I'm generally interested in toys. I work for a company that specializes in, for lack of a better term, character collectibles - but I'm in it for the toys. The Wall-E 15-Pc Bag O' Bots was something that totally got me - Kay-Bee toys carried this before they sailed off to oblivion, and at $4 I wasn't sure if it was too cheap or too expensive. I've recently been doing a lot of looking around at this kind of toy - Hasbro has 9-packs for $5, but Imperial Toy had - no joke - 90-figure sets at Walmart for a mere $4.50. Those weren't licensed, but still - these things are cheap. You've no doubt seen green army men at the dollar stores, so this kind of toy is about as cheap as they come.
You get 5 robots - 3 takes on Wall-E, plus Vaccum-bot, Eve, Autopilot, Gopher, M-O, Massage-bot, Paint-bot, Beautician-bot, Light-bot, Defibrilator-bot, Steward, and the Umbrella-bot. Note, some of them don't have final names - they're just placeholders. This is not a complete cast of the movie - after all, there's no Burn-E. Still, it's a nice box of cheap toys but they may have more to offer the older fan.
Rather than provide three-dimensional representations of the designs from the movie, these are somewhat flat or compressed figures sculpted with what I could best call a sort of forced perspective. Wall-E stands 1 1/2-inches high and his peculiar design makes him look like he's defying some law of physics. The squarish robot is now a sort of a flat parallelogram, angled in such a way that it looks like you're getting a lot more plastic than you might expect. Oddly, the illusion really works well in person - even when you view it from behind, it has a lot of false depth. I can't say I've ever seen a toy quite like this, so given how they played with the limitations of the "green army man" format this is nothing if not impressive.
The Umbrella-Bot is the tallest at a hair under 2 1/2-inches tall, and its skinny design requires no strange perspective sculpting. AUTO is similarly flat - there's not a lot to do here. Each figure is fully-sculpted front and back, and the glossy figures seem pretty durable. At an average price of 26 cents each, they really don't have to be all that fantastic for the money - but hey, it's the cheapest EVE and Wall-E you can buy.
Even though they're short, they're in scale with some of the Green Army Men-style toys I've seen. The style is unlike any other I've seen so far - so I wouldn't necessarily insist you display them together as a group - but the designs are certainly qurrky, and given their terrible distribution and low secondary market prices I have to assume that they failed to find their audience. This kind of figure comes and goes every few years, taking up various price points and paint jobs (or lack thereof). They're swell desk toys because they're easy to clean and stand easily on top of most flat (but not super-flat) LCD monitors. I just opened in August after picking them up when they were first released, and can tell you that I wish I could buy more toys like this for about this price.
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