fantastic_four

If you don't need the money or space don't worry about it, that's my approach to hobbies. I'm currently hogging up roughly three pallets in our basement, so that's the limit I'll work within. I'll be shooting for freeing up at least enough space on those for Sentinel boxes. I think all I have to do to make room for four 18" deep by 20" wide by 30" tall Sentinel boxes--which is my estimate for the size of the box based upon the box they put Jabba's barge in--is sell most of my statues. Which I've been wanting to do since I started buying action figures anyway, so it's all good.

I don't recall, is that your only Barge, or did you buy two and that one is your extra? Either way yea, if you haven't opened it yet it's probably time to unload. Unless you're thinking the market will increase. I haven't followed pricing closely enough to know what it'll do in the next year or ten.

Finally pulled the trigger on all of the Mafex figures I had been mulling over for most of the last year. Got all of them from Amazon Japan except the Batman Begins and Batpod figures. REALLY happy with all of them! Love those Thor lightning effects, the Batman Hush cape, and the overall look and optic blast effect for Cyclops. I also have their Spider-Man figure, and I REALLY want the Superman coming out next month if the reviews are good. I'll probably also get their Joker figure from two years ago, and possibly their Dark Knight figure featuring the upgraded suit from the second Nolan film.

Going to get somewhere from 3 to 5...going to be a last-hour decision for me, probably. If I get 5 I absolutely HAVE to get rid of some of my comic longboxes. Which I can totally do, just been avoiding doing the work of getting rid of a few thousand comics. If I get five, I'll start by opening one or two. I'll do some displays, figure out how well it works in my space, and go from there. If I find I want more, at least I'll have them. If I don't, I'll just sell a few. But I'd rather have the option to use them by jumping in now at $350 when in 2022 they're more likely to be anywhere from $500 to $1500 on the aftermarket. But storing 3 or 4 is why I need to clear some comic boxes out between now and a year from now. Tomorrow I'm going to estimate how big the box is likely to be...maybe something like 4 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet including packing materials. Storing a few of those isn't at all trivial.

Baroness isn't anywhere within 500 miles of me according to the Target web site and Popfindr. Not really sure I want her. I'm not going to collect Joes, and I don't see her fitting in all that well as a Marvel Hydra or AIM goon.

Joker himself doesn't appear to be in the credits so presumably he won't make for a fourth villain, or fifth if Catwoman ends up counting for that. Batman Begins villains -- R'as Al Ghul, Scarecrow, Falcone. Three total. Dark Knight villains -- Scarecrow, Two-Face, Joker, Maroni. Four total. Dark Knight Rises villains -- Bane, Talia al Ghul, Daggett, Catwoman. Three total, or four if you prefer to count Catwoman as a villain, and that's the same we see for this film in the trailer. So yes, you can definitely have too many villains if you overuse them. All I can tell from the trailer is that Riddler appears to be the most significant villain. They may just be using Falcone, Penguin, and perhaps even Catwoman as minor roles along the lines of the minor role played by Falcone in Begins, Scarecrow and Maroni in Dark Knight, or Daggett and Talia al Ghul in Rises. The main reason that Batman can stand to have more villains than most superhero films is that none of his rogues have powers so they can play relatively subtle roles and don't necessarily demand a ton of screen time.

Looks promising, but I can't tell much at all really. Do we know whose voice that is at the end where presumably Bruce says "how am I a part of it?" and someone responds "you'll see."

I saw it last month via Hulu. It's basically a female version of Superbad but better than that sounds. It's bolstered by cameos from a few SNL alums and other veteran comedians. I thought it was a much better debut effort than say, Cop Car, which won Jon Watts the Spider-Man: Homecoming gig. Seemed well-done, but I was bored as hell. Didn't make it past the first 15 minutes. Which surprised me because I loved most movies in this coming-of-age genre like Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, Rushmore, Lady Bird, Dead Poets Society, Juno, Ferris Bueller, Eighth Grade, or most any John Hughes movie.

Where'd you get the Raw10 shark? Is he sold out already?

Since I last mentioned the Mafex Batman Hush Medicom announced a black version of the figure as coming out in January 2021. He's in the image below to the left of Superman, and the bluish one that just came out is to his left. The black one looks great as well. I think I prefer the black one, but I may get both. I cannot WAIT for the Superman...he looks absolutely spectacular. I've never been a fan of the gritty, super-bulky Miller renderings of the Dark Knight, but wow, I can't believe how well Mafex has rendered them into super-articulated plastic form as shown to the left and right of Joker below. I'm tempted to buy those, too.

Mafex Batman Hush is out, and he is glorious. Perhaps the finest 1:12 scale Batman figure ever released.

If they did that the in-store inventory system would still show 6, but she showed me her handheld's screen and it clearly said zero. Brickseek shows none, so something's wrong with Popfindr for that store. Never seen this kind of inconsistency between Brickseek/Popfindr/Target's system before. I'm not too worried about it. Once August 14th passes I'll be able to locate them via Target's web site. It has become surprisingly good at tracking inventory for their exclusive items, so as soon as stores get more stock I'll be all over it. They usually get at least two shipments of exclusives, although certainly they sometimes only get one. We'll see...

Didn't get any Cobra troopers--they had the first Joe wave on hold for me at Customer Service which has a totally different DPCI. I can't tell what the heck is going on, but Popfindr shows a full box of troopers there, Brickseek shows zero there, and twice when I've called the store and given them the trooper DPCI and two separate people said they had them. Yet I looked at the screen of an employee's Target inventory system showing them as having zero. I did buy the all-black Snake Eyes from the first wave, probably going to end up giving it to my kid since I've already got the deluxe.

I've watched five reviews of the Cobra trooper now and they're ALL glowing. Two of those put it somewhere in the top three figures of the year. The design of the goggles looks REALLY good...apparently it will go either over their eyes or also over the helmet. Lots of room for customizing looks. I've only heard three consistent complaints: The guns have huge pegs on them to port them into the figure's back. Porting them in is great, but out of the back the huge pegs look dumb. Minor gripe there. The vest significantly hinders articulation and you can barely use the ab crunch. You can't take the vest off without cutting it. If the vest were removable you could both use the ab crunch and customize trooper appearance better in having some troops with the vest and some without.

Grats! How many you going for? I'm not sure how many I want yet. I'll open one and figure it out from there, but with extreme in-demand items like this I prefer to buy first and figure out how many to keep later. I've currently got 7 Legends Hydra troops and 6 Legends AIM troops. Hasbro is about to release an X-Men Hellfire Club goon troop building figure that I bet I buy at least three of depending upon how customizable they are. The goons are shown on the cover below...these specific goons were sliced and diced by Wolverine and later became Reavers, who were also the guys featured in the "Logan" movie who were trying to catch X-23.

One note about shelf date versus street date--when a Target employee showed me those dates (I explicitly asked them if I could look at their inventory screens and they didn't mind) they were on two completely separate screens in the system. I bet if they were both on the same screen the employees wouldn't confuse the two.

I just called the one Target showing 6 in my area, switched to Electronics, and asked him to check the DPCI. He said there were 2 on the floor and 4 in the back, but that he couldn't sell them to me because they were street dated. I told him that my understanding of Target's system is the shelf date/street date thing and that these figures were shelf dated but not street dated. He claimed he was seeing a street date in the system, but he said he'd try to ring one from the floor up. He did, and it let him. So I'm betting he was actually looking at a shelf date. He said he'd put all 6 at Customer Service for me and I should be able to come get them in an hour or two. I still only give it a 50/50 shot they're actually there when I get there. I've had this fail before, and usually it's because they weren't able to find it in the back. I also had a Legends Red Hulk mysteriously sold from the back an hour after I had asked for it to be held a few months ago. I suspect foul play from one of the employees on that one, but who knows, they're not well paid so I don't hold grudges against Target employees. It's still light years better than blindly visiting a store and hoping you find what you're looking for on the shelf...that method results in DOZENS of dry runs.

One other thing to note...this sounds like a lot to keep track of, but at least Target employees will try to help you. Good luck getting ANYTHING out of a Walmart employee. In my area specific Walmart employees are assigned to the toy section, but if you can't find that one person then nobody can or will help find anything at all. I know who two of my local Walmart toy managers are, but I RARELY see them. A big part of the reason Walmart employees don't help you is because they simply can't. If Walmart can sell something it's out on the shelves, and if they can't it won't be. So employees can't really help with that. Walmart is far quicker about putting things out. Usually when they get something in it goes to the shelves within hours, or 24 hours at most. So the moment you see a Popfindr or Brickseek count go up at Walmart it's probably already on the shelves. The usual cycle is it comes in overnight and gets stocked early morning.

That's what I heard too, that Target originally had a street date but later removed it due to this. But there's still a shelf date, and as always there's roughly a 50/50 chance any given employee won't know the difference between the two. So at the local Target that has a case the ideal situation is I find an employee who pays no attention to the dates and just fetches them for me. If I hit an employee that doesn't know the difference I might try another employee or just try again a day or two later and hope to hit a helpful employee, and keep repeating that until I either cycle through so many who either won't help or confuse the dates that I just give up. Since none have been put out in my area yet the stores are mostly wiped out I assume other collectors have already tried to pull them from the one store that still has them but failed. Meh, that's just how it goes. Sometimes you have to try several employees to get it, sometimes you can't get it at all. One good thing about this is that as far as I've been able to tell Target employees switch roles and departments a lot. I've seen stores where one employee tends to works toys a lot, but not often. I think most stores just randomly plug someone to work any given department for any given day. That's an advantage with toys in the back--if you can find someone who will go look back there eventually you can probably find one who either ignores the dates or knows what a street date is. I've had visits where I asked four different employees walking through the general area of toys to go check for something in the back. Some will say they don't know where stuff is, some won't want to do it at all, some are helpful. In general though you can try almost any Target employee, not just the one or two you see working specifically in toys that day. I've had employees working nearby in sporting goods or even the food section fetch toys for me. Usually the electronics employees will do it though so they're the first I try if no employees are in the toy section at a given time. You can also do all of this via the phone by connecting either to Customer Service or Electronics when you call. If you get lucky with this they may hold it for you at Customer Service. If you don't you tend to have better luck in the store.

When that happens I assume it's the employees doing the stocking paying no attention at all to shelf or street dates, or seeing them and knowing about them but just not caring. Most of the time I'm sure they don't notice they're even there since most items at Target don't have those dates.

My current understanding is that Target's system has two dates that can be attached to an item--a shelf date and a street date. The shelf date is the date they're supposed to put it on the shelves, and the street date is the first date it will successfully ring up in the registers. In my experience if employees are familiar with either of these dates they don't know the difference between them and may refuse to fetch and/or sell them to you because they think the shelf date is a street date, so yea, if either is attached to an item the self-checkout registers are best. If there's a street date your only option if you don't want to lose an in-demand item you get your hands on is to take it to customer service and see if they will hold it for you until the street date hits. I've never done this myself, but I've heard tales of others doing it. If you ask employees to let you look at the smartphones they all carry most will freely let you look at the screens of their inventory system. I've seen both of those fields in their system when an employee let me review the screens.

Target originally had a street date of 8/14 on this figure and many others, so some Targets are refusing to sell them or put them out. Did you have to get someone to fetch them from the back for you, and did they give you a hard time? Most of my Targets are sold out of it already, but one of them is sitting on a full case of 6 in the back; you can track this via Target's publicly-available programming interface used by popfindr.com and brickseek.com. I may try my luck today to see if I can find a salesperson willing to fetch them for me.

Wow, you're really army-building those. How many Target trips did that take? Just watched a review of this guy. He looks great...I may get a few and use them as goons to mix in with Hydra or AIM soldiers in Marvel displays. I loved Joe as a kid and had everything from the early 80s, but I'm not into military stuff anymore. But it's easy to fudge Joes in as members of SHIELD or HYDRA for Marvel collections. That's what I'm doing with Snake Eyes already.

He's the right height, but yea, he's usually drawn beefier.

I was shocked at how easy Target's own web site made finding Red Hulk in March. Whenever it said "Pickup available" for a given store it was always in that store--and all I had to do was buy it on the site and go pick it up, easy peasy. I'm hoping the same ends up holding true for Storm/Thunderbird.