It’s that time of year again! When Marillion fans gather around post boxes and anxiously check on message boards. “Has it come yet? Do you have yours yet?”
Yes, it has come, and yes we have ours now! What is “it”? Why, the annual Marillion Christmas release and Web UK Magazine of course! Since 1998, Marillion have offered free Christmas exclusives to those who sign up for the fan package. This year’s is a DVD: Christmas at the Club. This was a private fan gig at the band studio The Racket Club. It was an invite-only crowd, treated to live versions of the latest tracks from 2016’s Fuck Everyone and Run. Tracks like “The Leavers” and “Living in FEAR” sit among old favourites like “The Great Escape”, “Splintering Heart” and “Real Tears for Sale”. Can’t wait to get this one on the big TV screen.
The magazine is also a treat. Marillion recently conquered the Royal Albert Hall, and inside is the glorious photographic proof.
The Christmas season never feels like it has begun until the Marillion CD or DVD arrives. I am happy to announce that it has now officially started! Time to enjoy some Christmas at the Club.
GETTING MORE TALE #607: Every Picture Tells a Story
If you’re like me, you probably look at childhood photos and are immediately flooded with a million memories. Music, pictures and memories…they all go together don’t they? One triggers another and all three merge together in your grey matter. With that in mind, put on something nostalgic and join me with some short stories about some old pictures. If you can’t think of something to listen to, here’s Bryan Adams doing “Summer of ’69”!
I can tell by my hair that this picture is winter of 1989-1990. On the far left, you’ll notice my Darth Vader lamp, hand made by my mom a long time ago (though not very far away). Darth is priceless to me, and I still have him on that very same dresser today. Next to Darth, I notice that I didn’t think to remove the Speed Stick before taking a photo.
That was my first guitar. I just had to have a whammy bar. That thing would simply not stay in tune. In the 80s, you had to have a whammy bar, although Slash was slowly causing them to go out of fashion. My mom found a guitar teacher, a really nice guy named Gary Mertz. He was teaching my sister, myself and my best friend Bob all in one shot. He came to the house, and did 30 minute lesson with my sister on keyboards first. Then 30 minutes with me and 30 with Bob on guitar. I just wasn’t any good at it. I just don’t have the coordination. How my sister got to be such a great musician, I really couldn’t tell you. I got the shitty genes.
A year and a half later, and look at that hair. Sleek?
Second guitar. A flying V I bought off a guy from work. He was a huge Eddie Van Halen fan, and he customised the V with different pickups to try to emulate Eddie’s brown sound. I still had to have a whammy bar. Constantly diving for it made it sound like I was playing something other than random notes. I was pretty useless on guitar.
A little older now, this is about 1993 and that’s my first beard! Zeppelin and the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701 D) on the same walls as before. The Enterprise and the Kiss sketch I’m holding were both birthday gifts from my buddy Peter. I still have that Kiss sketch on my wall right behind where I work at LeBrain HQ.
Check out this model kit I build. That’s a Klingon Bird of Prey, a Romulan Warbird and a Ferengi ship. I bought it for the Warbird, truly a beautiful ship design. If you look close enough, you can see where I painted in little yellow windows on the forward section, just like the show. I did the same on the Ferengi craft, which actually turned out the best of the three.
And finally, I don’t know what compelled me to take pictures of all my stuff. Here it is, and all laid out specifically just so. Why? Couldn’t tell you. But there’s some cool stuff there!
With the exception of the cassette tapes, I still own most of this stuff. Some CDs have been replaced by expanded editions. The vinyl didn’t go anywhere though, and I definitely hung on to those Star Trek figures.
My collections for each of these bands has expanded so much that I couldn’t fit them all into a single photo anymore. It’s funny to look back and think, “Wow, that’s all I had!?”
Hold onto your scraplets, I have literally a shat-ton of photos from Toronto TFCon 2017!
I’ve never been to TFCon before. Buddy Jason has been trying to get me to go for years. This is the first time the planets aligned and I went with Jay with two goals:
Pick out a gift for myself from my mother-in-law (who is awesome that way).
Pick out something smaller for myself.
Jay picked me up around 7:00 am and we hit the road. We discussed strategies and vendors and I quickly realized that this was going to be epic.
I’ll let the massive photo gallery here speak for itself. For official and third party figures, I have never seen anything like it before.
The goodie bag you get for paying your $35 entrance fee was kind of crap. It had some flavoured water and a Schick razor. The TFCon bag itself will get more use than the Schick.
One of the coolest figures was the Con exclusive from OcularMax. Diaclone Paris Dakar Rally Terraegis is a mouthful, but it’s the yellow truck in the gallery below. Look at the detailed deco. Those aren’t stickers!
They also had prototypes of forthcoming third party figures. One of these was the giant FansToys Omega Supreme (mentioned earlier here). Another was a really sharp looking pair of jets for a new Masterpiece Aerialbots set.
The items I purchased were:
Takara Titans Return Wheelie from the fine folks at TF Source! – $25 Canadian. A real winner.
Transformers Collectors Club Impactor – $120 Canadian. Cheapest I’ve seen.
Third party company FansToys Phoenix – an homage to G1 Skyfire in Masterpiece scale. From The Chosen Prime.
I just found a new annual pilgrimage. Thanks Jay — can’t wait for next year!
Sausagefest 2017 unveils its new surprise twist: we are all voting for next year’s songs, right now. All lists must be turned in Sunday when voting is closed.
Because of the enormous numbers of hours to put together the Sausagefest countdown, this will give us a whole year to record for next year. No more last minute panics and logistical problems.
We have had a solid rain in Kitchener, Ontario. Not only are the banks of the Grand swollen to the limit, but there has also been a steady rainfall of new arrivals at LeBrain HQ! Summer has officially arrived, and what is summer without new rock?
First we have some gratuity for Mr. Geoff “1001” Stephen. Some surprise mail arrived from him this week: two 7″ singles and some Leafs memorabilia. As Mrs. LeBrain said, “Thank you Geoff Stephen for the wonderful surprise this morning. The calendar brought back so many memories of my favourite hockey year. Go Leafs Go!”
For myself, a Kiss “Christine Sixteen”/”Shock Me” single, which alas is too late to fit into my Love Gun re-review! Those two songs make it virtually a double A-side. The other single he sent has a similar standing: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town”/”Jailbreak”. Two singles, four amazing cuts of rock history.
On the same day, I received this from a Discogs seller in Japan: a CD that has been on my wishlist a long time. Despite the long wait, I managed to hold off from buying the domestic edition of Ghost’s debut Opus Eponymous all this time. A sealed copy finally came up on Discogs within my buying threshold, so I jumped at it. For my rewards, I got “Here Comes the Sun”, Ghost’s Beatles cover…and a very different one it is.
We will jump briefly to new arrivals in the toy department. Thanks to J. at Resurrection Songs we recently covered the ins and outs of Third Party products. Behold! Badcube has released their take on Masterpiece Transformer Insecticons. These are heavy, heavy toys with lots of diecast and G1 accurate insect modes, with robot modes an homage to the cartoon. Check them out with their leader Megatron (third party Apollyon) and their original 1985 toys below. These, by the way, are deluxe collector’s editions with clear plastic and chromed parts for added value. I’d love to compare them to an official Hasbro Masterpiece Insecticon, but such a thing does not exist. That’s why third party companies have a niche. Labels by Toyhax.
Apollyon by X-Transbots with Evil Bug Corps by Badcube
Badcube Claymore and Transformers G1 Shrapnel
Badcube Hypno and Transformers G1 Bombshell
Badcube Kickbutt and Transformers G1 Kickback
Last new entry in the toy Department: I found some new Star Wars Black Series 6″ releases kicking around at the local Toys R Us on Sunday. I should have grabbed more of the Imperial AT-ACT driver, that one being a Target/TRU exclusive, but sometimes you find those to still be warming the pegs a few weeks later. The Imperial Death Squad commander will look great with my Stormtroopers, but I feel to ask $30 for one little tiny Jawa figure is a bit much. They should have included two Jawas or a droid in there for that price.
The same day as the Toys R Us trip, I also dropped in at the newly re-opened Sunrise Records at Fairview Mall, which is really starting to come along with great customer service and an improving selection. I couldn’t browse long, so I leaped immediately to the metal section and grabbed two CDs that I was missing by The Sword: Low Country (2016) and the new live album Greetings From… (2017). I am slowly getting caught up on that band — loving everything I have heard so far.
A wonderful week to be sure, but it’s time to stop buying music and toys for a short while, and get ready for Sausagefest 2017. I finished recording my parts yesterday, and I have inside information that suggests that this Sausagefest countdown will be pretty awesome.
Action figures are like CDs. You can go and buy the “standard edition” at Walmart, or what have you. But if you want all the extra goodies, sometimes you have to hunt a little more and buy a few extra versions.
Toys such as my beloved Star Wars Black Series 6″ series have plenty of exclusives, some that I have and some that I want. The most elusive are the San Diego Comic-Con toys. Some exclusives: Jabba the Hut came with a cardboard throne and accessories. Their Boba Fett came with Han Solo in carbonite. But they are mucho pricey. Elsewhere down the money scale are toys that are exclusive to certain stores and online outlets.
Walgreens is a store that doesn’t exist in Canada and often gets exclusive Star Wars figures. Their most well known is the “prototype” all-white Boba Fett based on an original 1978 Ralph McQuarrie concept sketch. Their current Star Wars treasure is a C-3P0 variation with two gold arms and one silver leg.
The “standard” version of Threepio has the red arm seen in The Force Awakens. This “Resistance Base” Threepio is the common one. Since C-3P0 doesn’t come with any accessories (not even a restraining bolt or com-link), fans hoped he would come with alternate limbs, so you could recreate his look in Episode IV. Hasbro had a different plan. Instead they made the different limbed robots exclusives to Walgreens. I have been looking for one. (There is also a version with a darker red arm, but it doesn’t look as good as these.)
Our neighbors went to Toronto Comic-Con yesterday and found the Walgreens silver leg Threepio for me. It was only $40 — a lot cheaper than ordering one online. Thanks guys!!
Did you watch cartoons in the 1980s? If you, you probably remember the Transformers. Think back, and picture the cassettebots. Remember them? Soundwave (Decepticon) and Blaster (Autobot) were the cassette recorders, each with an arsenal of cassette mini-robots to back him up. Using an advanced alien technology called “mass shifting”, these giant robots could shrink down to the size of an actual cassette, thereby enabling them to spy unnoticed on human and robot alike. As affordable toys, you may have had some yourselves. The neat thing was these cassettes designed by Japanese company Takara were designed to perfectly mimic the size and shape of actual micro cassettes. On the TV show and in the pages of the Marvel comic book, they were depicted as standard sized cassette tapes.
Third party company Toyhax (also known as Reprolabels) has come up with some fun ways to enhance your cassette-bot toy collection. Recently they released a set of plastic engines and stickers for the current Buzzsaw and Laserbeak toys in the 2016/2017 Hasbro Titans Return line. This time they transform into little media players. Fans always complain that Hasbro toys “don’t look enough” like the original 80s toy they are an homage to. Toyhax has created the labels and engines to enhance the current toys, and enhance them they do. The new accessories even enable new modes, like the “Star Trek communicator” see below.
Toyhax have also released a sticker set that enables you to use ordinary Lego bricks to create you own shrunken-down cassette versions of characters both popular and obscure. All you need are those small 1×2 flats. You know the ones I mean?
Don’t have any of those just lying around anymore? Get this. You can buy them, picked to order, for just pennies a piece. You can pick as many of any colour you like. Mix and match the stickers to get the best looking mini cassettes around, and perfect for your Masterpiece scale figures to hold.
They look great, and it’s a fun little project you can do with very little cost. They enhance any solid Transformers Masterpiece collection as scale accessories. See below with Fans Toys’ “Tesla” (aka Perceptor), they look just perfect!
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