Wednesday, September 02, 2009

A slice of toy heaven I don't really give a rat's ass about

For seven of the past eight days I have been working furiously on sets for a Power Rangers toy commercial. We had to make a huge set of a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland on which the colorful members of Power Rangers RPM fought the evil Grinders. The spot is the lead-in for a contest, in which kid fans of the Power Rangers make their own movies completing the story we started.

As toy scoops go, this is fairly huge. I got to see prototypes of the spring line, including one Megazord that still had its pre-production red and green coloration. Unfortunately, if I showed off any groovy pictures of the sets or the prototypes I'd honk off the Bandai bigwigs and damage the rep of my good friends who hired me. So groove on the sheer quantity! The boxes above were actually the second batch of toys we had to wrangle after the batch being sorted in the top pic.

So there were tons of toys, which is cool, but they were Power Rangers toys, which are pretty much universally crap. Lame designs, construction, everything. Still, a fun job.

On a side note, I looked up the Power Rangers on Wikipedia and discovered that every year, instead of renewing the show, they start a new show. So there are sixteen different sets of Power Rangers for kids to clamor for, assuming they would be interested long enough.

1 comment:

JPX said...

Excellent post and congrats on the gig. In some ways it's like your own personal hell. One the one hand you're surrounded by piles of toys, many that have never been seen before. On the other hand they are toys you have no interest in. Its analogous to a gourmet chef being stuck in Dan's Variety. Sorry, that's a terrible analogy, it's been a long day. It's still a cool experience. Next time get in on a Star Wars gig!