Okay, enough with the appointments and back into that wacky universe of the Javitz Center, repository of strokes of genius, strokes of idiot, and the wildly, life-affirmingly bizarre. The first thing that we saw when starting from the first row sort of set the tone for the rest of the day.

This offends me and I'm not even religious. I can't think of any intelligent, non-sarcastic uses for a neon Jesus Cross. If you put this up in a church, the congregation would lynch you. You really wouldn't stick this in the window of a convenience store next to the LOTTO SOLD HERE sign, I'd hope. My only conclusion, being that this is a TOY fair, is that this is meant to hang in a child's room, which is a hellishly surreal concept unto itself. A neon Jesus Cross, hanging on a bare wall in a darkened room, casting orange shadows on everything.

"Daddy...Jesus is keeping me awake and hurting my eyes and quite possibly giving me cancer!"
"With faith, you don't need sleep. Or eyes or a prostate."
"But daddy.... can't we just turn off the sign? It's 3 in the morning."
"But then how will Jesus know you believe in him and not fill your heart with locusts where your love for him should be?"

Those wacky Christians! The next notably awesome thing we saw were these :

These guys are called Zoomorphs. They're clearly animals with detachable limbs, heads and torso and tails, which one can interchange with the other 16 available animals without needing to pay for extensive vet bills and court proceedings. The Zoomorphs come in four sets of four animals, with plans to expand the included animals with future expansion sets. All of the soft, rubber parts pop in and out of each other very easily. We hung out at the table and played for a little while, but there was NO WAY I could improve upon the 12-legged Spider Parrot, which included all the best parts of a spider and all the best parts of a parrot into one amazing creature that god himself is remiss for not having made in the first place.

The animals are made even stranger by, well, looking fairly unusual in the first place, even in their proper forms. As far as these animals looking like what they represent goes, they come cartoonishly close as one can while giving a Velociraptor a repainted finned Mosasaur tail, the Mosasaur of course being known for its powers to part oceans and lead his people to freedom. The translucent Goldfish head is possibly the best thing I've ever seen, and the T-Rex head looks like it came right off of a robot, the extra pieces included in each set seem to allow for ton of creepy, godless possibilities.

Somewhere in this vicinity was one of two very closely related products which take giving your kid a horsey ride on your knee to a whole new level. It's like... Horsey Ride X-Treme Forever all up in here. Last year, Dan recalls seeing the 'Po-Knee', which was a decapitated, plush horse head that you strap to your knee before saddlin' up your kid and bouncing his guts out. This year saw the return of the Po-Knee, as well as the product on the left, which is... another Po-Knee. We'd come to the Original Po-Knee before too long, and both would be being demonstrated in the most horrible ways possible.

I took the photo of the man on the left using top-secret spy mode on my camera, which was a complicated process that involved pretending to show Dan something on the LCD screen of my camera while asking him, "Is he in the shot? Turn it to the left? Okay, awesome," and snapping the picture over my shoulder. See, you want to get pictures of the craziness without making people feel like you're making fun of their product. This guy's demonstration was aided by an amazingly creepy Grey-looking punched-in-face doll that he was bouncing on his knee like some poor, boneless syndrome child. Oh, but the horse knee demonstrations didn't end there. They got worse. Specifically, they got mechanized.

As per last year's discussions with the creator of the Po-Knee, this device initially involved a computer program to sit the child in front of as you bounced him or her, without much consideration to the positioning of one's computer and accessibility of the mouse and keyboard. Dan, ever astute, pointed this out. While the computer program was not immediately present this year, it was replaced with a pair of Demonstration Knees, which jerked up and down at an alarming rate, attached to motors on the floor. The Demo Knees, needless to say, did nothing to especially enhance the limited appeal of the Po-Knee idea, which is sure to lose its novelty for children in a week, and could perhaps more easily gain a following in more erotic applications.

Down the line, more building / construction toys. I have no idea what these are, but their semi-translucent properties allow them to be illuminated from the inside. The exhibitors weren't much interested in giving a damn about being there, so we passed on without comment. Any two things that you could conceivably interlock in any way have made their way into the world of construction toys, somehow. From here, we entered the Toy Fair Chinatown, a 2-alley stretch in the back corner of the fair where you'll usually see unusual and disturbing items, and no one can really communicate with you in proper English. It's best to just keep on walking...

The yellow-headed and tiki items are called Switcherz, interchangeable dashboard characters for your car, coming in a handful of interesting varieties, including Skull and Devil, and judging by the scene at the display, they'll also stick to fat, bad guy heads. This is good to know, because slowly but surely, I'm headed there myself, and I'm comforted by the fact that I'll be able to decorate my pate with a little emoting man. I was lucky enough to walk off with a Devil head. To the left of those are a handful of shiny junk statues, very impressively assembled and purchasable at just about any comic con that you attend.

Finally, we hit the urban vinyl / pop surrealist subculture designer section of the show, which had the toys most related to my own interests as well as the cutest booth chicks. For piercings, unnatural hair colors and cuteness, there's no place like the urban vinyl section.

A large array of designer toy retailers and producers were represented, from Toy Tokyo, StrangeCo, Kid Robot, Rocket World, and Xone, to UFO Toys. For the uninitiated, most, if not all, of the above toys are based on the artwork coming from today's most controversial and current art movement, pop surrealism. Existing somewhere between illustration and fine art, and plumbing the ugliest and most beautiful depths of pop culture and the id of surrealism, pop surrealism, also sometimes called 'low brow', is everything we love about robots and bugs finally taken pretty seriously. Well, I take pretty seriously, with illustration and pop surrealism being the main thrust of what I do over at Resonant Fish, harboring hidden desires to be discovered and have plastic toys made of some fun, charming character I've painted.

The first three photos were taken at an unidentified booth, and feature some of the current designer toys available out there. That second one is Sam Kieth's LEGS statue, done in perfect, wild detail, and illustrated with that same Maxx-ish look. The photos following those were taken over at StrangeCo's booth, which featured pieces from the Neo Kaiju Project (which I'd blogged a bit about, after bringing some home as pets from the city this past summer), Jim Woodring's Newts and any number of other things that are justifiably lauded in Juxtapoz magazine. If you haven't really been interested in artist-driven toys, and admittedly, they don't have the immediate entry point, low price and mass appeal of, say, another Wolverine figure, swing on by any and all of the above listed sites and just look. Neo Kaiju = monkey riding a trilobite = quite possibly the best multi-artist driven line of this past year.

The most interesting part of hanging with the urban vinyl crowd was conversing with stellar artist Patrick Ma about his IWG Toys, a series of large animal figures with heavy weaponry, fighting to take back the world from rampant industrialization. Completely socially conscious, and practicing what he preaches, some of the proceeds from these IWG toys are being donated to wilderness groups. You'll have to excuse my abysmal photos of these - there are much better photos available at the official site. The squid-like creature will come with a glow-in-the-dark variant, so I can die happy. It was a booth that kind of re-affirmed that my own priorities in squid and glowing things and trilobites aren't so misplaced after all. Brian says that I mention squid about twice in every article.

As my camera alternately decided to function properly and crap out into blursville, we stopped by Critterbox to scope out their wares, which included a Matt Groening Life in Hell figure prototype which they were very protective over, like a fat lady over a buffet. Dan snapped some pictures after turning over his spleen as collateral, singing the theme song to The Facts of Life and peeing in a cup shaped like C3PO's head for DNA verification purposes. I'm sure he'll send the photos over. Some day. Dan. As an aside, that final photo is of Tim Biskup's Helper figure. ANR's Recommended Reading mandates that you go get copy of Biskup's bite-sized '100 Paintings'. Your 500-word essay is due next Monday. The best essay will get a powerful man-kiss from yours truly. The worst, well... I'll just burn down your house.

Nearby was Medicom themselves, producers of those Kubricks that I display so proudly, tried so hard not to love, and got addicted to anyhow. Oh, how jealously I gazed upon their four Japan exclusive Back to the Future sets, and the not-yet-released Marvel Series Four. That Spider Ham, though... that bitch is mine. Does it trump a Zoomorph Spider Parrot? I think we all know the answer to that...

Have you ever thought to yourself, during the lonely winter hours, "I don't have nearly enough three dimensional items depicting anal penetration"? Have these thoughts been chased by a resounding, "...or enough items to vilify and denigrate the members of the police force"? Well, hot damn, Phoney Baloney has been reading your mind! Stop them before they thwart your eBay auctions and break your fine china! Resurrecting an idea conceptualized in the 1980's, and finally bringing it into figural form after existing in many other various forms over the years, Phoney Baloney presents us with a series of police pigs in various states of torture and unhappiness.

... and the tremendously adorable girl working there, Sally, gave us free t-shirts, so what isn't to love?

The designer toys section isn't over yet, though, as we've not yet had the pleasure of checking out the Kaiju Kidz by the talented Ralph Cosentino. They're 8.5" monsters with kids inside! Completely charming, and with far more of a 'PLAY WITH ME' aesthetic which is only detracted from by the 40 dollar price point, these are really cool little guys in person. While apparently made of more obviously molded-plastic, snap-together materials than the usual vinyl toys, they're still cute enough to pass the test. Whatever that test may be.

These weren't the only creations at Cosentino's booth.

And finally, below, the Foofnicks and such over at the Xone booth, which was kind of lost beyond the ostentatious Master Replicas setup. Another entry into the designer toy world, which is never hurting for wild ideas and always excited to accept more. They had free stickers and ergo, a direct conduit right into my heart.

Before we bring a conclusion to the urban vinyl section, I'd like to mention that Toy Tokyo is running a tsunami benefit raffle over at their site, featuring original art and collectible items at 10 bucks per ticket. Some of these items were on display at Toy Fair, and while I don't see the beautiful Tim Biskup figure upon first glance at the site, I plan on buying a few tickets for various items before the end of the raffle, and I suggest that you do the same. If my name on a piece of artwork was worth a damn, I'd be painting up a storm for them.

And like waking from a dream where turtles teach arithmetic in amoeba-shaped classrooms and pretty girls actually talk to you about toys, we left the designer toys in the distance.