Around The BLOCKhead

By: Erich Arendall

Episode 3: Stikfas it to the man!

Standing at about 3.2" tall, Stikfas are not only in the category of the tallest standard block figures around, but are also some of the most articulated and poseable. Which is good, because they need something to counterbalance being frustrating to put together and bland in color.


The building blocks
of Stikfas life.
Stikfas, as you may have surmised, do not come pre-assembled. Instead, to help keep costs down (one assumes) they come in tabbed sheets. In order to play with the Stikfas--as a figure, that is, unless you like playing with sheets--one must remove the body part components from the sheet. The limited instruction sheet suggests using "proper tools," but since I didn't know what such tools were and because I'm not allowed to play with razor blades since the incident, I just used my nimble fingers and, when needed, mighty teeth. This often left little nubbins on the pieces. Thankfully, I keep my pictures small so they might be hard to make out.


(Dearly) de-part-ed
Once I freed every piece from its prison... I had a pile of parts. Once again, the 1 panel instructions were not completely helpful. Fully constructing a Stikfas figure required a little intuition and additional examination of the box. All told, it probably took me a quarter-hour (15 minutes for those unequipped with the home game) to put together a figure. This time may be slightly longer than average because I began choking on a piece. Kids, don't use your teeth to build or deconstruct toys. Take it from one who knows--and who probably still has a valuable GI Joe piece or two which will be found upon his autopsy.


Alive! It's alive!
ANYWAY, after performing the Heimlich maneuver on myself and toweling off the plastic building block I resumed construction and soon had myself a nice, green, Stikfas figure with a lot of articulated points. This is like a miniaturized art doll (you know the one's I'm talking about). Except it's actually supposed to be played with. This will come in handy the next time I'm dating an artist, they hate it when I start playing with those fun wooden dolls. I bought this particular set from ThinkGeek and it also came with a "Dome Walker" which I hastily put together. And broke. It was a bit of a disaster, actually.


And I had all these
extra parts left over!
Once again, I was given a single-panel instruction for a somewhat complicated toy. I relied a lot on the box illustration to help get the piece mapping correct. In my haste, however, I tried too hard to force a piece (it was the correct piece) and snapped the connector off the plastic casing, leaving my dome walker not only a southpaw, but with one arm. I hope it doesn't kill my wife and I'm blamed for it, escaping my prison fate and having to travel the states like Dr. Richard Kimble. I'd miss all my toys. Some of the pieces were extremely loose on the walker and it didn't really stand on its own, much less stand and hold a Stikfas figure. All in all, I was pretty disappointed with the vehicle. Maybe I'll hunt down the dune buggy or motorcycle Stikfas toy next. That should be easier. In the meantime, I'll just blame any problems in life on the one-armed dome walker.


We don't need another hero?
I also picked up the Hero set from ThinkGeek, which gave building opportunities for not one, but two figures. The cool thing about Stikfas is that their pieces are interchangeable, so the more figures one collects the more opportunity for customization. This would be cooler if customizing solid colors was actually interesting. The dome walker cost me an unsatisfying $20, but I snagged the hero package (which, again, is 2 figures) for a paltry $9. I'm much happier with the latter purchase. ...Even if I broke some pieces while putting them together, too.


"Speedyguy! You saved me!"
I'm being a little harsh to the Stikfas. Every set does come with stickers with which one can customize their Stikfas figures and vehicles. I didn't actually use the stickers, though. If you were snickering in your seat about my less than wunderbar building skills you'd laugh out loud at my feeble stickering skills. I comfort myself in the knowledge that stickers would interfere with my imaginative process and hinder the maximum customizability of Stikfas. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. The stickers include full faces, chest crests, eyes, mouths and belts as well as some odder stickers like a smiley face, magnet and sound effects. Where would one properly put a "biff" sticker on a figure? Don't tell me. I'm not sure I really want to know.


Speedyguy includes "tall"
in his list of powers.
Are the Stikfas worth it? Are they for you? Well, they're difficult to track down, they're not the cheapest of toys and because of their height they don't play too well with a lot of the other block toys like PALz or MiniMates. However, they are incredibly poseable and can be a lot of fun to play with when fighting Stikfas vs. Stikfas or other larger toys like LEGO's Bionicle line. There's a villain kit that I'll probably picking up with my next ThinkGeek order to give my Stikfas heroes something to fight. Right now they just keep saving my solitary Stikfas civilian from his own ignorance. No, Stikfas civilian! Don't taunt the one-armed dome walker!

-erich

Erich Arendall has yet to feature Stikfas in his webcomic Attercap.Net but thinks the dune buggy or rock band playset might make an appearance in the future.

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Copyright © 2007 Eric Arendall