Toy OTD: Nathan Jurevicius, Kid Robot's Scarygirl City Folk Figures: Crossing Guard, School Girl (2007)

Nathan Jurevicius is not only a cool illustrator, but a prolific toy designer as well! TheScarygirl City Folk collection probably isn't his latest line, but it's certainly one of his more recent ones. It's a blind boxed mini-fig series with a wide variety of characters. I only bought a couple of them, so I'll review just those two here.

Kid Robot's toys are of a consistently high quality, and this line is equally good. The sculpts capture the playful, graphically strong designs and interpret them into three dimensions very well! They're planned to be cast in multiple parts, and the assembly seams are strategically chose to blend into the design without disrupting it. The construction itself is fine, making the characters look solid. The use of materials is clever, such as the transparent plastic for the Crossing Guard's staff, and the mounting of the book stack on the School Girl's head.

The paint work is also nice and clean - there's not a ton of detail on these designs, but the color borders are sharp, small paint areas are tidy, and the broader paint areas are smooth. Details like the School Girl's eyelashes are crisp. The color palette is limited by design, not budget.

Mini-figures rarely (if ever) have articulation, so it's a non-issue here.

Balance for both designs is fine: School Girl has a back wheel to steady her; and the Crossing Guard has a broad, flat base. Mr. Jurevicius is very conscious of this aspect of manufacturing and addresses it well, regardless of the figure scale. Either small stands are included, or the designs are well balanced on their own.

Packaging for this line is terrific, both in terms of the individual boxes and the larger case. Both are heavily decorated with Mr. Jurevicius' graphics, but they're not overwhelming. The color use here is tasteful, but punchy enough to attract attention. All of the boxes are unified with a similar palette of black, pink, green and white - it's easy to keep track of this series!

There's fifteen different characters in the set, and at least two paint variants (a black-faced School Girl, and a black Jelly Cat). You can get blind boxes for $9.73 + shipping each at overkillshop.com, and a few of the characters are on eBay right now: The School Girl chase and both Jelly Cats for $19.99 + shipping each, and the Doctor for $29.99 + shipping. These prices seem a bit high, so you may want to be patient and poke around at the next Vinyl Toy Network or something. Good luck!

A Busy, Nerdy Saturday

Relatively speaking, of course. Most of my morning was spent photographing new acquisitions for my toy collection, as well shooting some of the old ones. It take too much time to do it on weekday mornings, so now it's all about Saturday and Sunday. I think I shot about twelve yesterday (and five today), so that was good - I like to shoot enough to make it feel like I added about two toy photos a day (to surpass the photo I'm supposed to use each day for my Toy OTD feature). I got some really nice shots, plus I finally figured out how to shoot my Real Action Heroes Trinity figure. Toys that are mostly black or really darkly colored are hard to shoot with just natural sunlight, but I finally figured it out!

I found out about a Castro theater film festival called Shock It To Me! at the last minute, so I was trying to figure out how to go on Fleet Week weekend. That's when the Blue Angels come into San Francisco, and there was a ton of other activities going on as well. Just thinking about the potential traffic and parking problems made my spine start telescoping into itself!

The reason I wanted to go to the festival was that Joe Dante was appearing to host screenings of some of his films, as well as some that inspired him when he was young. Since the get-together with John Landis had worked out pretty well, I thought I'd meet Mr. Dante at the screening and see if he was interested in visiting the studio and hosting a talk like Mr. Landis had done. I was originally going to try to see Gremlins 2 (my favorite of the films being screened) in the afternoon, but it took longer to wrap up my toy photography that I thought, so that wasn't going to happen.

At first, I was going to bail on the whole enterprise, but I'd wanted to meet Mr. Dante for quite a while, so I called the Castro to see how his appearance was being handled. As it turned out, the longest he was going to be on stage was in between Blood and Roses and The Howling, neither of which had screened yet. How could I go to the talk and go to the Super 7 Monster Mash/art & toy release party which was happening earlier in the evening - especially on such a busy weekend, and with the screening in the Castro district, notorious for its lack of parking (I've missed screenings looking for parking in the Castro)? Some juggling was clearly in order.

Anita and I drove into the city at about 6 PM - we headed for the Castro first, as I wanted to make sure the event didn't sell out. It hadn't, so I picked up a ticket and drove over to Super 7 and parked in the nearby Japantown mall. We got a good spot in line and checked out the party for about forty-five minutes, just long enough to say 'hi' to Brain and Dora, and snag some sweet Nathan Jurevicius Fauna figures. We left at about eight o'clock to begin phase two.

Anita didn't want to see The Howling, so I dropped her off at the nearby AMC 1000, parked there (they'd be open until I got back from my movie), and cabbed it into the Castro. That cost about ten dollars each way, but in my mind it was worth it to avoid the parking aggravation. I got over there at about 9:40 or so - in plenty of time, as it turned out, to catch the mid-double-feature talk. I wasn't very impressed with host John Stanley - he seemed to have a lot of his facts wrong and didn't always ask good questions - but Mr. Dante was funny and shared some good career war stories with everyone. This worked out great, and I have a feeling it was the longest talk of the day. I ducked back into the lobby after the talk was over, and met Mr. Dante.

He was on his way out to dinner, so it was a little rushed, but I managed to invite him for a talk, give him a business card with contact info, and get my Explorers DVD signed. NERD! He was very nice, and made a point of mentioning that he thought Ratatouille was one of the best films of the year. So we'll see if anything comes of that. If not, well... I tried. I ducked back in to check out The Howling again. It was okay - maybe a little better than I remembered it.

Happily, traffic was in my favor all evening! Once the film was over, I cabbed it back to to the AMC 1000 to meet back up with Anita. She'd checked out the Heartbreak Kid remake, and had a blast (which was great, because I had no interest in seeing it). We compared notes over a turkey burger at Mel's, then zoomed home and flopped into bed - phew. Fun, but hectic!