Post Numero Uno!

Hiya, kids! Welcome to Galactic Awesome!, a blog I've started to showcase and talk about my various collections of vintage science fiction toys.

I know, I know... some of you are grumbling that I already have a blog to showcase and talk about my various collections of vintage science fiction toys. And you're right, I do. It's called Doc Atomic's Attic of Astounding Artifacts, and it's located right here. But that blog is for the really vintage toys, the robots and ray guns from the 1930s through 1960s. 

Galactic Awesome!, on the other hand, is for all the other toys I collect. (And yep, the exclamation point is part of the name... at least until I get annoyed by it.) Here's where you'll find original Star Wars figures; old Ahi Star Trek and Lost In Space toys; Japanese die-cast figures (also known as chogokin) and vinyl kaiju; and whatever else ends up in my collection. Yeah, most of these toys are from the late Sixties through the Eighties, but I'll also be tossing in some new stuff now and again. Hey, a cool toy is a cool toy! 

On top of all that, I'll be writing about the culture surrounding these toys, from the movies, TV shows, books, and comics that inspired them to the marketing ploys that got us to buy them to the different ways we actually played with them back in the day. (And by "back in the day," I sometimes mean... ahem... last week.) In fact, I'll probably branch out even more -- perhaps beyond even toys. Who knows? I sure as hell don't.

While The Attic of Astounding Artifacts is more of an encyclopedic endeavor, Galactic Awesome! will be a little looser. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know as much about these toys as I do about the ones in that other blog, so this will be a bit heavier on the enthusiasm and a little lighter on the scholar-ism. But I hope this opens the door for discussion in the comments section. If you've got some intel on a toy that I've posted, by all means, school me. School me hard.

So with that, I'll say "Stay tuned." I've got some nifty posts coming up this week, and from there, we'll see where things take us. In the meantime, here's a Japanese wind up R2-D2 from Takara. More on this little guy later on...