In the beginning...

In the beginning there was Art Asylum (AA), and there was the Art Asylum message board. It wasn't huge, but there were a good group of folks who were interested in the properties and toys that AA was involved in. As a bonus the employees were semi-regular contributors and often gave insight into the industry. I wandered in after a link on the Trek Today news aggregrator site posted a link promoting AA's new Enterprise action figures. Prior to that I was into action figures at all, but I was hopeful for the new Star Trek series and dove in.

When the Enterprise figures finally arrived at my local Target, next to them on the pegs were some chunky block figures of the original Star Trek cast. Minimates. There was something about them. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew I liked them. I bought the "Big Three," Kirk, Spock and McCoy, took them home and started playing with them.



It seems like every time I saw these on the toy shelves/pegs I'd buy one or two. Quickly, Star Trek wasn't enough. I searched out the other lines, Crouching Tiger, Bruce Lee, KISS and the other Rock minimates. These were a bit harder to come by than Trek because they were limited to speciality retailers. The big-box stores didn't bite. It's too bad as none of the three inchers made it to a second series.



Please try to ignore the ugly watermark in these images. I was new to design and tried to come up with a logo to 'protect' my images from 'theft.' Either it worked, or the photos weren't worth stealing. Looking back, I bet it was the latter. Don't worry it gets smaller as time goes on, and eventually disappears completely.



The TNG standins are from the Playmates Innerspace line. They came with little ships or phasers that unfolded into playsets. I picked up several of these just for the wee figures. I love the idea of action figures playing with action figures, you'll see more of that in a future post.