Essays that examine how nostalgia for the pop culture of my youth has shaped my adulthood
I’ve always been hesitant to describe myself as a collector, but the truth is that I’ve been collecting things my whole life. From stuffed animals and sticks when I was little (yes, sticks) to books to comics to toys, there hasn’t been a time in my life that I wasn’t out chasing something to add to […]
Continue reading "Collecting Is Not Creating change is good"
I know, I know. It’s been a long time since my last article and now the first new thing I’m writing is a music review? And not just a music review, but a review of an album by a 15-year-old YouTube star? Well, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m doing. And I’m just as surprised as […]
Continue reading "Drifting Down The Rabbit Hole on music, age, and the exciting surprise of the new"
I was going to write a long article back in December 2015 demonstrating why The Force Awakens is just a remix of Star Wars, as Star Wars was a remix of what had come before (kind of the snake eating its tail). But once the movie was released I realized that I was far from […]
Continue reading "Everything Is A Remix especially Star Wars"
When the new Superman movie by DC Comics/Warner Brothers/Christopher Nolan/Zack Snyder, “Man of Steel”, was released in 2013 I felt about it the way many comic fans felt about it: the movie was nice to look at, but it sure wasn’t Superman. The Superman I know wasn’t humorless. He protected the people. And he surely didn’t […]
Continue reading "Man or Superman? A Re-Evaluation of Man of Steel"
Or, to put it another way, when is green not the right green? If you’ve bought action figures from Mattel over the past few years, you know that they have had some issues in the manufacturing of your favorite DC Comics characters. But the one that really puzzles me is how often the colors of the final […]
Continue reading "The Fallacy Of Memory or why big toy companies just can't seem to get it right"
Update – 7/06/2015 So in the nine years since the first installment of this post, the vintage comic strips reprints has absolutely exploded. I would never have imagined in 2006 that what I was calling “The Golden Age of Comic Strip” would REALLY be a gold age. Seriously, I don’t know how this will ever […]
Note: I don’t want to have to watermark everything, I think it looks ugly. But if you’re going to repost any of these images or share them, please just give a link back to this page so people can see their original context. Thanks. I think if you read a few of these articles you start to […]
Welcome to part three in my series of reminiscing about the old days of concepting for Star Wars items that never were made. Except some of these were actually made! Amazingly, this post is following the last one not even a year later, which is a lot better than the four year gap between part […]
…Or something like that. So, with the big breaking news of Disney buying Lucasfilm, I’ve been in a Star Wars mood these past few days. I may just break down and write the next chapter of the “Unproduced Star Wars Concepts” saga. To be honest, it’s taken me so long to revisit it because this […]
So I was browsing through Netflix the other night, looking at their range of mediocre to abysmal choices of things I haven’t seen when I stumbled across the newish documentary “The People vs George Lucas”. With no better choices at hand I proceeded to watch it as I wrapped up some late night editing for […]
Every time one of these big budget superhero movies is announced there is a process of fear that fans go through. Will it get a good director? Will they get the casting right? And what is the costume going to look like? This last bit has probably cause more anxiety and grief than any other element. Because the costume […]
…but the GOP ain’t one? As I was driving to work last week on my hour long commute I was listening to the Sirius XM channel “Backspin”, which for those who don’t know is a Hip Hop station. Well, really a “Rap” station. Actually, to be specific, an oldies Rap station. And I pondered that: has […]
Well, that turned out to be a bit longer than I had planned on. It’s been four long years since my last look at the “rejected” concepts that my former co-workers and I came up with when we were working on promotions for the launch of Star Wars: Episode One, The Phantom Menace. And it […]
“You take out ‘of Mars,’ you don’t tell where he came from? That’s what makes it unique!” a former Disney executive said. “They choose to ignore that, and the whole campaign ends up meaning nothing. It’s boiled down to something no one wants to see. – ‘John Carter’: Disney’s Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco” So in a couple of […]
So these days it seems like no one is totally happy with the companies that are making mainstream toys. If it’s not the price hikes, it’s the selection. Or the quality control. Or the shoulders are backward. Sure, sure, these problems are all annoying, especially in light of the price you pay for the toys […]
As the years have gone by and I’ve gotten older (and wiser?) I’ve come to notice that every time one of our “distinguished men of AFi” have posted pictures of their past childhood holiday toy pictures that something has been missing from my life: namely, any similar pictures of MY childhood Christmases filled with toys. For […]
Or, what the Space Shuttle means to me. On Thursday, July 21, 2011, US Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time, returning from the last mission that the shuttle program will fly for the United States. The program and the shuttles themselves have been retired, cast aside due to a national lack of […]
Five years ago, shortly before I left California for Texas, Julius Marx and I paid a visit to the studio of a truly fantastic artist, sculptor, and all-around great guy: Rubén Procopio. If you don’t recognize the name you surely will recognize his work (and if you don’t recognize the name, shame on you!). First, […]
with James “Sallah” Sawyer. So there was that thing back a few years ago where we found out all about the plans for the final years of the Super Powers Collection including concept art for many possible figures. And that other thing, where some extension plans for the original Kenner Star Wars line showed up in […]
Continue reading "The Best Kept Secret The Birth and Death of Mattel's Secret Wars Line"
So it’s taken quite a bit longer than I planned on to get back to another installment of my unproduced Star Wars gems. But here at last is the untold story of the promotion that you never got to see, and what a doozy it is! A couple of caveats right off the bat: I […]
When I first started collecting toys back around 1990 I would run into other collectors sporadically (this being in the dark days before the internet collecting community at large had coalesced around USENET, for the most part). One way I would know that they were die-hard toy hunters was that they had had “The Dream”. […]
Ok, so I finally saw the Wachowski Bros’ Speed Racer the other day. Holy. Cow. This was one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure I know how else to describe it. It was, hands down, the best adaptation of a comic or cartoon to movie EVER. Now, before I get […]
I’m not a very good artist. I mean, I’m OK as far as it goes. I can get the job done or at least figure out what needs to be done. But when it comes to guys like Matt Cauley or Kerry Gammill or Dave Hudnut (all guys I know and worked with) there’s just […]
Before I post about more unseen Star Wars stuff, I thought I’d do a bit of follow-up to some that I’ve already shown. One of our biggest heartbreaks in designing stuff for Phantom Menace promotions was getting all the way to prototype on a big Jabba the Hutt beanbag, but having it rejected for cost/size […]
So I started this year vowing to cut back on the toy buying. In fact, I had quit buying almost all together, thanks in part to it being so hard to find Mattel’s latest offerings and the fact that Hasbro has delayed the next batch of Marvel Legends for so long. In any case I […]
Today’s toys have risen in quality in leaps and bounds over the toys of my youth. The sculpting is better, the molding is better, the packaging…can be better at times, and the articulation is in a whole other league. And for the most part, the painting is better. Well, sometimes, that is. For companies like […]
Ten years to be exact. That’s when I left the oil fields (where I was shooting industrial video) and entered the world of product design. I got really lucky, having made some contacts through Raving Toy Maniac when I was running it with Eric G. Myers, to somehow stumble into a new career despite having […]
Ok, so I’m in the grocery store the other day and while I was walking down the aisle between the fine products from Campbell’s Soup Company and the displays of healthy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups there was a sidecap rack with Little Golden Books on it. (Not to be confused with the German dog food […]
I haven’t done one of these posts in awhile, but I’ve been rediscovering stuff I’ve been sent over the years that never made it to shelves and thought that it was high time that some of it been seen. This little piece was sent to me by an anonymous soul who has dropped a few […]
In addition to books and toys, I buy a lot of DVDs. Mainly old movies, because I’ve already discovered that they don’t always stay in print for long, and then command crazy insane prices on eBay once they’re out of print. Plus, the past few years have been great as far as the rarer films […]
I’ve been a collector for as long as I can remember. When I was around three years old, I collected sticks. Yes, ordinary branches that had fallen from trees, which came in all sorts of varieties and limited editions. After that I picked up stuffed animals whenever I could, the more unusual the critter (plush […]
Like the previous entry on the BK Lord of the Rings figures, these were pitched to Burger King in 2001 as a tie-in to the then-airing X-Men Evolution cartoon. The earlier idea of figure packs was such a hit internally, when the X-Men license rolled around it was thought that the perfect “never been done […]
Continue reading "Rejected! X-Men Evolution Toys You Never Saw"
This will be an ongoing feature here at Ottertorials: ideas and concepts that never made it off the drawing board. While many collectors are aware of certain toys and figures that never make it into production (especially concerning Star Wars toys) most people don’t realize that for every toy made, there are dozens if not […]
Continue reading "Rejected! Burger King Lord Of The Rings Army Men"