In which there are micro pirates

I have bought a ridiculous amount of toys lately so it is about time I shared some of my new delights.

I recently came across this Micro Playmobil series. It takes Playmobil children and has them playing with micro-Playmobil figures! Each set comes in a little box with a boy and a girl and a landscape pictures inside, plus a series of tiny magnetic figures attached to a magnetic board. How utterly awesome. I literally want to buy every single one in the series! There's a farm and two castles and an adorable Noah's ark and a harbour... so cute.

What I really like most it though, isn't actually the utterly miniature Playmobil, but the children figures that you get with it. They will go so well with existing series' that I have. I bought this amazing pirate set and I already have lots of pirate figures and even some zombie pirates - but now I can have little pirate cabin boy and girl to join the crew! I am also so pleased that these sets are not sexist - both the boy and the girl are active figures, the girl is wearing trousers and not some Elizabeth Swan figure, some prize to be won. She is playing too!

 

Set when closed

The same equality is true for the knights set which I am definitely going to buy next. The boy and girl are both playing at being knights, at being active - not one boy-knight and one girl-princess. The little boy and girl knight dress up go even better with all my medieval sets because I want to make a training school in the style of the excellent Tamora Pierce books and have boys and girls training to be knights. I already have lots of figures that could fit into the Tortall world so one day I want to do a little stop motion video of one of the books using Playmobil and have Kel and Alanna and all the others.

And on a separate note I also watched Moonrise Kingdom last week. I know, I am a bit late to the game - but how awesome is that film? I love the touch of darkness, although it never got quite as dark as I thought it would be. If you haven't seen it, I really recommend it. Moonrise Kingdom is a whimsical coming of age film with stunning cinematography.

And in honour of it Andy and I made a Lego version of the narrator:

 

Hope you like it! 

In which I list my favourite playmobil figures

I am blogging on a Wednesday again like I promised. At least I got that far. It turns out I really am a bad blogger. It's true that I have been very busy with one of my closest friends in the world disappearing and getting married (the other way round) and so had hen dos and plotting.

However making excuses is just boring so I may have to accept I am a little bit of a rubbish blogger. Im going to keep aiming to do every Wednesday and as often as possible at the weekend but saving the world has to be done at some time and I'm no longer making promises.

Anyway at the hen do we had to tell an interesting fact about ourselves and how we knew the lady in question. I decided to share my obsession with playmobil. If you have been reading this blog for a while you will notice that I am inconsistent with my topics and occassionally just post up pictures of playmobil. It interests me and I hope it interests some other people out there. Or you all think I'm mad.

So. Today's list is: my 5 favourite playmobil figures.

1. The Cowboy.

This was my first ever playmobil figure. I bought him at a museum in California and played with him for the rest of that holiday. I took him with me to uni and wherever he sits on a shelf is home. He is my Woody. He was always the best guy when I played: a highwayman but friends with the native americans and only robbing from mean people.

2. The Jester.

I really love jesters. I am scared of clowns but jesters are somehow cool. I also collect interesting jokers in packs of cards, so I had to have this figure. Then my sister bought me a gardener set for the chainsaw just so this could happen.

3. Alanna

I got this figure because she reminds me of Alanna from the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to become a knight. It is a fantastic children's series which I talk about a lot and have really influenced me. I re-read them often. Also this figure could be a girl (as I think it was meant to be a boy) and that is rare in playmobil. For all that I love the toy I have no illusions that it is actually fairly sexist and I have a blogpost planned on that topic.

4. Ninja.

I have tons of pirates so a ninja is just cool and necessary.

5. Necromancer

I have this wizard figure for a while but I gained the necromancer staff recently and I love it. He is currently on my chest of drawers raising an army of the undead. Plus the skull on the end of the staff comes off.

One more thing. I played some dungeons and dragons a while back in which we made all of our characters into playmobil figures and I thought it looked good enough that it was worth recording.

We did some serious damage, plus I was a were-tiger.