Ballad of the Defeatist Completist

Let me tell you my story of collecting elitisim.
Of how nothing good happened when my goal was completism.

I am the defeatist completist.
I collect the robots until it's no fun.
And when I've almost caught them all-
That's when I sell my collection.

"I want my geewun back!" I once demanded without apology,
I wanted old skool toy robots with today's toy technology.

"They should remake all those old robots again and once more!"
Oh how I should have been careful what it was I wished for.

So they brought back those "Classics" and it was cause for celebration.
Because the Transformers from the eighties had very little articulation.

I am the defeatist completist.
I collect the robots until it's no fun.
And when I've almost caught them all-
That's when I sell my collection.

Looking back I had thought my child self dumb
because I didn't care enough to own every last one.
But buying only what I liked was not what I'd become.
Collecting ALL the robots is much easier with adulty income.

One by one they showed up, my classic old friends with fancy new modes.
I was ready with the money and I bought them by the caseloads.

They even made Starscream and Skywarp-they'd make the other jets I knowed.
But how those other seekers came about made my head friggin' explode.

I am the defeatist completist.
I collect the robots until it's no fun.
And when I've almost caught them all-
That's when I sell my collection.

When I almost got them all, the difficulty did worsen.
To want a complete set I must have been a crazy person.

Just when I was almost there-hey I was no robots collecting slacker-
they made a Botcon exclusive out of Classics Thundercracker.

Along with Dirge and Thrust and the rest of the boys.
No way in hell I'd pay over three hundred for only five toys.

I am the defeatist completist.
I collect the robots until it's no fun.
And when I've almost caught them all-
That's when I sell my collection.

"Screw this Classics crap!" I screamed, and then I vowed
to sell off my collection with a low Buy-It-Now.

I know you're not supposed to ever say never
But all I wanted was to forget my failed robot endeavor.

Never being complete may be easy for Tyler Durden,
but knowing all that's out there is a really heavy burden.

And so I found myself following the advice of Stephen Wright-
“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

I am the defeatist completist.
I collect the robots until it's no fun.
And when I've almost caught them all-
That's when I sell my collection.

This one's for all my Boo

Last year I uploaded this to YouTube but under another name not nearly as great as Evil King Macrocranios. When I wanted to change the name of my account to EKM, YouTube wouldn't allow it. I had to delete the old account and establish a new one. It sucked! In all the changings I forgot to reupload this masterpiece. Now that Blogger has video upload functionality I thought I would put it here.

What I thought was funny was that after I took it down I started reading people posting on message boards saying they think an Orbots toy was made because they remember seeing a guy on YouTube with one. I made it pretty clear in the comments section of the YouTube page that I resin cast the figure myself. I guess I was close to starting an internet rumor of sorts.

HOLY CRAP MOMENT OF THE WEEK!

Brought to you by the Prince of Macrocrania

No ice for me, please (but I wish I had some)

I'm not going down to Antarctica this year. While I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to do it two years in a row, I really wanted to spend time with my son during his first Thanksgiving and Christmas and all that. Between Antarctica and military stuff I haven't had Christmas with my wife since around 2003 I think. So it was a tough decision to make but this year I'll be at home with my new family while my friends go down to the ice for the '07-'08 austral summer. Some of them are already there and one of them, Cliff, is keeping a daily blog. I wish I could be there so I could do what I do best-sit in a little tower on the ice looking at the sky and watching the planes come and go. Collecting snowflakes, making AT-AT videos and bootleg Iron Maiden shirts and looking for old robot cartoons in New Zealand record stores was pretty fun, too. It's especially rough missing out this time because I expect that in a few years the job may not even be available once the machines get good enough to replace human weather observers. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back but if I don't I am happy with the memories I have.

Here's the kitchen, there's the dining room and down the hall is ROBOTARD WORLD

I am so in awe of the married couple that does the podcast about collecting Star Wars crap. They've got this massive collection and they named the part of the house they keep it in "The Sithsonian". Everybody else would call it "the basement". They have video of The Sithsonian in their 100th podcast. I can't really match the enormity of their collection with my disorganized pile of aged geriatric toy robots but I do want to be incredibly batshit crazy like them and name my laundry room something awe inspiring.

Back when I was a kid all the toystores were suffixed with 'World' or 'Palace' or 'City'. Then TRU came along and destroyed the cities and burned down the palaces. That sucked! Kiddie city, Playworld, Children's Palace, Circus World-they all went under. So I need my laundry room name to be suffixed with "World" in their honor-something like "Robotard World". Otherwise I'd be stuck with "Gay Robots R Me", which is actually pretty good.

For a while I was calling it Fortress Messimus because it was so out of control messy. But "Fortress" is inappropriate because that conjures up majestic images of an setup more elaborate than the stage backdrop at an Iron Maiden concert, when in actuality all I'm doing is running an old folks home for 20 year old toy robots. My laundry room is where roboplasticos go to die, like a robot hell. It's hardly a fortress-it's more like a retirement community for Dinobots.

I think I've since found a fitting acronym for my collection of aged, geriatric toy robots with peeling stickers and yellowing plastic. It has to be an acronym because all the cool names in the 80's were acronyms - K.I.T.T., M.A.S.K., C.O.B.R.A., Magnum P.I., etc. Behold, "G.A.Y.T.RO.N. World"! GAYTRON as in "Geriatric Aged Yellowing Toy RObots Nuthouse". It's retarded but I'm never going to come up with anything as good as the Sithsonian.

You didn't have them all unless Santa gave you a BJ

You know what type of person annoys me the most besides toy robot collectors I meet at Wal-Mart in the checkout line? The burnt out, used-to-be toy robot collectors I meet at Wal-Mart in the checkout line. On more than one occasion I'll be buying a roboplastico and a guy behind me will comment on what's in my cart. "Oh yeah I used to be all into those when I was a kid in the eighties. I had them all." And I'm thinking, first off, you're friggin' nineteen years old, jerkwad, and I seriously doubt you were even sentient enough to understand what "having them all" even meant. At that point I am left with two options: a) ignore the moron (which is cruel) and b) throw down with talk of red Bumblebees and yellow Cliffjumpers (which is worse).

To give them the benefit of the doubt I assume we're talking about Transformers from 1984, which are the ones everybody remembers and were the smallest in number so the average person had a good chance at "having them all". However, the average "I had them all when I was a kid" nostalgic fan will not remember specifics about their collection so I don't know why they even bring up that lame claim to fame. If I casually throw out a "Oh? Did you have the red Bumblebee? The yellow Cliffjumper?" I'm met with silence as they realize they've just met the one person in the world who actually gives a shit about the colors of toy robots from 20 years ago. Then they'll bow their heads in stunned contemplation as I shake mine and they realize they didn't "have them all". Crushing the spirit of a stranger who wanted to share their interest in toy robots is really petty and cruel, but what the hell, I'll never see this guy again.

Once in a while I'll meet the one guy who either knows what he's talking about or will lie just to keep going with what has become my absurd toy robot pissing contest interview. When that happens I pull out the nuclear option-"You got a Bumblejumper?" I'll ask. This is usually the easiest way to make pseudo robot nerds cry. Because you may know about red Bumblebee and yellow Cliffjumper-hell, you may even own one or both of them, but chances are you don't own a Bumblejumper. Bumblejumper separates the men from the true robot nerds. Owning a Bumblejumper is the point at which one can no longer consider themselves a valued contributing member of normal society. To own a Bumblejumper is the toy robot equivalent of touching Kubrick's monolith on the moon, except it's sort of the opposite of evolutionary advancement and it makes you more retarded in the eyes of monkeys.

When I was a kid I didn't give a shit that approximately one in every ten Bumblebees was red and one in every ten Cliffjumpers was yellow. When I was a kid I thought miscolored minibots were freak toys and red Bumblebee was retarded and I laughed at the kids who had them. But somewhere between twelve and twenty-two it dawned on me that no collection of '84 Transformers is truly complete without them. Even rarer was Bumblejumper-the unnamed by Hasbro yellow Transformer minicar utilizing the Microchange Mazda Familia 1500XG mold and that came packaged on Cliffjumper cards. It never appeared in the catalogs. The best estimates I've read are that Bumblejumpers were 1 in every 100 Cliffjumpers. Honestly when I first heard of BJs in the mid nineties I thought it was a hoax engineered to make people who didn't have them feel incomplete and inadequate. But I did more research and I concluded that Bumblejumpers did indeed exist and there was no conspiracy making me feel dumb for not having one. I had to pay $40 for my BJ but boy was it worth it.

So I really wonder why people feel the need to throw out that "Had them all when I was a kid" line, because chances are they didn't. Oddly enough, the people who use that line are the 'normal' ones who think grown men with robot collections are dumb. So why do they say it so much? Is the vast majority of well adjusted members of society looking to establish some sort of robot nerd credibility without the stigma of being robot nerds? Why? For some reason people have a sort of robophobia when it comes to admitting they own or have owned toy robots. Freakin robophobes! I would totally buy a shirt with Bumblejumper on it and the caption "No you didn't!" Then when a robophobe comes up to me and says they had them all, I'd just point to my chest and shake my head.

I never noticed what a nice ass Optimus has

I've been following IDW's Transformers comics ever since they got the license in '05 and I think theirs is the best written take on TF comics ever. All of the main series tie into one cohesive whole and it's been a great ride so far. Well this week I think we get a double shot of good books coming out with Spotlight:Optimus Prime and Megatron Origin #3. The Spotlight series has been consistently great and Megatron Origin does for Megatron what I wished the Star Wars prequels would have done for Vader. They tell his story not from when he was a wussy baby but from when his life turned to crap and he snapped and got all evil. So this looks to be a pretty good Wednesday at the comic store.

Oh, and if you missed those Burger King movie toys, deal of the week is the whole set for 10 bucks from ABCtoys4me.

This is why until I have confirmation that it's a girl I always stare directly at the boobs

When you're a guy with long hair living on any military installation you are in the minority. Ellworth space station is no exception and the only other guy with hair remotely as long as mine is the 80 year old biker guy who stocks the coffee isle at the commissary.

The other day I was pushing the baby stroller on the sidewalks all around the base when two guys came driving by in their crappy Dodge truck. From a distance the passenger couldn't tell if I was a girl or not and he started checking me out! It was weird because I felt like a goat being stalked by chupacabra. Then as he got closer he figured out I was a guy and he winced, shutting his eyes hard like he was trying to get rid of the taste of the unintentionally homesexual thoughts he was having.

Then as they passed by I shouted "You're gay!"

"To Catch a Predator" would be infinitely more interesting if every so often they'd let one of their contestants win

When I was in my twenties I had a lot of friends who were young single fathers. I think all of my friends with babies were single dads that had relationship problems with their baby mommas. They used to tell me that having a baby was the single best way to meet hot young women. You take a baby to a mall and you'll have to beat off the girls with a stick. Well now that I have a baby I'm doing a lot of beating off all right, but it's not like they told me because apparently my baby emits 'My dad is gay' rays.

It seems like the only young people that I have met because they wanted to talk to me about my son are more young guys in dysfunctional relationships with their baby mommas. There was that one young guy at the new daddy class and then the other day when I was at the Dodge dealer, there was this young guy working there that gave me a ride to the mall while I waited for them to fix my piece of crap Dakota. This young man was in the same situation as the other young dad I met-his girl took the baby and ran. I don't know how these conversations deteriorate but he went from 'It's fun being a dad, huh?' to 'There are no good women left. They're either taken or they're bitches or they're sluts'. I was thinking, what's wrong with slutty bitches? Obviously he was underestimating the fun one can have with a good slutty bitch. Those are the best kind!

I'm getting sort of tired of being the guy these total strangers choose to dump their life baggage on. Not so much because the conversations are depressing, but I'm tired of feeling helpless to console them and not knowing what to say. I decided I'd just be totally supportive of everything this one guy was saying and throw it all right back at him with plus ten enthusiasm. I said "Hell yeah they're all slutty bitches! You know what? I secretly say 'Fuck Yeah!' when I hear about a serial killer cutting off the heads of hot college girls. I applaud the murder suicide husbands who kill their wives. Good for them! And when I watch that 'To Catch a Predator' show I keep hoping that I'll finally see the one guy that wins and gets to molest the decoy girl." The next ten minutes of the ride were pretty quiet but when we finally got to the mall just before he let me out of the car he said, "Dude, you know 'To Catch a Predator' isn't a fuckin' game show." Then I clicked my tongue, gave him a thumbs up and winked, "Yeah, but that doesn't stop you from winning at the home version!"

Down, Right, Left, Up, Down, Down, Left

Now that nobody cares about the Transformer game anymore, the codes to unlock G1 Optimus Prime and Megatron have hit the game magazines and websites. Codes have also been released for invincibility and unlocking all the stages. This weekend I will be tearing up Cybertron as an invincible Optimus Prime.

I would buy comics from you right now but that goes against my policy of not being a total cockholster who takes advantage of people

The last few email newsletters from Mile High Comics have been downright depressing. Chuck the president has contracted west nile virus for the second time after being told he'd never get it again. As his health deteriorates he's been cutting prices on all the back issue comics in his inventory. What's even weirder is that he's come up with a coupon code named after his disease that offers even greater discounts upon checkout. It's scary to watch and I feel bad for him, but damn there are some good deals here. Check out Chuck's the last email:


WESTNILE Sale Continues!

Howdy!

I have to keep things very short today, as I am even more ill right now than I was on Thursday. I really don't want to belabor the point, but this seeming second case of West Nile (or whatever it is...) that I've contracted has been progressing steadily in intensity. I now have a really hard time with even simply mental processing, and the headaches are becoming more frequent and intense. I just hope this stops progressing, really soon...

While I may be feeling really poorly right now, the additional 20% off that I provided all of you via the WESTNILE codeword sale that I began on Thursday really worked wonders. I realize that allowing all of you to loot our inventory at 50%-80% off will hurt us in the longer term, but quite frankly, I just don't care right now. I'd rather have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that business will be great while I'm not able to be here. So go ahead, use the WESTNILE codeword to grab even our very best books at 50% off. On any another day I really might object to your buying our books for next to nothing, but right now you'd be doing me a real favor if you placed a large order...

That's it. It took me over 20 minutes to compose just the two paragraphs above. I'd love to write some more, but I just don't have it in me today.

Happy collecting!

Chuck Rozanski,
President - Mile High Comics, Inc.

Ten seconds after I took the picture a chupacabra came out of the UFO and my son ate him

After making the trip to the monument marking the official middle of nowhere, I was driving the family back home. There was an eBay auction for a robot toy I wanted to get back in time to bid on. Then we passed a sign that said "Devil's Tower 50 miles" and I thought, screw robots!

Devil's Tower has been something I always wanted to see and I felt like a real dad going for it. I always laughed at doofus dads in the movies that took their families on trips that the family obviously never wanted to go on. But it wasn't so funny when the tables were turned and the doofus dad was me. How could that happen? I thought I was a cool dad. I should have known I was dumb when I invited my own father to come with me to see the tower the first time he came to South Dakota and he didn't want to go. My wife really didn't want to be there and my son is too young to know the difference between Devil's Tower and a strip club. I now realize I drug them along. I thought I was a cool dad. As I stood at the base of Devil's Tower with my own family and we looked up at this big weirdly shaped green mountain I realized I had become Homer Simpson. I also realized Homer Simpson has a great time being Homer Simpson.

There's a little campground next to a small post office and some souvenier shops at the entrance before you pay ten bucks to get into the Devil's Tower national park. For half a second my wife and I were debating whether we were going to go to the park or if the view from far away was just as good as the up close ten dollar one. Of course since I was the dad I was determined to get us all as close to the tower as possible and the only reason we stopped before the entrance was to get t-shirts. Unfortunately my wife didn't want one but I got one anyways, plus some awesome UFO themed post cards!

The whole reason I even wanted to go in the first place was because of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Knowing what I know now, my mom probably didn't think taking me and my sister (who were four and three in '79) to see that scary movie with aliens was a good idea. I was too little to understand what movies were really and I was so frightened at the end of that movie I thought aliens really were abducting us. But taking your family to scary uncomfortable places is just something dads do. I understand that now. Taking me to see Close Encounters when I was four was probably just as bad an idea as me taking my grumpy family to Devil's Tower one late Saturday evening 28 years later. I wonder if in thirty years my son will torture his family in a Devil's Tower related fashion. It's becoming somewhat of a dad tradition around here.

Great looking stuff everybody else knew about before me but that I didn't find out about until it came out on Playstation Store these past few weeks

The Playstation Store has been releasing short two minute episodes in a five part animated series for their upcoming game "Heavenly Sword". The cartoon reminds me a lot of The Maxx. It looks really great in HD. So far two episodes are out.

Part I

Part II

Then there's the trailer for some game called TimeShift. Holy crap that video is awesome. I remember one of the bad guys in SilverHawks could stop time. If he knew what he was doing he could have totally butt raped all the SilverHawks and crapped in their plane. But instead he was an idiot. Such a fantastic power was totally wasted on such a stupid character. Luckily this game does not take its inspiration from SilverHawks.

I have a weakness for Jet Li movies. This one called 'War' has that same guy from 'The One'. I would watch it even if they called it 'The Two'.



And finally there's this movie called WALL-E made by the guys who did Toy Story, Monster Story, Nemo's Story and all those other CGI 'story' movies for little kids that I haven't seen. But this one is interesting because it's a robot with a speech impediment and you know how I love that combination.

The Fooshing of the Bells OR: In the future everywhere will be famous for 15 minutes

Back in the early days of Antarctic exploration, the Russians founded Vostok Station at what they believed to be the South Pole. Unfortunately they were wrong and everybody laughed at them. Then the Americans found it and put a pole there, but the ice keeps moving so they have to replant it repeatedly and everybody laughs at them. So they gave up and just made what they call the ceremonial South Pole which is a much more photogenic place with all flags and tablets and stuff that people go to take pictures next to. Up here in the northern hemisphere I thought the geographic center of the United States was somewhere in Kansas. Boy was I wrong! Last week there was a story in the Rapid City Journal about how there's going to be a big ceremony for the unveiling of a gigantic granite compass about 50 miles northwest of here marking the geographic center of the country. Apparently I was taught US geography by russians.

Belle Fourche, South Dakota is a really tiny little town out in the middle of nowhere about 10 miles from South Dakota's border with Wyoming. They pronounce it 'Bell Foosh' but if you try to use that pronunciation with Google's free 411 service, 1-800-Goog-411, the computer will tell you you're an idiot. There's really not a lot there, but what the Bell Fooshers have figured out is that if you count Alaska and Hawaii, it's approximately the geographic center of the United States. And since South Dakota is all about the tourisms, they built a really big ass compass which they put in place last week at the ceremonial center of the country. This isn't actually the true geographic center of the country, that's about ten miles north. But that's even more out in the middle of nowhere than Belle Fourche is and I guess they took a cue from the US Antarctic Program because the compass is right smack in picturesque downtown Bell Foosh.

Over the weekend we went to go check out the marker and I was overcome by the majesty of the place. A little boy walked up to me and asked me something. I figured he wanted to know about the compass so I told him it was a monument to all the people who died in the 'center of the America wars'. It really does look like some kind of war memorial. Then I took my Alternators Optimus Prime and placed it right in the center of the monument and started crying until the little boy told me he wanted to know where they were having the Guitar Hero II tournament. I told him that wasn't until next week. I hope they don't make Puerto Rico or Iraq the 51st state anytime soon because that thing looks really heavy.

Monument officially commemorating South Dakota's status as "The Middle of Nowhere"

Most people discard the box and keep the toy, but most people are not the king of imaginary lands named after cranial abnormalities

Deal of the week is Image Anime's Transformers Collection series #15 reissue Stepper for $20! I already have that one but I did order their Binaltech Overdrive for $40. Binaltech Overdrive is one of those Japanese toys with extra features that makes you think the US version got the shaft (or in this case, it didn't). While Binaltech Overdrive got the drive shaft that turned into a gun barrel, Overdrive's American counterpart, Alternators Windcharger, did not. Alternators Windcharger was rumored to be a victim of Honda's assertion that giving the toy a long gun barrel was too violent an image to be associated with their brand. This puts Binaltech Overdrive high on my list of "Must have Binaltechs for people who hate Binaltechs".

Somewhere a toy robot
is missing these exact parts

I did at one point own Alternators Windcharger. I bought it at the Hasbro store at Botcon 2006 for $15(!) and then I traded it away the next day after I did a head swap to it for the art contest. I think this gives that toy the record for shortest period I've ever owned a roboplastico and also, the distinction of being the only figure whose head is the only body part that made it home.

Realizing that I wasn't a good sculptor never stopped me from embarrasing myself

In October it'll be 5 years since I started resin casting as a hobby. I've started a new folder at Flickr Macrocrania called High Def CSF celebrating that anniversary with a couple of pictures of the things I've made over the years. It's mostly resin robots but I want it to be a celebration of my favorite things I've made regardless of the medium. Although I've done little writeups of my work before, I plan to make this Flickr album a good source of decent pictures because you know the world was just begging for a high res shot of the Last Autochode.

Oh yeah who's gonna hook you up with this week's hottest ROBO MUDDA FUCKIN PLASTICOS? TOYS R US, BEEYOTCHES!

OMG I MADE 800 DOLLARS ALTERNATORS ARE FOR ASSHOLES

Yay for scalping OR: OMG VHTF TOY ROBTOS from a fart-free home

Whoa I cannot believe how I'm raking in the dough on eBay. I don't mean to brag but recently I sold an extremely rare VHTF GoBots mechanical space chicken (that cost me nine dollars) for a penny. I also sold a couple of EXTREMELY HARD TO FIND jet robots along with a robot monkey (all three originally cost me over $25) all for a whopping five bucks. I think from now on I will just put my money in boxes and send it off to people. But at least I'm not the guy who sold a Super Fire Convoy for four dollars.

During my last round of selling I found myself rooting for certain bidders. I would look at the bid histories of some of the guys bidding on my auctions and I could tell there were some really big fans of the total garbage GoBots and Air Commanders stuff I was selling. I was hoping one guy in particular would win one auction because I could tell he was amassing an impressive collection
of Air Commanders. But he got outbid by someone who was willing to pay me more and I ain't in this to help hardcore devotees of crappy obscure toylines so I'm not too sad that he didn't win. In the end all I want is to have enough room cleared so that I can see the floor of my robot room. I don't give a crap who wins as long as they send me the kitty.

Nowadays it's in vogue to hate scaplers and sclaping toy robots but for me to do so is hypocritical. The only difference between me and them is that people want what they're selling. At least those guys have a plan instead of the bizarrely complex catch and release program my robot collecting has become. Besides, I see other 'collectors' participate in the exact same behavior they bemoan scalpers for but when a collector does it, somehow it becomes 'redefining their collection' or 'refocusing their collecting goals'. Screw that! When I ebay toy robots I call it redistributing crap to those who truly enjoy eating it. I don't need no hoity toity explanation to ease my conscience while I lose money selling GoBot chicken machines for a penny.

One thing that amuses me about other eBay sellers is how they over inflate the rarity of the stuff they bought the other day at their local mass produced retail consumption warehouse. Have you read these auction descriptions? "This shit I found at Wal-Mart is so rare!" And I'm thinking, dude-anything you find at Wal-Mart, by virtue of it being something found at Wal-Mart, is not rare.

And another thing-why do eBay sellers even bother to describe their stuff as Mint In Sealed Box? Sure the toy robots inside may be untouched but hot damn all the boxes look like total ass lately. At least I'm honest with my descriptions. Nobody who had bought my stuff can argue that it came in better shape than they expected. To me, the term MISB used to conjure thoughts of an immaculate specimen of a toy in a case fresh unmutilated package, but nowadays use of the term MISB is at best ironic. They may as well mean Mint in sealed Box of Dog Turds. Why do these boxes look like they got kicked up and down ten flights stairs? And I don't mean little stairs, I mean crazy ass wacko MC Escher stairs. I wish their moms left these sellers Mint in Sealed Placenta.

In space only the crazies get to be heroes

If a guy you knew for a while suddenly told you he was your long lost brother would you believe him? If one day you caught him talking to people only he could see, wouldn't you be scared that he was a total psycho? And if he constantly got into fights that sometimes led to limb amputations, wouldn't you be pissed that he's always getting in trouble? Then if the same guy told you that the evil king of the galaxy was his dad, and by extension-yours, would you believe him? THEN WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS KISSING HIM?

This cartoon girl butt is proudly brought to you by DODGE-makers of the RAM

I got that Kiss Play Convoy I wrote about last week. I'm sure Dodge is proud to have their logo and vehicle likeness placed in such close proximity to cartoon hoochie butt. However it's kind of fitting because most people think Dodge trucks are total ass.

Hot Mod

About a week and a half ago, Jeff from one of the Yahoogroups I'm on noticed a YahooJapan auction for a Hot Rod that had been modified so that the legs extend a bit further than normal. I first thought that Hot Rod with extended legs was some sort of prototype figure that was only seen in the 1986 catalog. But it turns out all Hot Rods have this feature. Apparently there are more details sculpted into the knees of the figure, but for whatever reasons Takara decided not to engineer the lower legs to extend far enough to see these areas. Not content to let the Japanese have all the fun, the call went out to anyone on our group brave and willing enough to try to modify their Hot Rod accordingly. A guy on our group named Martin has experience with modifications like this but he doesn't have a spare Hot Rod to mess with at the moment so while he gets one I figured I'd give this a go. Sometimes attempting these modifications is scary but I had an extra reissue Rodimus Major I bought in Turkey so I figured what the hell-it's trilingual packaging anyway so I've got nothing to lose. You can see in the picture above how the modification adds approximately a quarter inch / half centimeter to the height of 'ol Rodimus Rod (or whatever they're calling him nowadays). That's the modded reissue on the left and a Targetmaster Hot Rod on the right.

You can see here upon dissassembling the leg how much of Hot Rod's knee never gets extended. There are some nice sculpted details that never get exposed.



Here is the basic lowdown of what needs to be done using the right leg as the example. All I used was a screwdriver and a dremel. The screwdriver dissassembles the leg and the dremel sands down two raised bars that need to be made flush with the lower blocks below them. One of the bars is on the rear leg panel and the other is on the front.



Care must be taken not to cut the bars down too much or else the leg will not catch and Hot Rod will never stand up at all. I trimmed slightly too much on one of the forward panels but not enough to destroy the figure. I've just got one knee that's ever so slightly looser than the other. The lower legs still lock securely but if I had gone any deeper I would have wrecked the figure.



Here's a closeup of the knee areas showing just how much of an extension I got out of this. Good luck if you choose to try it. Remember not to trim those blocks down too far!

I know SD is South Dakota but which one is HD?

Despite the Blu-Ray logo being displayed prominently on the front of the box, it turns out 60 percent of PS3 owners don't know it has a Blu-Ray player. I find that really hard to believe. It's like not knowing your triple changer has a third mode. Are the people dishing out over $500 for these systems really that dumb? Amongst the 40 percent of people that were aware of the Blu-Ray capability, only half of them used it the last ten times they turned the thing on. That I can believe. I think that's due to the short list of movies out so far. I've only watched one Denzel Washington movie on Blu-Ray in all the months I've had my PS3. Once Transformers comes out I'll buy that and I'm waiting for Blu-Ray Ghost Rider to come down in price a bit, which I think it will eventually at Wal-Mart.

A better question would be how many times people used their PS3's DVD upscaler to watch DVDs on thier HDTVs. But I'm getting the impression that most people wouldn't know how to use that functionality either. I suspect a lot of people continue to watch standard definition broadcasts on thier HDTVs because they don't have channels in thier area broadcasting in HD or they don't have the tuner. Ultimately I think this shows the vast majority of American consumers suffer from techno-illiteracy and a tendency to consume for the sake of consumption. Which is a shame because it's really cool to do things like stream music and movies from my PC to my home stereo via the PS3, which is something every PS3 owner can do but many are apparently not aware of.

All this time I was feeling dumb for only owning two games. Not being a hardcore gamer made me feel inferior to other PS3 owners but considering how much use I get out of it as an internet browser, a DVD player/upscaler and a streaming media player (plus with all the downloadable HD movie trailers and crap from the Playstation store) I don't feel so bad.

Stop busting my bows!

While the news media distracts us with stories of stock markets and global warmings and Iraqs, sinister forces have been at work hoping we won't notice their nefarious deeds! I listen to a lot of baby music now that I'm a dad and one thing I've noticed is how politically correct a lot of the songs have become. While we were preoccupied by healthcare and the war on drugs, the sinister forces have been changing the lyrics to baby music! On one CD I have, they changed the lyrics to the 'Rock A Bye Baby' song from how I remember them:

De-pussification training: Start early

"When the bow breaks the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all."

To:

"When the bow breaks the cradle will fly
And up will drift baby into the sky."

What the hell? Why did they do this? What is so horrible about the first version? Are they afraid of damaging the delicate psyches of babies that have no comprehension in the first place? Since when did babies become such pansies that we had to make all the nursery rhymes safe and non threatening? This is total baby pussification mind control if you ask me. I have decided to combat these negative influences by coming up with my own lyrics! Whenever I'm putting the Prince of Macrocrania to sleep I now sing this much more manly version:

"When the bow breaks the cradle will fall
So don't let those fuckers bust on your bows!"

Skidsmarks the spot OR: A farewell to Alts

It was the year 2003 and my life was looking awesome. I had just gotten out of Air FOrce after seven years of being paid to look at the sky and figure out if it was raining. I was having fantastic unprotected interracial sex with a girl I had tricked into marrying me. At 29 I was working my dream job as a Target stockboy again and starting Community College in Tucson, Arizona in the hopes of earning a degree in automotive upholstery refinishing. I was on the fast track to success. Then it all came to an end when I forgot that my woman was still in the Air Force and they could screw with my life by doing weird stuff like sending us both to Turkey. And that's exactly what they did.

So, accepting the certainly sucky future I disenrolled in Community College, gave Target my two weeks notice and with Turkey on my mind I went to one last Transformers convention in Chicago. Roboplasticos were the last thing on my mind when there at the Official TF Collectors Convention, Hasbro announced they were starting a new line of robots called Alternators. They debuted the line there with the first two figures to the amazement of all the gathered toy robot nerds. Many were impressed that this new line would feature 1:24 scale officially licensed likenesses of automobiles from real life vehicle manufacturers. The level of engineering that went into making these toys with opening doors, trunks, hoods and detailed engines and interiors was astounding to many people. I remember seeing the first Alternator, Smokescreen, and thinking it was total ass.

So off I went to live in Turkey for the next two years as a dependent spouse. We lived on a tiny Turkish air base where they didn't allow US flags to fly and even worse, the base exchange store did not carry toy robots. I wasn't really into them anyway so I didn't care. After seeing Smokescreen I decided to boycott the Alternators line, which is really easy when you're living in Turkey and they're not in any stores anyways. But after a few months those Alternators started popping up at the base exchange and my resolve weakened. I was a lonely boy far from home. I was desperate for the touch of toy robot plastic. And in a moment of weakness when the exchange was having a ten dollars off sale I strayed and bought the Dodge Viper Side Swipe. I felt so dirty. I was a dirty, dirty boy.

I feel like my boycott still existed because in the very beginning I was boycotting them a little by not getting Smokescreen but temptation was so tough to resist because Alternators made me feel like a man as long as I kept them in their car modes. They looked like highly detailed model cars when we had guests over but at night after the nookie I would sneak out of bed and turn them into robots when my wife wasn't looking. Back in the states, the Alternators line was plagued by crappy distribution and poor sales so it was common for some of the figures to become insanely rare while others went unsold for months. In Turkey I was always a few waves behind and I really wasn't in a position to complain about missing one or two. I was lucky to have any. It was a dark time where I charted the progress in my life not by what I had accomplished in terms of education and career, but in toy robots. And by 'dark time' I mean 'totally awesome'.

Antarctimus Prime

In 2005 I began working in Antarctica and on the plane ride down there from Turkey I had a layover in Singapore. The Singapore airport had an insanely cool toystore and it was there that I found Alternators Meister. I think that made me the first toy robot nerd to bring an Alternator to Antarctica. Meister would be joined by another Alternator a few months later (thanks to my sister back home who sent me Tracks) and the next year I would take Alternators Optimus Prime to the ice. I was making history! It was a sort of retarded history, but it was history nonetheless.

In 2006 I went to Botcon and bought an Alternators Windcharger, which I then modified with a little plastic head I made in the likeness of the human named Chris Ryall. Chris is the editor in chief of IDW publishing, the current Transformers comic license holders. Chris really liked the "Chrischarger" toy and I traded it to him for a comic book. It was all very gay but it was good times. The Botcon people thought my Alternators Chrischarger was so great they prominently showcased it in their gallery of art contest entries (it's the middle picture in the 14th row down).

I'm dissapointed now as Hasbro has announced that after 4 years and 27 releases, Alternators is coming to an end. I have a lot of wonderful memories thanks to those toys. It was with much sadness that I bought the Scion xB named Skids, which will probably be my final Alternator. Skids was my Moby Dick because I wasn't willing to pay more than $15 for it but ShopKo wouldn't cut their clearance price down below $16.75 for the longest time. Finally they clearanced their remaining stock down to $12.50 last week. I'm sure the ShopKo cashiers will be glad that I'm no longer repeatedly asking them to tell me what the price is every time I go to their store every week. Farewell, Alternators. Unprotected interracial sex won't be the same without you.

Lost in the middle of nowhen OR: It's hard to be nostalgic after eBay destroyed the space time continuum

I used to frequent a comic book store back in 1996 before I got on eBay. The store manager and I would reminisce about Transfomers because at the time there was really no market for them and I would enjoy bitching that it was hard for me to revisit the days of my youth when I couldn't surround myself in toy robots. It seemed like they all just dissappeared and took my childhood with them. The store manager told me that in terms of toys, nothing made after 1983 was as hopelessly lost as I thought. He said that after '83, people who ran mom and pop stores began stockpiling cases of every post Star Wars toyline. He told me that Transformers may not seem popular (at the time they weren't) but I shouldn't think nobody collects them or that huge lots of stock aren't out there. He said it may not be easy to find, but there was an assload of toy robots waiting to be bought if you knew where to look. Until someone could break open the buyer/seller barriers separating the old toys from the people who want them, there would be no revisiting the bygone eras of my roboplastico childhood. He seemed quite wise to me even though he was an ex-army helicopter pilot that fell out of his helicopter.

Fast forward to yesterday when I was driving out here in the Black Hills of South Dakota and I hit a long stretch of nothing but road. There were no signs of civilization-no other cars, no buildings. It was just me, my truck and miles and miles of dormant yellow grass on flat hills. I thought that at that moment I could have been anywhere in time. It could have been any year. The scenery was probably just the same then as it was back in 1974. Then it hit me that I had no proof of what year it currently was-no newspaper or watch or nothing. If Marty McFly exploded his DeLorean in front of me and asked what year it was I'd be screwed. I had no proof that I was in 2007. The featureless land gave no hint as to how much mankind had progressed beyond the crappy road I was driving on. I decided why should Marty McFly have all the fun? I wanted to believe it was decades earlier and with the lack of chronological proof saying otherwise, I took South Dakota with me all the way back to the year 1986. The only thing that fucked it up was that I know my truck is a '99 model and that kept jerking me back forward into at least '98. I had made my own retarded version of a time machine but in order for it to work I needed an older car.

As I was stuck in 1986 or something that looked a lot like it, I wondered to myself what really anchors me in the present day and how do I really know I haven't slipped back a couple of decades? Then it hit me that the measure of what generation I live in is what the pop culture is like. Why else would they come up with phrases like 'the MTV generation' or 'children of the eighties'? We are anchored in time by what's on TV and what's on the shelves at Wal-Mart. If you asked me what 1985 was like I couldn't tell you anything about the socio-political events of the time but I could tell you all about the year I got the Constructicons and the Dinobots. We may as well forget the number designations and just call them 'The Cosby Decade' or 'The Iron Maiden Era' or 'The year McDonalds did those Dukes of Hazzard Happy Meals in the shape of the General Lee'. That's how I remember them.

The great thing about when I was little was that if you didn't buy one of whatever was the popular toy when they came out, once they sold out that was it. You got no more chances to participate in that shared pop culture experience. Consumption of specific consumer goods and Toys R Us toy aisle resets marked the years for me and defined the stakes in the game I called living in the eighties. There were no second chances to go back and experience a Coleco handheld Pac Man game or a Go-Bots model kit. So I came up with these sort of pop culture generational boundaries that marked the passage of time by events and merchandise unique to that era. I knew who I was and where I had been and my experiences differentiated me from mister Joe Pokemon five year old guy.

But then eBay hit me in 1998 and nothing was the same anymore. Whatever chunk of the human experience I grew up with that defined my life-all the tv shows and toys that made it up-it's all on ebay right now. Any era of the past can be participated in by Buying-It-Now. There are no more pop culture generational boundaries anymore. Thanks to TV on DVD I can have a kinship with everyone who grew up watching anything from Welcome Back Kotter to Sopranos. Much of my identity as a person was erased by eBay, the only thing keeping my sense of self intact is that I can't afford some of the crazy prices for old stuff. In a way, high ebay prices are the only thing protecting me from my childhood totally coming back. My generation may once have been referred to as children of the eighties and we are forever marked by the handful of popular cartoons of the day. But today's kids have access to multiple generations of cartoons and aren't at the mercy of what's on TV right now to entertain them in their childhood years. They cannot be as easily defined by what common entertainment they watched a in a specific era. They are probably better described as the Best Buy Bourgeois or Citizens of Circuit City.

Back in the nineties I used to live in a state of constant nostalgia, wishing for the old days. But ever since eBay and Best Buy erased the buyer/seller boundaries between the old days and now, nostalgia had its balls cut off. The past is all around and it can be bought if you want it more than the other guy bidding against you on eBay. You don't even have to go that far, though. The internet has all sorts of time warp sites just waiting to take me back for free. I can even go to the library and relive the old news of the day and virtual shop through the old ads. In fact, the reason I sat down to write just now was that I wanted to announce I updated the Vintage Space Toaster Palace with ads for Transformers 1986 and Transformers 1987. So let's hear it for the secondary market and open up a fresh can of 1986 because nothing takes me back to when I was 12 like a good ad for Galvatron pajamas.

Brushes with (relative) fame OR: Thanks for the (almost) memories

The other day I was at the mall and I'm sitting down and this old guy starts talking to me. I guess it was because I had the Prince of Macrocrania with me and for some reason old people really dig babies. I imagine when I'm old I won't want to be around babies because they would remind me of the time I wasted when I was a baby not doing productive things. Well it turns out this guy was the dad of some famous PGA golfer guy and he was expecting me to know who his son was. I think it's kind of unfair to get in a pissing contest over how accomplished your children are with someone like me who's only got a baby. I'm thinking, well it's fantastic your son is a golfer but mine still pees on me. I HAD NO STORIES OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS! I think if I want a boost of self esteem I will hang around kindergartens and tell five year olds about my vast collection of Turkish porn.

That would be my second near brush with celebrity. The first was when I was working at Target back in El Paso in '95 and I met the mom of a girl who was dating Robbin Crosby, the guy who used to play guitar in RATT. She saw I was working in the music section and she needed help with something so we got to talking. I told her I liked RATT and playing guitar badly and she said Robin was teaching lessons. Sure enough, in the El Paso Times classifieds I found an ad Robbin put offering to teach people guitar. I never pursued it and a couple years later Robbin died and I felt dumb for having missed the opportunity to at least meet the guy. I saw a billboard for a RATT concert that's coming up around here in South Dakota and I almost started feeling sad but then I thought, "Wait! You can't almost feel sad about someone you never really met, dummy!"

I forget-am I masturbating or am I in a Legend of Zelda boss battle with a Dodongo?

The other day I was at the base exchange here at Ellworth Space Station and I came across what I thought was a hot new porn magazine called "Military Spouse". What a great concept! Judging by the cover I thought it was naked pictures of lonely wives of deployed military guys. But then I opened it and it turns out it's about recipes and decorating your bathroom and crap. What a dissapointment. It got me thinking about the golden age of porn at army and air force bases back when I was active duty.

When I joined air FOrce in 1995 they sold all sorts of fantastic porn at the base exchanges. I was impressed with the wide scope of pornographies for sale. The post exchange at my first duty station Fort Hood had a magazine section easily twice as large as the biggest Waldenbooks and it was dominated by a 20 foot long Library of Congress of porn. Those were awesome times. Then I went overseas to Good Korea and I was dissapointed that Korean porn was so awful. They cover up the crotches with badly photoshopped neon bikinis or even worse, multicolored Tetris blocks. I think it's like that for all of Asia. While I percieve Tetris blocks on vaginas to be censorship, I think the Japanese government incorporates video game related images into porn to get Japanese guys interested in women.

Thankfully when I got sent to Good Korea in '98, the post exchange at the little army camp I was at still had a pornorama unlike anything you could find on the streets of Uijongbu. But then some pansies in the Department of Defense decided the military guys were wanking too much and it was getting in the way of our mission defending the earth from the aliens. What can I say they found me out. So they passed the Military Honor and Decency Act and halfway through my Korea tour they took all the good porn out of the exchanges while I was yelling NOOOOO! in slow motion like you see in the movies. It was back to the streets for me and I had to get used to Donkey Kong coming out of asian girls' butts.

Cell shaming

I ran across some Yahoo Japan auctions for four cels from the original Transformers cartoon. They're still going on and right now they have 2 days to go. They're breathtaking and I mean that in a Bob Ross kind of way. The painted background of the one Ravage cell is a beautiful depiction of Arctic ice. I hope the animators at Toei really enjoyed their work and weren't all burnt out on cartoons. Usually talented artists start out doing laborious and unglamorous work just to pay the bills and the worst part was that individual artists weren't credited at the end of the show. I wonder if the background painter was a guy named Takumi who had dreams of painting fantastic Arctic landscapes and debuting them at a prestigious art gallery, but until then he was doing cartoon paintings for toy robot commercials. I'd prefer to believe that Takumi enjoyed working in anime and that his background paintings in the Transformers cartoon were his calling. I hope he was afforded a little bit of fame in his lifetime for his work on the show but like I said, he went uncredited and nobody knew who he was as he walked the streets of Tokyo looking for a pachinko parlor to go unwind. I imagine Takumi may have resented being uncredited a bit and one night at the pachinko parlor he may have overheard two little boys talking about cartoons and one of them liked the Transformers and said Fire in the Sky was his favorite episode because of the beautiful ice paintings. But just as Takumi was about to walk over and appreciatively give the boy some signed arctic background cels he kept from the show because the studio threw them in the garbage after they were done filming them, the other little boy said Transformers sucked and it'll never be good as Gundam. After which, alone and dejected, Takumi walked back to his pachinko machine and committed seppuku by continually banging his head against the pachinko machine until the glss broke and then he slit his throat with one especially sharp shard that was reminiscent of the beautiful arctic icicles he painted for the cartoon that day.

***UPDATE!***

The auctions are over-here's what the 'winners' paid in both yen and real money:

Ravage in the snow - 153,000 yen / $1,296 America money
Optimus Prime and a tree - 46,000 yen / $389 America money
Starscream shooting - 66,000 yen / $559 America money
Megatron and Reflector - 90,000 yen / $762 America money

When I Kiss Play, I Kiss Play to win

I just ordered a Kiss Play Convoy, which is the Japanese version of Alternators Optimus Prime released last year as the premier figure in the Transformers Kiss Play line. Kiss Play is the Japanese only Transformers series where Takara packaged thier version of the Alternators molds along with small cartoony female figures. The figures in and of themselves weren't more risque than a lot of Japanese candy toys. Heck, compared to action figures you can buy at the mall of girls from video games, the Kiss Play figures were actually pretty mild. But where this line caused an uproar was in the packaging and associated fiction where the girls were depicted in a most hardcore Lolicon fashion. There was a bit of backlash from the vast majority of toy robot fans in America because of the overt sexualization of these characters and also because Takara discontinued the use of significant amounts of die cast in their versions of the Alternators. Consequently Takara began miscalculating demand and underproducing subsequent figures in the line, causing toy robots like Kiss Play Rodimus to be in high demand on the secondary market despite the vocal majority of collectors' condemnation of the line as tasteless and perverted. I was surprised to find a video game importer of all places selling Kiss Play Convoy and still at a somewhat reasonable $65. They rarely go up on eBay and just recently an opened one sold for $87. I see that there are four sealed Kiss Play Convoys on ebay right now with over five days to go and they've already been bid up to $35-$60 each. I expect they'll climb to somewhere in the $90-$100 range by auction end so I'm glad I jumped on the online retailer solicitation when I found it.

I am not collecting toy robots, I am operating a bizarrely complex catch and release program with toy robots

I really admire this "Will it Blend" guy because he at least has a plan for what he's going to do with all the crap he buys. This is unlike myself in my twenties, who just would buy stuff without any thought of where I'd put it or the damage I was doing to the space-time continuum. When the time came to finally put all my roboplasticos together in one room after a lifetime of collecting, the resulting super dense mass of die cast parts almost caved in on itself and created a black hole. I swear if I had bought one more robot I would have disappeared South Dakota.

What was I doing? Whatever it was I wasn't doing it effectively. I think moving around constantly over the last ten years contributed to my problem. I never had to worry about how much stuff I was accumulating because I never had it all in one place. I would just leave the bulk of my collection with my mom in Texas while I lived in different places buying more toy robots and sticking them in storage or taking them with me to the next place. Now that I finally have a place to put it all, I understand the enormity of my consumption and I'm trying to right the wrongs of the last decade of excessive roboplastico accumulation. I know one collector with over 5,000 toy robots. Not coincidentally, I also know a guy that lives in his bathroom because his house is full of 5,000 toy robots. I will avoid that fate!

I find myself really anxious and upset as I'm getting my collection sorted and organized for the first time in since forever. Why should getting it presentable like I always dreamed be giving me anxiety attacks? I have this suspicion that cleaning it up means I have to confront what I've done with my time and money over the past 20 years. For once I will be face to face with all I have bought. I am Luke Skywalker going into the tree cave on Dagobah. I sense there is evil in my laundry room and I must confront it.

Getting rid of stuff on ebay has at times been therapeutic. I used to cower in fear every time I stepped into the robot room but now I enter those hallowed halls a conqueror. I can feel their little plastic robot eyes trembling, wondering if they'll be next. It's given me a measure of control over my robots but on the other hand I find myself questioning why I ever bought them in the first place if all I was going to do years later was sell them off. Oh well, there's no sense in trying to guess why I have countless Combaticons, multiple Megatrons, plentiful Primes and too many Terrorcons. Selling the extras off really isn't going to kill me and I think I can cope with not being the king of all robot collections.

I am not above wanting to see Michael Bay direct a live action Yar's Revenge

Back in the 80s it was so hard for me to find geeky people to talk with about toy robots. Nothing has changed but thanks to podcasts I can hear other people as geeky as me talking to each other about toy robots. So it's kind of cool to know these people exist but it really doesn't do me much good because all this technology does is make me feel like a voyeur or even worse, a guy with nothing to contribute overhearing a conversation where cool people talk about interesting things. Podcasts may as well be porn the way they leave me feeling like a spectator, although it's easier to play along watching porn than playing along listening to a podcast (if you know what I mean). I guess the next evolution in nerd interface technology will be a virtual person who will come out of the computer and have geeky conversations with me, at which point I will no longer waste time and energy trying to seek out abstract concepts that have so far eluded me like "friendship" and "multiple willing sex partners".

In years past there'd be only a handful of podcasts a month that would discuss Transformers or other toy robots and I'd eat them up quick. Thanks to Michael Bay I am now drowning in podcasts to listen to featuring conversation about Transformers. Even though the movie's long gone I don't know if I'll ever catch up. Despite how I feel about the opinions expressed, each of the shows is a lot of fun. I wanted Michael Bay's Transformers to be like Spider-Man the Movie but instead I got Spider-Ham the Movie. Oh well. it doesn't mean everybody else thought it sucked. Here's what i've been listening to lately:

The guys at Comic Geek Speak did a great Transformers movie review episode including an interview with Tom Martinek the sequence supervisor for ILM that worked on Transformers. At the end of the show they break out their old TFs and play with them. That was pretty funny to listen to.

This Week In Geek did a slew of Transformers realted shows recently and they were all fun listens. They did a review of the game, a review of the movie and most interestingly an interview with Stan Bush. I do think they got a bit over excited about the game and gave it a way more positive review than any other place I've seen, but I agree with them that it's a fun time and their review works as a nice counterpoint to all the negativity from other gamers.

Finally, Destroy All Podcasts DX did a funny (if overly long) review of the movie in episode 16. They thought it sucked so I was on board from the first moment but unfortunately their review suffered from the same problem as the movie-it went on for waaay too long. They had a couple of good jokes in there but hot damn they droned on for so long, commenting on and dissecting every single scene of the movie. At first I thought they couldn't go wrong because goofing on Michael Bay is so easy but boy did they make it look hard.

If you're going to goof on Michael Bay, maybe YouTube is the best place to do it.

This makes me want to do a video called Crazysteve-Power Collector

I think Mister Rogers' real message was you're special if you have a buttload of toys

There seems to be a lot of Mister Rogers hate going around because a finance professor at Louisiana State doesn't like that Mr. Rogers would tell kids they're special. The professor believes Mister Rogers telling viewers that they were special ingrained a sense of entitlement into kids and they grew up thinking life deserves them favors. So in essence he believes Mister Rogers ruined a generation of American kids. What a moron!

I agree that watching Mister Rogers screwed me over but not for that reason. How could the critics miss the most obvious negative message being broadcast loud and clear from the neighborhood of make believe? How could they not see that Mister Rogers was teaching kids that the accumulation of material possessions, especially toys, was the only way to true happiness? The BEST PART OF THE SHOW was when that trolley came and took the viewers to the kingdom of King Friday the Thirteenth, who ruled the ultimate toy collection land. I grew up wanting to have the sweet bachelor pad Mister Rogers had with a toy train running through the living room and a basement full of puppets living in gigantic castle dioramas and scratch built trees and shit. Man, I think his setup was awesome. If he was still alive I'd want him teaching the toy customizing and diorama building classes at the next Botcon.