"My blog is going to give away 1000 dollars every day of summer. Make sure you refresh and visit multiple times. It may not be every day BECAUSE I'M POLITE AND DON'T PROMISE THINGS I CAN'T DELIVER." -- Posted By Anonymous.

Oh, please. I haven't updated X-E's main page since the Superbowl. Manipulating readers into refreshing for ad impressions has clearly been a long-term goal of mine. Besides, I'm not even late. "Once a day," I said. I'm totally on deadline.

"Anonymous" must be punished, and my chosen method in punishing Anonymous unfortunately means that you're going to be punished right along with him. I had a beautiful, long and interesting entry planned, but now I am SCRATCHING it, and instead, I am going to review the KAHEGA ACTION FIGURE. From CONGO.

You like that, Anonymous? Are you pleased with the fruits of your uncaring and unsigned comment? You've ruined it for everybody. I had GOLD planned for today...and now gold has been replaced with KAHEGA. And by the way, Anonymous: I've got a Karen Ross action figure just waiting for your next fuck-up.

Hindsight dictates that a Congo action figure series was a terrible idea, but I don't blame Kenner for giving it a shot in 1995. It's assured that they had to work out the licensing details and produce the toys long before they knew how well the movie would be received. This isn't to say that Congo was a total flop, because it wasn't. It just wasn't a very important movie, with its scope of diehard fans limited to stoners who found humor in the concept of a gorilla talking through the magic of a hotwired Nintendo Power Glove.

Truth be told, it's one of my favorite films ever, and I mean that with 100% sincerity. Congo was unfairly compared to Jurassic Park due to the Crichton connection, but when most reviewers were busy looking for the Spielberg-level storytelling wizardry and never-before-seen special effects, a small-but-elite force of moviegoers realized that any flick that featured Tim Curry getting yelled at for eating sesame cake before meeting his demise at the hands of an undiscovered camp of mutant gorillas was worth twenty times more than a T-Rex launching goat carrion.

I loved Jurassic Park, but it had nothing on Congo. Congo is the ultimate movie. From egotistical "Amy Monkey" christening herself as "pretty," to the scene where the heroes use flare guns to displace heat seeking missiles, there is not one second in Congo that doesn't stand toe-to-toe with any other second in any other movie.

Anyway, the toys tanked. They hardcore tanked. Congo was an action movie, but even I can't argue that its characters weren't exactly on-par with Indiana Jones. Kenner tried everything they could to make it work, but it was impossible. Remember Peter? The kinda dorky lead guy from the movie, whose only vested interest in the adventure was returning his talking gorilla to her safe homeland? Well, to make him translate better as an action figure, they fitted Peter with a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. But deep down, it's still just the guy from Congo who blurred the boundaries of bestiality while picking leeches out of his crotch.

Still, at least Peter is a character people who've seen Congo would probably recognize. I'm not sure the same can be said for Kahega. If you don't recall Kahega's role in the movie, that's your problem. I'd tell you, but I can't. Because of Anonymous.

Kahega is easily one of the worst action figures in history. Whatever chance you stood to be reminded of the film version of Kahega is eradicated by the fact that the figure looks absolutely nothing the fuck like him. Indeed, the only thing Anonymous and I have in common is that we both look more like Kahega than his action figure does.

One of the worst-proportioned toys of the modern era, Kahega's six-pack of abs is cut into a three-pack by the odd placement of his belt, which christens a journey down to a pair of legs that could not possibly belong to the torso that isn't more than a half a centimeter above them. And I was barely past digesting that when I noticed that the sum mass of Kahega's head is smaller than either of his feet.

Strangely, there's a gaping hole on Kahega's back which allows him to handsfree-carry the smaller of his two gigantic guns. Read that again, in case you missed the bit where Kahega mounts weapons inside a hole on his back. You really gotta feel for poor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. He had to be so excited when he heard that he was going to be immortalized as an action figure, and then he gets this. You also gotta feel for poor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje because text-to-speech programs really don't know how to pronounce his name.

By the way...I have the full set of Congo action figures. Everyone from "Monroe" to "Blastface the Grey Gorilla," who according to his package comes with "mutant fury." "Mutant fury" was Kenner's code-speak for "this figure does not come with anything." I guess by the time they finished fitting the seventy-seventh action figure with the same shoulder-mounted missile launcher, they knew they were pushing it. My point? If Anonymous messes with me again, I'm breaking out the Amy action figure. The AMY action figure. Think before you leap, Anonymous. Adebisi lives.

Posted by Matt on 07/02/2008. E-mail me!