Pound World Sell The Coolest Toys

When people mention pound shops and toys you might picture dolls with their faces printed in the wrong places, toy guns that look like they'll slice a child's hand up if they hold them,  little plastic houses with furniture twice the height of one of the floors, clone action figures in entirely inappropriate metallic colours, superhero merchandise that looks about as legitimate as a nine pound note and plastic horses whose boxes claim they're ponies and whose heads have fallen off and are rolling around loose in those lying boxes.

And that would all be entirely fair because I've seen all of those things myself, but there are also the totally brilliant toys as well. No really, there are.

This lot for example:

A bunch of cool stuff.

That lot are all pretty awesome and came from my local Pound World and only half of them only cost 50p.

Zoobles!
Zoobles are cool. They're little balls that turn into brightly coloured animals or little brightly coloured animals that turn into balls. One or the other.

They don't look like a whole lot when you take them out of their packets, but tap them against that little magnetic base their heads pop up and you get...

Aren't they cute? ^-^
One weird thing though, Redford (the one in the middle) is blue according to the packet, but the actual Redford there is purple. That's weird, right? I know the figures come in different colours in different sets. Maybe the individual packets have different colours as well and it's just coincidence that the other two match their packaging colours?

Only one way to find out!

Nope! The Redfords have just been packed in the wrong packets. Maybe that's how these ones ended up in Pound World?

Anyway we have...

Buzzabelle!

Harry! (I'm totally going to get Harry in some more colours.)

And of course Redford.

Aren't they cute?
There are eight in this wave. I am so getting the other five.

Next up something I normally see for about £2 each in most stores, but are currently in Pound World on a 2 for a £1 deal.

Littlest Pet Shop figures are adorably cute, so it's pretty obvious I'd be a fan of them. Unfortunately in this case I got the same one twice, but hey, who's going to complain about getting two Tweety-birds for a pound?

"We tought we taw a puddy tat!"

You do find some odd things in pound stores though. Tie in toys for the French release of the Magic Roundabout movie?

Check!

I once read that The Magic Roundabout wasn't so much translated from French to English as a new writer sat down and just made up new dialogue to go with what they were seeing.

I'd like to think that when The Magic Roundabout movie hit France they returned the favour. Hell that's apparently what happened in the US and the UK and US speak the same language! Mostly.

Last up some Hello Kitty toys!

I like Hello Kitty toys. I'm a big fan of Hello Kitty toys. If you were feeling charitable you might call me a collector of Hello Kitty toys. For the less charitable amongst you, hoarder might also be an appropriate term to use.

I also like constructable things, though the buildable Hello Kitty figures are a little disappointing in that regard. None of the pieces from these two figures are compatible with each other, not even the bows. How am I going to make new outfit combinations from all my duplicates if I can't swap parts!?

Oh well, they're only 50p each, so I can't really complain.

"Now you go over there and I'll photograph you pretending to cook."

So to sum up, Pound World have cool toys and you should go have a poke around in there occasionally, specially if you like small, cute things.

Robots, Lego and Hello Kitty

A little while back I did a post about the awesome things I would sell if I had a toy company. Well, I designed an ad!

Then my scanner went and then I forgot all about it, but here it is!



So, who wants to give me money to make them, huh?
They'll be awesome I'm tellin' ya.

Talking about toys, have you seen these?



How cute are they?
Mega Bloks (Yes, I know, but they're really not as bad as some people say) have been selling Hello Kitty sets for a while now. These ones go for about £2 for a figure a brick and an accessory in a blind-pack, and £4 for the slightly larger sets.

There's another one of those £4 sets with Hello Kitty wearing a chef's hat, but I can't really justify buying that one too.

Here's the background bricks, unobscured by cats.



Here are the accessories. They're all pretty nice other than the balloons. The balloons are pretty rubbish to be honest. The rest though, they're very nice, specially the cupcake and the umbrellas.



One of the nice little touches I like with the Hello Kitty sets is that pieces that could just be straight recolours have properly different schemes. Likewise, the fact that only one of the two figures in the raincoat has buttons that stand out and that one of the party hats is patterned and the other one isn't.



I'd like it if the two versions of the sailor suit were a bit more different from each other. Maybe another main colour, although I suppose blue is the obvious colour, or maybe make one of them sleeveless, or something like that. Anyway, it's a minor complaint. I still like them. : )

What's kind of odd is that whereas the Halo and Marvel blind-packs all seem to include a 2x4 brick, only three out of the five Hello Kitty ones I've got have them. One of them has a 2x2 brick to stand on and one has a 2x6 flat piece. Weird.

Also kind of weird is that all four of the bricks have text printed on the end.



I wonder what those numbers mean and whether there's similar ones on the bricks in the Halo and Marvel ones.

All in all, they're pretty funky. There are two characters other than Hello Kitty in the larger sets, her sister (Hello Kitty with the bow on the wrong side) and a sheep character of some description. I don't know what she's called.

I've seen a couple of images of what appears to be series two of the blind-packs including two of the sheep and one of the sister. Hopefully they'll actually show up in the shops soon.

Hello Kitty appears in Commander Cottontail as the ambassador for the Sanrio-Mega Bloks alliance. That isn't much of a spoiler seeing as the entire comic is based around a one off strip featuring her and the commander, which I've already posted about a bit.

Anyway, what's next?

Oh, yes. I have a friend called Pete and he's awesome. See, he knew I wanted this Lego minifigure, but couldn't really justify or afford it. A short while after I mentioned it, one turned up in the post. Brilliant.

Do you want to see what I wanted it for?
Well, I'm going to show you anyway. =P

It's a little Lego me! Complete with stripy sleeves, a Mega Bloks red umbrella and a big black hat.

And a Brick Forge acoustic guitar. Tha-wum!

Of course there's a few part that I have been buying myself on ebay, such as the torso on the figure below.



Can you guess who it is?
I hope so.

If you can't scroll down.

Further down.

Just a bit further down still.

...



If you can't work it out now then there' simply no hope for you. =P

Finally, to finish up, here's Commander Cottontail and some of his crewmates on the space station. :)



Next post on Thursday, probably. Warning, will probably contain a picture of me and not the Lego me. You have been warned.