Post by hypnotator on Jul 29, 2004 4:40:32 GMT -5
My Cocoboy vs Skullbonz arrived yesterday, and I was a bit upset at having to pay another £24 customs fee to the postie before he handed it over, but the set is lovely. I’m a sad enough robot nerd to dream about toys fairly often, and the dreams are usually about weird or unlikely Cyborg, Micronaut or Aurora variations. These are like something straight out of one of my dreams; a Cyborg with glasses and a smoked, skull-headed Muton/KW figure.
The bodies are very like Cyborg 99’s but smaller and the transparent plastic feels very brittle so I handled them extremely carefully. I’m already pre-warned about Medicom figure breakage issues thanks to this site. The figures come almost fully costumed up, and I want to display them naked, so I set about removing the costumes very carefully. Cocoboy was fairly easy to undress as his costume is cloth and soft rubber, but Skullbonz has harder vinyl costume parts. I’ve built a few vinyl models, though, so I know that a hairdryer comes in handy here. A little heat applied to the boots and gloves made them slide off easily, but the torso piece was another matter. It’s one moulded piece with no slits to aid removal. It just doesn’t come off. How the blazes did they get it on in the factory? Has anyone successfully removed one of these intact? From what I could see, no amount of heat would allow the shoulders and arms of the figure to pass through the narrow waist of the torso piece. I deliberated for some time, then, reluctantly, took the scalpel to it. One neat incision from left armpit to waist and the torso piece is removable and reusable. It also ruins the resale value of the toy, but who’s reselling?
These figures have inner brains, like Cyborg and KW, and the outer heads sit over them a little too high for my liking, so I set about removing the brains. This took a lot of heat and some careful levering. Afterwards, the outer heads just fall right down to the shoulders, so I wrapped a transparent rubber band (from a new Star Wars figure) around each neck and the heads sit nicely.
The figures come in separate, identical boxes with a fold-out comic strip on a series of flaps. The strip has English and Japanese text, so whether you are meant to read it right-to-left or left-to-right is beyond me. There is a highly misleading photo of Cocoboy on the box, showing wires and machinery in his legs and light-up red eyes, neither of which you get. Each figure has an instructions sheet, with descriptions of the characters’ attributes in hilarious broken English. Skullbonz has a “trip brain”, no drug reference intended, I’m sure. You get a CD with each which plays a funny little 2-minute video with shots of the toys, lots of colour filtering and a funky soundtrack by Take-Faeces (gosh, this sounds far more offensive than his real name).
I took a few of pics, and I dressed my UK Cyborg and Muton up in the croc suits. I need to reduce the file size before I bring them with me to post – watch this space.
Hypno
The bodies are very like Cyborg 99’s but smaller and the transparent plastic feels very brittle so I handled them extremely carefully. I’m already pre-warned about Medicom figure breakage issues thanks to this site. The figures come almost fully costumed up, and I want to display them naked, so I set about removing the costumes very carefully. Cocoboy was fairly easy to undress as his costume is cloth and soft rubber, but Skullbonz has harder vinyl costume parts. I’ve built a few vinyl models, though, so I know that a hairdryer comes in handy here. A little heat applied to the boots and gloves made them slide off easily, but the torso piece was another matter. It’s one moulded piece with no slits to aid removal. It just doesn’t come off. How the blazes did they get it on in the factory? Has anyone successfully removed one of these intact? From what I could see, no amount of heat would allow the shoulders and arms of the figure to pass through the narrow waist of the torso piece. I deliberated for some time, then, reluctantly, took the scalpel to it. One neat incision from left armpit to waist and the torso piece is removable and reusable. It also ruins the resale value of the toy, but who’s reselling?
These figures have inner brains, like Cyborg and KW, and the outer heads sit over them a little too high for my liking, so I set about removing the brains. This took a lot of heat and some careful levering. Afterwards, the outer heads just fall right down to the shoulders, so I wrapped a transparent rubber band (from a new Star Wars figure) around each neck and the heads sit nicely.
The figures come in separate, identical boxes with a fold-out comic strip on a series of flaps. The strip has English and Japanese text, so whether you are meant to read it right-to-left or left-to-right is beyond me. There is a highly misleading photo of Cocoboy on the box, showing wires and machinery in his legs and light-up red eyes, neither of which you get. Each figure has an instructions sheet, with descriptions of the characters’ attributes in hilarious broken English. Skullbonz has a “trip brain”, no drug reference intended, I’m sure. You get a CD with each which plays a funny little 2-minute video with shots of the toys, lots of colour filtering and a funky soundtrack by Take-Faeces (gosh, this sounds far more offensive than his real name).
I took a few of pics, and I dressed my UK Cyborg and Muton up in the croc suits. I need to reduce the file size before I bring them with me to post – watch this space.
Hypno