Year 10: July Update

The last update was in February, and not too much has happened since then. I'd meant to make at least one toy video this summer, but that hasn't happened. Life has gotten in the way and I've been a bit lazy I suppose. After building the new PC, I thought I'd play more games this year too, though I have not done that either. One thing I did do was visit Arizona, someplace I'd not been since 2014, and that gave me a little bit of time to sift through some boxes at my parent's home. They were boxes that were primarily my sister's things, however, I found some items that were mine, such as Mego Superman's cape, a Hot Wheels coloring book, and instructions to Tomy's Cosmic Clash game. Unfortunately, I didn't find what I was looking for, which would be the clothing to some 12" Star Wars figures. I want to make a video of those and I will if I ever find Obi-Wan and Luke's clothing, or at least some of it.

In the post before this one are magazine scans of the original Masters of the Universe movie, and this week I saw the new movie. I don't consider it to be good, maybe average. At nearly 2.5 hours long, I'd expect more character development, more locations, and more Battle-Cat. I'll pick a few things apart, and there will be some minor spoilers here. The movie begins with a young Adam and then he is suddenly in his 20s, and we don't know what happened when he got to Earth; who raised him? Of course, everyone's development got fast-forwarded, and we don't see what happened to Man-At Arms and Teela after a battle, and the next time we do see Man-At-Arms, he is an alcoholic. Also, Adam is very dumb, which I think is the worst part of the film. In the cartoon he acted clumsy and clueless at times to hide his identity, but he wasn't stupid. Here he makes Skeletor look like a genius by comparison. Good or bad, there is an android that, if you're a Star Wars fan, will keep reminding you of Rogue One's K-2SO. Obviously, the movie is not meant to be serious, and the writers do have fun with the silly character names, but the story could have been much better.

Speaking of movies, Hasbro is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Transformers: The Movie with a 4K theatrical release September 17th. That had been announced earlier this year, and more details have come out for it and many, many other things this weekend at San Diego Comic Con. There is plenty of news about Marvel movies, like a Ghost Rider film coming in 2028 that will star Ryan Gosling, and confirmation that Deadpool and Peggy Carter will appear in Avengers: Doomsday. Marvel will be publishing a new Indiana Jones comic book too, with the first issue coming in December. Last year, DC had announced an animated film trilogy based on the 1993/94 Batman comic book story Knightfall, and that will be available digitally on August 25th, and a physical release will follow shortly thereafter. 

It may seem way too early for Christmas, but Hallmark has already released new ornaments for the holiday season. I always mention these because they usually feature licenses related to what I talk about and are cool miniatures, and some can be displayed nicely year round. A few of the newest highlights include a PlayStation that plays the start-up sound, X-Men '97 Blackbird that plays music, and a Batcomputer from the classic TV series, with lights and sound.

And last but not least, it's LEGO time. I write the blog updates so infrequently that there is always a new LEGO set, or two, worth mentioning. One of the best video game consoles of all time got the brick treatment: Sega Genesis! You can even choose to make it a Mega Drive instead. It was announced in May and released in June at a price of $39.99. For Nintendo fans, LEGO is releasing a Donkey Kong Arcade with playable level on August 1st for $199.99.

By the way, you might notice some sort of links (blue text in a white bubble) on posts. I have no control over those, they are automatically being added by Blogger.

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Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan

Star Fox (Electronic Gaming Monthly - March/June 1993)

I'd heard about Nintendo preparing a remake of Star Fox 64 earlier this year and meant to post this when that was released. Apparently, it released on June 25th, but I completely missed that as I've not been doing a good job of keeping up on the current game releases the past couple of years. I don't have many magazines from 1997, however, which is when the original Star Fox 64 released, and that is why I decided to post a little coverage of the first game in the series that debuted on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES).

While I missed my target, Fox McCloud did not, as his game won Electronic Gaming Monthly's (EGM) "Game of the Month" award in the June 1993 issue. Star Fox also made the cover of EGM's March 1993 issue where it was previewed. This was the first game to use Nintendo's Super FX, a chip that renders 3D polygons and can produce better 2D effects than the Super NES. Only seven other games used the Super FX chip.

The Masters of the Universe Movie (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Magazine - Spring/Summer 1987)

Earlier this month, a new live-action Masters of the Universe movie was released. I've not seen it, so I cannot give my opinion, but I will say that I thought it looked terrible after viewing the first trailer. However, many reviews are above average and although I don't typically agree with my sister, she liked it a lot. As I write this, Rotten Tomatoes has a 68% consensus from critics and 86% from audiences. Not too bad, though this post isn't about that movie, it's simply a reason to take a quick look back at the 1987 film starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man. I did see that movie, however, not in a very long time. It was silly, of course, with the heroes traveling through a portal to Earth, and the majority of both critics and fans didn't enjoy it. 

I've scanned a couple short articles from two issues of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe magazine. Surprisingly, there isn't a lot of movie coverage in the Summer 1987 issue featuring Dolph on the cover. There are two pages, one of which is only photos of the characters, and it does include a poster I never removed. I also scanned two pages from the Spring 1987 issue; one is a very small preview before the film's August 9th release, and the other is about a contest winner.

Summer 1987

Spring 1987

16-Bit Soccer

With the 2026 World Cup in full swing, I've scanned some reviews of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo soccer games. Most of the reviews are from GamePro's August 1994 issue's The Sports Page column that features a "Soccer Showdown." Also from GamePro (February 1990) is a ProView of the Genesis' World Championship Soccer and Electronic Gaming Monthly's (November 1993) review of Electronic Arts' first FIFA game on the Genesis. I'd consider doing a gameplay video if I had a soccer game on a fully functional platform, but I don't. While I've enjoyed playing various video games of the sport, I only own two retro soccer games. They are both FIFA International Soccer, one for Game Gear and one on Sega CD, and both of my systems have issues.

Starlog's Mark Hamill Interviews (1982/83)

I've gone a bit off topic a few times the past year, and this is another time as this post is not about games or toys. However, it is related to Star Wars, which always gets an exception. Of course, I always try to post something about Star Wars on May 4th because it's Star Wars Day. As I mentioned in February, I now own a variety of Starlog issues, most from the early 1980s, when Return of the Jedi was in production and subsequently released. Within the copies I have, there are a lot of Star Wars articles, and with this post I opted to focus on the Mark Hamill interviews since Starlog interviewed him three times in less than a year, including in back-to-back issues.

Starlog #65 - December 1982

Starlog #72 - July 1983

Starlog #73 - August 1983

May the 4th be with you!

Gaming Ads: Backfilling #23

Before now, I had posted nine game ads for Parker Brothers, and today I have 16 more! I found Parker Brothers liked to advertise in comic books, possibly more than any other game publisher. Four of the ads feature Star Wars, which is why I chose to post these now with another Star Wars Day tomorrow. One of the ads is for the Death Star Battle Home Video Game Sweepstakes, a game based on Return of the Jedi. Something quite interesting about the sweepstakes is that third prize is the unreleased game Ewok Adventure. Developed by Atari Games, it was completed and a prototype exists, but marketing thought the controls were too difficult, so they chose not to release it. In the game players control an Ewok glider while dodging and dropping rocks in an effort to destroy a shield generator. It's likely anyone that won third prize received another Star Wars game in its place, probably Death Star Battle, though Parker Brothers had also already released The Empire Strikes Back and Jedi Arena.