The title says it all.  I’m going for a spin with my Transformers Revenge of the Fallen (ROTF) Sideswipe today!

If you had been buying and reading our local “The New Paper” tabloid, you’ll probably know about the The New Paper (TNP) Dollars printed on the top left hand corner of the front page since 2 months ago.  The TNP Dollars are for readers to cut out and bid for electrical items, bikes etc., offered by “The New Paper”.  My family buys this paper everyday but we don’t bid for the prize items. 

I cut out all the TNP Dollars for my action figures to play and set up a mini ‘economy’ with.  However most of them are clueless on how to use ‘money’.  Hence my Transformers Animated Swindle action figure gathered up all the TNP cash (total of TNP$ 8,550 to date) and is asking for SGD 34.00 for them all.  

Interested buyers, please email me via my Contact Me page for further details to purchase these TNP Dollars!  *Note: Do not be detered by Swindle’s namesake.  I can’t help that Hasbro named him that.  Rest assured that I’ll be acting as his agent on the sale of the TNP Dollars!  My online references are found here.

My Ninja Pony went out toy hunting and shopping with me during the weekend.  She set off on her own at a particular departmental store and came back with a report for me:

A male customer in his 30’s was overheard ‘educating’ a store personnel at the toy section on how to differentiate the latest wave of a certain popular and hard-to-find action figures toyline, from the leftover old stocks at the store.  He would also like her to contact him immediately should a new shipment of those toys arrive at the store. 

I think the store personnel must find toy collecting adults weird and quite troublesome, and probaby thinking:

“Come on, grow up, man!  These are toys, and they are all for kids!” 

“They’re all the same Mr, they came from the factory like that!”

Toy hunting season has officially started for me since 2 months ago and will last till Fall or beyond.  Hence it helps to put some of my toys to work and do some ground espionage work for me!  It gives me some content for blogging and also gives me an idea of the current demand and supply of certain toylines, especially those that are tied in with blockbuster movies and popular cartoons!

The premiere of “Wolverine and the X-Men” animated series is finally starting today on our local Okto Channel!  It shall be shown on weekdays on 7.30pm, a good time slot for most people to get home from school or work to watch!  Today’s first episode will be “Hindsight - Part 1″.

Here is my collection of “Wolverine and the X-Men” action figures that I harvested from the departmental stores and Sunday toy market in April.  The photo also shows another use for the (Type 1a & 1b) figurine display boxes from Daiso.  Luckily for the My Little Pony ‘toy drought’ in the same month, if not I won’t have enough ‘Play’ funds to splurge on these.  Plus I was also chasing after some sought after Marvel Universe action figures last month too (That will be in another future blog post).

Many of the popular characters like Magneto, Colossus, Beast and Iceman were initially harder to find, but the stores have began to stock up on all the characters again in the past 2 weeks.  It’s not difficult to find this toyline in the stores now, but the paintwork on every one of them has some defects.  For every 20 pieces of the same figure you come across, only 1 can barely make some reasonable pass grade.  Even the ones I have are not perfect, but I gave up looking for the never-appearing pieces with perfect paintwork, and just settled for the best I could find.

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Last week, I sent my pair of SDCC 07 Super Pony and MLP Fair 07 Exclusive Pony to a pony collector friend here to do some corrective painting.  I got them back over the weekend and I’m so pleased with my friend’s work!  Now if I do not point them out, I believe no one can easily detect where the factory error painting defects once were!  This pair of 2007 exclusive ponies look so smart and pretty posing together for a photo!  They are Zoom the Super Pony, and Fantasia the Fairy Pony, according to my toyfics!

As per LEon’s suggestion, here is my blog post and photos of all 3 Bumblebee figures in my Movie Transformers Legends collection (it wasn’t easy taking these photos as they kept running and racing around the photo studio in excitement).

Here’s Japanese exclusive clear Bumblebee (on extreme right) showing his fellow Movie Legends Bumblebees the crumpled looking original plastic package he came in.  The other 2 were too polite to tell him that they came MOC and MIB, even as normal store-released figures, haha!

Here we have all 3 Autobots posing for a group photo in their robot modes. From left to right (battle-damaged, clear and normal Bumblebees).  Their faces have the same colors and they have an Autobot symbol on their upper chests.  Only battle-damaged Bumblebee’s (extreme left) logo is in red.  Normal Bumblebee (extreme right) has extra blue paintings on his legs.

Over here, all 3 Autobots are posing for a group photo in their car modes.  Battle-damaged Bumblebee (extreme left) has extra ‘burnt marks’ painted on him but at least he has a painted rear screen, unlike normal Bumblebee (extreme right) which left it out.  The rear stripes on the latter are also overpainted from the boot to the rear screen.  Overall, I find that battle-damaged Bumblebee most resembles the run-down 1974 Camaro in the movie.  This figure came in a 2-pack with Decepticon Scorponok.

I wanted take more photos, but my camera ran out of battery power so I stopped at 3 photos.  Anyway, the 3 Bumblebees were getting impatient and they immediately zoomed off when I announced that the photo session had to be ended early.  Till now, I haven’t found where in my room are they hiding at yet… I just hope that I don’t accidentally step on any of them tonight…!

You can tell how obsessed I am with my San Diego Comic Con 2008 Exclusive Pony (I call her “Ninja Pony“) by the number of posts that I have devoted to her so far.  She also won my inaugural “Top Favourite Toy of the Year” award in 2008.  Do you know that your toys can become obsessed as well?  Here’s a little trivia to share with you: -

Just last month, I was addicted to a Korean historical drama series called “Il-Ji-Mae”.  It’s better known as “Yi Zhi Mei” in Chinese.  It’s basically about the life and adventures of a young Robin Hood-styled chivalous thief who robs from the rich, and then distributes the loot to the poor and oppressed peasants. 

He’s nicknamed by the peasants as “Il-Ji-Mae”, which literally translates to “a stalk of plum blossom”, because he always leaves a small painting of a stalk of plum blossom behind at each crime scene to taunt his rich victims.

Now my Ninja Pony also became obsessed with the show and she starts to believe she’s “Il-Ji-Mae” too.  For weeks she had been pestering me to get her a stalk of plum blossom as her copycat trademark tool.  Now that Chinese New Year is just around the corner, there are many stalls selling big branches filled with lots of plastic plum blossoms here, but I didn’t want to buy a big branch just to get a small stalk for her.

Hence I decided to be really cheap and scoured the grounds near the flower stalls to look for discarded small stalks.  I was lucky to find one very small stalk with just one plum blossom attached to it.  It looks good next to my Il-Ji-Mae pony and now she’s so happy with her little plum blossom prop that I have peace in my ears at last!

If you’re keen to purchase an “Il-Ji-Mae” pony, I have a MIB one (minus the plum blossom stalk) for sale at my online toy store.  Go see how she looks like mint-in-package and with her original box!

Il-Ji-Mae DVDs (20 episodes in Korean & Chinese dialogue with English and Chinese subtitles), are now selling at our local TS VCD stores for only SGD 19.00 each.  You can just go buy the DVD instead of watching it online!

It was a historical moment for Singapore this weekend, and especially today when the world’s first F1 night race was held right here in our shores, right in the heart of our city centre.  I managed to catch the live telecast of the race through the local and sports cable channels on my TV with my family.  Whenever the commercials came on, we just switched to the other channel and vice versa.

It was also a night of action along the race tracks as the cars found their placings ‘re-shuffled’ by race incidents and the deployment of the safety car.  Overall, it was a night to remember by F1 fans and connections, and also the local organisers and everyone here in Singapore.

A few of my most privileged toys got to watch this exciting motor sports live with me.  They were mostly my Transformers Legends mini figures as well as the Hot Rocks dream team plus their connections.  Only they among my toys could really appreciate the thrill of the F1 race as some of the Transformers characters are race cars. 

The leading rock band of my toyfics world, the Hot Rocks were seen checking out their new stage for their coming weekend concert. The Hot Rocks, consisting of lead singer Hot Shot (black color), R.E.V. (yellow color) and X-Brawn (grey & green color), have been the most popular and most sensational hit among my toys for over a year already.

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As the clutter clearing and room re-organizing ‘hurricane’ swept through my room and study hall this week, many of my toys and other things got ‘uprooted’ from their ’squatter settlements.  My Transformers Legends mini figures became among the uprooted ‘victims’ as they await the allocation of their new accommodations. 

For the moment, they managed to find shelter and a temporary home in this small empty box.  The Autobots and Decepticons were very cooperative in this time of difficulty and they sorted out the space in the box themselves.  However once they are out of the box, they would resume their daily ‘Transformers battles’.  This photo was snapped just before their ‘bedtime’ when all of them were already ‘exhausted’ from the day’s ‘activities’.