, and a Batman calendar/card holder.

I am currently working out of my garage or I would have bought it to impress my office mates.

This was another cool toy I found at the toy show in San Jose. I’ve seen the visible man before, but this was the first time I had seen the woman.

Last weekend I went to this twice annual toy show in San Jose. It used to be the Humdinger toy show I think.

I missed out on buying a boxed 18″ alien for $250 while I went to get cash. I was hugely disappointed. But I saw some cool stuff.

Here is a Buck Rogers toy I had never seen before that is kind of cool.

More to come.

I have added an area where you can just talk about toys, leave me feedback, or whatever. It is non toy specific, and is really just a comments page. so not a lot of functionality. I’ll try to find a real forum tool for WordPress and add that to the site so we can have a better time chatting if it gets used a lot.

Red Falcon Clone in Red

Adam wrote in on a comment on the Micronauts Red Falcon page asking about RF clones. There are a lot of them out there. I am not as well versed in my RF clone lore as some, but I do have a few of them in my collection. Take a look at this one…

This particular clone has a red and white body, a different head that than RF, but has some common parts like the armor and the sword. Unlike RF, who turns into a big bird, a falcon perhaps?, this one turns into a motorcycle. Kinda neat.

A second clone I have is in green and is more Red Falcon like than the red one.

Red Falcon Clone in Green

Like RF, this one has wings and body armor. It also shares the standard RF head. Unlike RF, his body armor has two guns attached to it and he packs a couple of pistols. 

In Adam’s post, he mentioned a black RF clone. I don’t have one, and haven’t seen one, but there is no reason to believe it might not have been part of this line of knock offs. 

From what little I do know these guys were sold in discount toy stores and places like Big Lots. May have been sold in drug stores. Overall, the toy quality is poor, but they do have magnetic ball joints like the Micronaut and Microman Magnemo toys.

These pics were shot with my cell out of my toy case, so excuse the fuzzy quality.

Someone left a post the other day asking me about Tente. If you don’t know what it is, you’re missing out. Tente was a Lego-like building system that was mainly available outside the US. I got mine while living in Colombia, SA. 

Anyway, the system had very similar blocks to Legos and the kits were thematic, like space or transportation. And like Legos, you could build them into whatever you wanted. I didn’t have a lot of them, but they were ahead of Lego in many ways. While Lego still had pretty generic pieces in the 70s and early 80s, Tente had a lot of specialized wheels and parts in their kits. But they made a lot fewer sets…

Tente Building System

I used to have a lot of TV and movie related stuff on BEM, but took it down when I re-did the site. I’m not going to focus on this by any means, but I love sci-fi and movies and TV, so it will occasionally show up.

Last night, I was watching the new Doctor Who. I’m up to Series 3. I enjoy it. It’s a fun show. But it hasn’t rocked my world or anything. Until I saw an episode called Blink. 

Scary as hell and effing brilliant! I love a good time travel mystery and this one really delivers. Starts off with a young lady in a spooky old house peeling off some old wallpaper with a message from The Doctor from 1963. The Doctor is hardly in the episode, but it was brilliant none the less. 

If you’re not a Doctor Who fan, or if you haven’t watched Series 3 and this episode yet, you really should. I’ve re-watched it twice and love it more each time.