Random Notes From The Poppity World of Culture

The PopCulteer
August 19, 2016

Your PopCulteer has had a fun week of unexpected driving adventures, delays and hang-ups that pulled his mind away from the task of writing, so this week our Friday column will be filled with short bursts of randomosity, okay?

Mattel’s Thingmaker

We wrote about the new Mattel Thingmaker 3D printer earlier this year after we saw it in person at Toy Fair in New York. Now you can pre-order it from Mattel, Apparently there have been some delays and the pre-order for Thingmaker has been removed from Mattel.com and Amazon, so maybe it won’t be available in time for Christmas.  When it does get here, it looks like they’ve made it easier to import your own 3D designs than it seemed it would be back at Toy Fair. Three hundred dollars for a decent little 3D printer isn’t too bad. We’ll keep you posted about when it will be available. Check out our video to see what we’re talking about.

Hillbilly Toy Chest Sale

Just a few weeks ago we told you about Hillbilly Toy Chest in Milton and their huge celebration marking one year in their new location. We have since learned the bittersweet news that Hillbilly Toy Chest is shutting down at the end of this month.

It’s not actually bad news. Nathaniel and Emily Williamson decided to close their shop because Nathaniel’s other career is taking off, and they want to start a family, so running a collectible toy/comic/card shop was simply too much. They are going out on top and they’re doing it with a huge sale, which now sees everything in the store marked down 50%. We hate to see them go, but we’re glad that it’s not because of bad business or anything negative. It was just time to move on.

The sale runs until August 27 at Hillbilly Toy Chest at 878 E Main Street in Milton. Everything is half off and they are selling off their fixtures, pegboards and display cabinets.

ShockaCon

We are six weeks away from ShockaCon 2016. We will be telling you much, much more about ShockaCon in the coming weeks. For now, check out this video…

Haversham Olympics

Listeners of The AIR may have noticed that some of our programming has been in reruns for the last couple of weeks. Our British production partners, Haversham Recording Institute, supply several shows to us which are a labor of love created by their presenters.

Love, as you may know, does not pay the bills, and several of their announcers have been tied up doing voice over work on various international Olympic broadcasts for the last couple of weeks.

This will have them busy for a while, so next week will likely also see repeats of the programs hosted by Herman Linte, Dexter Checkers, Nigel Pye and Humphrey Hubert. Sydney Fileen, co-owner of Haversham and the host of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat (more on that later) will not miss any shows, as she explained to us that she “simply doesn’t care for sport.”

The Renfields

One of our favorite bands, The Renfields, are playing a Labor Day Weekend concert, Septemer 3, in Pineville, Kentucky. This has outraged one particularly strident Pinevillain who feels that The Renfields promote Satanism.

Now, given that The Renfields are about as Satanic as Count Chocula, this is more than a little hilarious. A Facebook campaign to get the band pulled from the line-up stalled when the person instigating it tagged too many people and had their account restricted.

I’m pretty sure that The Renfields do not actually worship Satan, although I believe that their frontman, Vincent Renfield has been know to occasionally wear satin. Perhaps that is the source of this poor woman’s confusion, or perhaps this is a conspiracy between her and the international Cotton cabal to villify the use of satin worldwide.

Very tiny-minded people are actually planning to boycott the whole four-day festival because of this. The comments on the Facebook Event Page are pretty darned funny. Here are The Renfields on The RFC MINI SHOW…

Batman 1966 Animated Feature

With voices supplied by Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar, the TV version of Batman (complete with the only-ever one true first official Batmobile) will return as an animated DVD in October. Here’s what you need to know…

MEGO Monkees

Figures Toy Company, the folks who crank out way too many cool MEGO-style action figures for me to keep up with, have released a new batch of figures based on The Monkees. You can order them HERE.

Big Electric Cat Playlist

As we mentioned above, you can hear a brand-new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat today at 3 PM on The AIR. Sydney Fileen presents two hours each week of the finest New Wave music you will ever hear curated in one place. Tune in at The AIR, or on this neat little widget…

The playlist for today’s Big Electric Cat:

Ultravox  “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”
Souixsie and the Banshees  “Hong Kong Garden”
Gleaming Spires  “Art Together”
Comateens  “Overseas”
Video Sex  “Mojo Mama”
The GoGos  “You Can’t Walk In Your Sleep (If You Can’t Sleep)”
Stan Ridgeway  “The Big Heat”
The Living Daylights  “Sugar Days”
T-4-2  “Outside Your Window”
Talk Talk  “Talk Talk”
The Flirts  “Danger”
Robert Marlow  “Calling All Destroyers”
A Flock Of Seagulls  “Messages”
Split Enz  “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”
UK Viva  “Radio Saviour”
Lene Lovich  “New Toy”
The Fallout Club  “Wonderlust”
Re-Flex  “Keep In Touch”
OMD  “Secret”
DEVO  “Planet Earth”
Naked Eyes  “Emotion in Motion”
Small Affairs  “Back To China”
Sherrie Actor  “Forbidden Fruit”
Ian Dury and The Blockheads  “Reasons To Be Cheerful Pt. 3”
The Stranglers  “No More Heroes”
The Damned  “Neat, Neat, Neat”
Tenpole Tudor  “Swords of a Thousand Men”
Jona Lewie “You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties”
The Slits  “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”
Background and close music is Giorgio Morodor’s  “Chase”

That’s it for this week’s hastily-assembled PopCulteer. Check back for our usual stuff. We’ve been here for nearly eleven years, with fresh content every day for the last three, so at least we’re consistent.