Notes from the Toy Aisle at Target

Since Lileks appears to be taking the month off from the "I took Gnat to Target and stocked up on windshield-washer fluid" posts, I'll pick up some of the slack.

Man, they'll make action figures out of just about any character nowadays, won't they? A trip to Target yesterday turned up figures from, strangely enough, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But what really struck me was that since the original show was filmed using real models in stop-motion animation, these action figures look pretty much identical to their TV show characters. (No action figure ever looks much like its character. In 1997, when the Star Wars Special Editions came out and new figures were issued, the one of Luke Skywalker was so burly that for a minute I thought I was looking at a Beastmaster figure dressed in Luke's Tatooine tunic.)

Oh, and here's an odd memory: does anyone recall a series of Crest Toothpaste commercials that were designed to run during Saturday morning cartoons in the late 1970s? These were animated, and they featured something like a team of "Crest Warriors" whose job was to defend the "City of Toothopolis" from the evil "Plaque Invaders" or some such thing.

Yeah, I'm thinking of some weird stuff this morning. This Maxwell House coffee is some goofy shit, man -- I gotta get back on my Eight O'Clock Coffee. Things will be much better that way.