In what's by far the strangest event since the resurgence of the Ninja Toitles began, giant-sized action figures are being packaged with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III DVDs in neat windows boxes, sold at the radical discount rate of 13.99.  There really aren't any good explanations for this, and every time I look at it, fifty more questions pop in my head and make my head go all ninja hurtles.  The film came out in 1993; TMNT's current crop of fans (we do not count) can't possibly share its age demo.  Even so, TMNT III is nothing for anyone with a vested interest in the current franchise to be proud of, and I can't imagine any bigwigs at Playmates sitting around giant oak tables shaped like miniature golf courses saying, "A good way to make today's kids love today's Turtles is by showing them the single most critically shat-upon aspect of yesterday's Turtles."  Only they wouldn't say it like that.  They'd say it more dumberly.

Being one of the fortunate losers who can say that they enjoy both Old Turtles and New Turtles, this mashing of eras serves me big plates of delight that figuratively taste like awesome Cool Whip.  I've always tried to keep my nerd level in check when it comes to not opening things that would look better opened because they'll be worth trillions of bling clams someday, but no, you absolutely CANNOT open this set, because the sum is worth a hundred times more than its parts.  The figure is cool, but there's a million of them, and the DVD is kind of cool, but you can buy it from any gas station with a TigerMart for 2.99.  Only together are their strengths fully realized.  Only together can they be worth writing about at 11:30 on a Tuesday night.

Some attempt was made to make sense of the madness.  It's the "Movie Action Set," including a "Mutant Movie Star" — a "Box Office Brawler."  I am so close to meaning it when I say I'm cracking up right now.  And now that I've noticed the movie popcorn graphics all over the box, I really do mean it.  This one's for the books.  The tubular books.

So, I cleaned out the freezer today.

SNT, Week 2030230.

Following up on the previous entry, we headed over to one of those "Dollar Tree" stores after sobbing over the loss of Easy Video.  For me, the night had been way too disappointing to tack on going home empty handed.  Browsing the aisles with tear stained cheeks, we soon found happiness again within all the many strange foods, toys and "Best of Mike Myers" SNL videos the Dollar Tree offered.  Check out the booty…

Strawberry MoonPies!  The MoonPie has become a rare artifact in the town I live in, so much so that I spent a long string of years falsely believing they'd gone extinct.  Not so.  That said, I'd never heard of strawberry MoonPies before last night, which look remarkably appetizing and so, so pink.  Though you could argue that everything in a dollar store is a bargain, it really feels like something special to get four MoonPies for a buck.  This happy thought led to a bit of MoonPie research when I returned home, which ultimately landed me at the official site, which ultimately landed me on a page of the official site that sells metal buckets full of RC Cola and MoonPies for under twenty bucks.  I smell a riotously macho Superbowl party.

I am so down with this.  I am so down with this big unpretentious box full of Fortune Cookies, complete with fortunes.  It's amazing.  I probably eat enough Chinese food to cover half of the industry's needed margins, but when it comes to the included fortune cookies, I take 'em for granted.  Usually skip right over them, tossing the little edible ears into the trash with a big pile of see-thru mustard packets and gnawed-on rib bones.  Now that I see 'em all tucked away in a big, glorious box, I've consigned myself to a fortune cookie obsession that promises to last at least three of four days.  Don't mind the notation of the cookies being "citrus flavored" — they taste just like any ordinary fortune cookie, and this is a good thing.

I guess I bought these because they're generally sized and generally shaped like the collection of pewter figurines I once owned - you know, the kind only purchased at nerdy game shops with big sticker warnings on the package detailing the horrible death awaiting anyone willing to lick their preciously poisonous surfaces.  Yeah those.  One set features knights and horses, the other features ninjas.  Though the knights enjoy a broader range of detail and paint colors, the ninjas are clearly cooler, and whenever these forces finally lock horns, they will clearly be the victors and oppressors.

Got some more things too, but I'll save 'em for a rainier day.

Also saw two movies recently.  Crash, which I really, really liked, and War of the Worlds, which uhh…I dunno.  As a spectator with his gloves off, I dug a lot of the scenes.  The aliens were nicely menacing with their stupid machines and that thing that essentially equated to a food processor for live human meat.  Then it just ended.  Flatly.  Very very flatly.  I don't feel this should be written off as "justified" just because it's faithful to the story's roots.  For me, it was a little more like this: "BAD SHIT BAD SHIT BAD SHIT BAD SHIT…OKAY WE HIT 120 MINUTES, GOOD SHIT!"  Then again, I have no right to this opinion.  For half of the movie's duration, my head was buried in this old graphic novelization of Return of the Jedi that suddenly appeared next to the bed.  No need for phonetics, now I've got it in print: "Deeshka!  Deeshka dewongie Chewbacca!"

Tomorrow will be brighter, because tomorrow is Friday.  Also because giant jellyfish are kicking the shit out of the Japanese.  You think I kid you?

New article coming this weekend.  Highlight of the week has been wrapping a project at work for LEGO and drawing inspiration from Unicron's theme song for the background track.  More on this later.  The only thing important to me tonight is mourning the loss of Easy Video, the most kickass video store in the world.  I paid tribute to it in a roundabout way in this old article, and I'd gone back to it many, many times since then.  Stuffed with some of the most memorable but impossible-to-find cassettes known to geek along with piles and piles of old candy, trading card packs and random toys, we jetted over to its former location near the Woodbridge Mall in Jersey tonight to find an empty store in an empty chain mall that seemed dangerously close to being obliterated by a wrecking ball.  My heart sank, especially because this means I missed the liquidation sale.  Adding to the pain is that the only decent mom & pop video store left in my general area is one I have a massively delinquent account at.

And just down the street from the former Easy Video rests the gloriously old Hostess Bakery as seen in X-E's Choco-Diles article.  I assume that'll be next to go, thus eliminating any reason for me to ever visit the city of Woodbridge again.  This cannot happen.  To be frank, the city of Woodbridge needs me.

SNT?

I had every intention of giving this one the full X-E review treatment, but I've gotta admit defeat: Interest has waned, and there's no sense starting an article just because it was conceived.  So forget it, let's make it quick and dirty: I kind of liked Son of Kong.

An infamous exploit that was somehow rushed into theaters in the very same year as the original King Kong (1933), the follow up is a more direct sequel that one might think.  With Robert Armstrong reprising his role of Carl Denham and the events of the story set more or less directly following the father film, Son of Kong clocks in at just over an hour, and spends much of that time throwing crap at the walls just to be able to say it was over an hour long.  With a tighter budget and an impossibly fast production turnaround, all of the fun on Skull Island had to be kept to a minimum.  Denham and a skeleton crew head back to the mysterious lump of prehistory in search of rumored treasure.  As Denham is being sued by everyone in New York City on account of the Raging Gorilla Action seen in King Kong, this is his only hope.

A lot of reviews paint Son of Kong as a more lighthearted film than its big daddy.  I didn't really think so.  Sure, Kong's son is goofy and affable, but that's no different than King Kong doing that Groucho thing with his brow when he first spots Ann in the original.  Whatever.  Skull Island is far less explored this time around, understandably, but even with a mere 20 minutes or so of the film set on the island, they managed to pack in enough monsters and mayhem to make it worth a watch.  Highlights included:

- Denham and Damsel Du Jour befriending Kong's son (known to fans as "Kiko") by freeing him from a quicksand trap.  They later bandage his finger and are rewarded with a hundred flying coconuts.

- Son of Kong battling a kickass giant bear, using ten trillion pro-wrestling maneuvers and managing to orchestrate a five star match without even a secondary championship on the line.  Go Kong.  And bear.

- Dinosaurs!  They're back!  A stegosaurs!  A triceratops!  And a sea serpent that's a hundred times cooler than anything seen in the original.  Seriously.

Kong's son is all-hero in the film, never once a menace.  I won't spoil the ending, but I wouldn't recommend watching it if you think WATCHING KONG'S SON DIE WILL MAKE YOU CRY.  It's one of those sacrifice deals — kinda sweet, actually.  No idea why Son of Kong is so often ranked among the worst movies ever made; it's silly and unnecessary, sure, but so is every other movie starring monkeys.  I say it's worth a watch.