Happy 4th!

AEIOU would like to wish you a Happy and safe 4th of July, no matter where you live!

Head on over to Wonderful Wonderblog to download an album from 1961 called "America the Beautiful - The Heart of America in Poetry" spoken by Vincent Price!

Mailbox Invaders from the Cosmic Ark

 What better way to celebrate the 200th post than with some blogger goodwill?

For those playing along at home, AEIOU will also be a year old in 16 days!

A few weeks ago fellow pop culture blogger jboypacman posted some pics of his minifigure army on his site, Revenge from the Cosmic Ark. I commented that I'd have to track down one of the Character Builder astronauts to go with my Doctor Who minifigs (also made by the same company).

Jboy kindly offered to send me one of his spares and initially asked for nothing in return. A few days later he asked if I'd pick up and ship a couple of the sodas I'd been blogging about, which I was more than happy to do!

Here's the astronaut with my Doctor Who figs...and a few friends. While it's not part of the Doctor Who line, it fits in just fine as the Unknown Astronaut that assassinates the Doctor.

What I've failed to mention thus far is the size of the box he arrived in. It was much too big for such a small figure. Little did I know before opening, Jboy sent some extra goodies my way! There's nothing like opening a box you don't know the contents of!

An Avengers skateboard, MegaBlocks Spider-Man, a couple of Deck Dudes, a Character Builder knight, a stack of Weird-Ohs trading cards, a Hot Wheels Ecto-1 and a couple of Heroics figures. (not pictured) LEGO Statue of Liberty

But that was not all! 

At the bottom of the box, shrouded in bubble wrap something larger lurked. 

What I found was this beauty...

Bad photographer! Forgot to put something in for scale. It's about 9" long.

If you're having the same reaction I did, you're saying "Whoooaa, cool! But what is it?" It is the UFO Master Blaster Station (1979) by Bambino. I'd never heard of this toy but there is something about an LED display and that particular white plastic that just zaps you back to the 70s' regardless. 

According to the manual it was the world's smallest color graphic display and the first electronic computer game with a microprocessor! It's a pretty fun retro gaming experience. You have 80 seconds to shoot down as many UFOs as possible, with 99 being the top score.

The UFOs descend down one of  three "lanes" toward your missile base. You get more points the higher up the UFO is when you blast it. Of course, you can only have one missile at a time but you can guide it between the lanes to your target. There's 3 difficulty levels but I haven't tried the hardest one yet. Here's a gameplay video from YouTube.

Pretty exciting, huh? I love old school electronic games.

A huge thanks to Jboy for sending all this extra cool stuff my way!

Monthly Movie Recap - June 2012

Well, the good news is these monthly posts will be a lot shorter over the summer as I've landed a temp job. June was by far the biggest swing between amazingly awesome movies and amazingly bad movies. As always, clicking a linked title takes you to Amazon where you can order it and toss a few coins our way.

Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story (2011)
It's almost like King of Kong but for Monopoly. One of the players is a grade school math teacher who breaks down probabilities of the game board to teach his class. The doc also discusses the history of how the game came to be which is pretty interesting. 

Cool: Narrated by Zachary Levi!; I could actually watch the full 40 minute video of the championship game and not be bored
Lame: Just like every other competitive game, there are some real weirdos
Rating: 8/10, if you ever wanted to be a Monopoly shark, watch the DVD extras