Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Archive for the ‘Fun Stuff’ Category

When you were a kid (or NOW, if you are a kid), what would you have given to have 1,200 Hot Wheels
Cars racing around a track all at the same time? I know!

Well, Chris Burden, an artist in California has done just that. He’s currently working on Metropolis II, an installation that will appear at the Low Angeles County Museum of Art.

Metropolis I was created in 2004 and was composed of 80 cars. Obviously he upgraded a bit for this new version.

Once completed, the cars will race past a Rube Goldberg "city" made form Erector Sets, Legos, and Lincoln Logs.

I’m sure there’s a serious message behind this artwork, but for our purposes, it’s just way-cool. Hope it comes to the East Coast at some point in the future so I can see it in person.

Via Gizmodo

OK Go has once again created a great creative music video. This one also includes creative animation, which is something I love, which you might know from the flipbooks and other items we carry at Dave’s Cool Toys.

Their new video uses 2,430 pieces of toast with animation burned onto each one. I’m not sure, but I think they re-used some.

Anyway, it’s wonderful and I hope they keep it up! Enjoy

Via Gizmodo

Sesame Street has pulled a segment from the show featuring Katy Perry after it appeared on YouTube and received comments from parents that were angry about the amount of cleavage she was showing.

Here is Sesame Street’s official statement on the video:

"Sesame Street has a long history of working with celebrities across all genres, including athletes, actors, musicians and artists. Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult. We use parodies and celebrity segments to interest adults in the show because we know that a child learns best when co-viewing with a parent or care-giver. We also value our viewer’s opinions and particularly those of parents. In light of the feedback we’ve received on the Katy Perry music video which was released on You Tube only, we have decided we will not air the segment on the television broadcast of Sesame Street, which is aimed at preschoolers. Katy Perry fans will still be able to view the video on You Tube."

Was it that bad? Decide for yourself. Below is the video (at least until they remove it from YouTube as well).

I love OK Go. Their videos are wonderful. They are somewhat of a throw-back to the time when MTV actually played music videos and artist made an effort with them. Here’s a new one for White Knuckes.

Dogs rule!

An excellent video of soap bubbles by Sterling Johnson on Stinson Beach. That’s all.

Peepee Teepee in action. Well, waiting for action.

This past weekend we visited Gift Fair in New York City. Had a great day wandering around and visiting vendors.

One of the oddest things we saw was the Peepee Teepee. It’s a little cloth teepee that you put over a baby boy’s penis during changing to avoid those dreaded urine fountains.

As far as I can tell, the Peepee Teepee doesn’t adhere in any way, so I don’t really see how it could possibly stay in place during a diaper change. And, as one reviewer on Amazon pointed out, one good stream of urine would knock it right off. Now you have urine spraying and flying, wet Teepees too.

They come in a set of five in a little laundry bag. They’re made of cotton and are machine washable. You can also get different patterns such as Camouflage.

My guess, not too practical, but would make a talked-about gift at a shower.

Peepee Teepee, set of five, washable. Selling for about $10.00 on Amazon.

Haven’t you ever wondered what The Chimpmunks really sound like? Here’s the The Chipmunk Song, Christmas Don’t Be Late, slowed down to hear their actual voices.

The song isn’t really slowed down, rather pitch shifted. Althought when they made the original, they recorded the voices at half speed, and, when played back at full speed, their voices would be higher. I would guess they needed to also speak and sing more slowly when they recorded it. But by electronically shifting the pitch in this video, the song stays the same length.

Jedi toy painting

Artist Robert Burden has created a wonderful work of art entitled "The Birth of a Jedi". It’s oil on canvas, and stands 10 feet x 7feet.

If you’re wondering how this fits in to a blog about toys you will understand towards the end of the video for the closeups

Of course if you’re wondering that, you probably haven’t visited my blog before (I go off-topic a lot).

The painting covers events in Return of the Jedi when Luke is rescued by Han and must be kept warm in the belly of the TaunTaun. Although I remember them being white, or gray.

Scroll down for a time-lapse of the 7 months it took to paint.

via Gizmodo

A few weeks ago I posted about “Poop Up Pool” and wondered in the post whether it was a real photo or a photoshop fake.

Yesterday I got a message from a Krissi in Sweden that she’d seen this product, live and in-person in her local store. She took a photo with her cell phone and it’s posted below.

Here is what she said about it:

“This is from a Coop store, one of the major grocery chains in Sweden. It looks like the source from the first photo in your blog post was also at a Swedish Coop, since the price tag is the same. This isn’t the first time that poorly proofread Chinese import products have been on the shelves here…definitely the biggest howler though.

I tried to find this product on Amazon again and the only product that came up was “Dirty Jobs Season 4“. This says a lot about the show.

	Poop Up Pool Confirmed!

Lego version of Escher’s Ascending and Descending

I seem to be stuck on Lego lately. Oh well.

Today’s post combines two of my favorite things, Lego and M.C. Escher.

Who would have thought that you could create the wonderful visual illusions of M.C. Escher in three dimensions with Lego? Apparently Andrew Lipson did. He has created some amazing lego versions of Escher’s artwork along with his friend Daniel Shiu. He has used some photographic cheating in a couple of instances, but mostly they are pure models that depend more on the photographic angle for their illusions.

He makes other great things from Lego, but his Escher works are truly masterpieces and I can’t even imagine the amount of time, space, and clutter it must take to plan and construct them. Apparently he has too much spare time.

Scroll down to see some examples of his work and be sure to visit his website to see how they were done and information about construction.

	Lego Balcony

	Lego Belvidere

	Lego Relativity

	Lego Waterfall

Toys exposed by x-ray

Have you ever wondered what mysterious mechanisms might inhabit the depths of your favorite toy? If you recall my earlier post about the book Bears with simple images of teddy bears turned inside out to reveal their inner workings you’ll know that I have.

Modern toys often have lots of electronics, batteries, gears, and motors to discover. But even older toys had hidden mechanical workings such as dolls who’s eyes close when they lie down. I must admit I’ve always wondered how those actually work.

Scan Toys is an exhibition of x-rays taken of toys at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. But it’s far more than just a collection of x-rays. It transforms common toys and their inner workings into art.

I don’t recognize some of the toys and I haven’t been able to find much explanation of each individual image. Some of the images also have non-toy items in them as well. But each one is beautiful and fascinating.

Don’t think you’ll be getting to Buenos Aires anytime soon? No problem. There is a wonderful Flickr set of at least some of the images.

Via Gizmodo

Jame’s May’s Lego House

What would you build if you had an unlimited supply of Lego? How about a house?

James May, one of the hosts of Top Gear, has done just that.

It’s part of his show, James May’s Toy Stories, which examines some iconic toys and "embarks on some ludicrously ambition adventures and feats of engineering" with them.

One of the goals of the show is to motivate children to put down their Wii remotes and get out and play again (an idea that Dave’s Cool Toys can get behind).

James May’s Toy Stories is a British series, so some of the terms used were unfamiliar to me, but the toy guide on the BBC America website made it more clear. For example, Airfix was a term I wasn’t familiar with, but they are plastic model kits.

A Lego house is quite ambition, but so is creating a real bridge out of Erector Sets, recreating an actual train route with model trains, or building the world’s largest model plane (life size!).

	Plasticine Tree

For one episode, they have created an entire garden out of 2.5 tons of plasticine in 24 colors at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea show. The garden drew attention, both good and bad. Many critics felt the garden shouldn’t be at the show because it had no actual living plants. But people from all over England contributed to the garden and it eventually won a "gold" medal. The medal was made of plasticine. The judges were in a spot because his garden broke the rules of the show by not including any real plants, but they liked it enough to reward it anyway.

And that’s not the only accolade the show has earned. They created a "Scalextric" slot car track at the original circuit at Brooklands, the birthplace of British motorsport, using 20,000 sections of track, stretching 2.75 miles. Guinness World Record
!

Unfortunately, their attempt at a world record scale train track failed because vandals placed pennies on the track, shorting it out and stopping the trains.

James May’s Toy Stories premiers on BBC America on June 28 at 10:00 p.m. Don’t miss it!

The show aired last year in Britain.

There is also a book, James May’s Toy Stories, available. The only DVD I could find was coded for Britain.

Since Toy Story 3 opens today, here’s a video I stumbled on this morning that takes vocals and chords recorded from Toy Story
and remixes it into clips from the movies. Great video! For more of these, check out the Pogo YouTube channel.

I love OK Go. I like their music. But I love their videos.

One might have thought that their very popular treadmill video would be a one-hit-wonder, never to be outdone. (Not me, of course. I never doubted them for a second.) But they followed that up with their amazing Rube Goldberg Machine video.

Well, they’ve done it again with another amazing video for their song "End Love", which is about the end of a relationship.

The video uses widely varying speeds to compress and expand time throughout. And it’s one single camera shot! Yikes! At one point they compress 24 hours into only 1/2 second and at another point they stretch 1/2 second into 16 seconds.

The video, which runs 4 minutes and 30 seconds, includes a total of 18 hours of the band members performing and 192 hours of the LA skyline at the very end.

The amount of planning that went into this video boggles the mind. This means that the band members had to performs parts of their song very slowly and parts of it very fast so that when the video is compressed/expanded it will fit into the final real-time version of the song. Plus, it has a goose.

One last thing before you watch the video. OK Go is running a contest on Facebook for this video. Download the video for free, then upload it to your Facebook page and get your friends to comment on it. The Facebook user with the most comments in two weeks wins.

I came across this amazing animation with fire this morning. It’s an animation of classic computer games recreated with fire. Actually 320 tealights. It took the creator 2 weeks and a lot of patience to create. It was worth it.

via Gizmodo