Friday Fail: Photo-Graph Car

Every Friday at noon I showcase a real failure of a toy. And by "Failure" I mean "a cheap, crappy knockoff toy that should be destroyed before it infects humanity with some sort of degenerative disease".

But first: A reminder of some basic info. These posts are meant to showcase FAILURE, not to act as a catalog. I'm not selling these bootlegs, nor should you go out and look for them on your own. These are posts about what to AVOID buying. Go spend your money on real LEGO parts. You'll be glad you did.

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Friday again? Already?
Well, that means it's time to get ready to be shocked and horrified by yet another cheap LEGO knock off.

Today's scum? A little piece of crap identified as Photo-Graph Car.

Zephyr Knight is back with another "Almost a legit LEGO set buy not quite" offering. This time, they've taken LEGO STUDIO theme and made a mockery of it.

The front of the box shows the LEGO Director mini-figure sitting on a mobile camera rig - filming plastic army men. No, really.

Here's a closer look. That's a plastic army man and jeep! They didn't even bother to keep the bootleg confined to a single brand.

The back of the box continues the goofiness. A part of "Series Transformation", the Photo-Graph Car changes shape ever so slightly to take on the challenges of war (I guess - the photo backround is to blurry to make anything out), auto-racing and dirt bikes. Well, mabe not auto-racing - maybe RC car racing. Either that, or our Director figure is meant to be roughly fifteen feet tall.

The side of the box has a strange bit of graphic design - the blue background is peeling like bad paint...only to reveal another completely blurred and unrecognizable photo.

Speaking of "blurred and unrecognizable" check out that text. The bootlegers have chose a font that makes it nearly impossible to guess what they've written on the side of the box.

Here's a larger than life-size view. I even ran it through a sharpen filter. My guess at the wording?

This product puts together to pack simple, the construction
is reasonable, the shape is novel, helps to educate to begin
to move the brain ability, expanding the visual field, not the is high school students friend the best to choose.

Clearly.

Here's the box top with the usual photos of other bootlegs in the series.

And the various warning labels on the bottom. Nothing we haven't seen before.

The contents of the box are also pretty standard...but check out those instructions!

They've just been wadded up and cramed into the box. "Neatness counts" has never been a bootlegger's motto, but this is just sad.

Here's the parts spread out. As usual the colors and decorations fail to match up with the illustrations. The wheels are again the single-piece hub and tire recast we've seen in other sets. The parts have "HELO" stamped on them in place of the LEGO brand name.

The instructions follow linear time for once - although they do show an extra brick in the camera assembly.

The parts went together okay - but the cheap plastic and casting resulted in the ugly (and sharp) crack in the camera mount shown here.

Here's the mini-figue. A big change from the STUDIO Director or Cameraman shown in the printed materials, eh? He looks like an albino terrorist to me. (Although why he'd want to terrorize albinos, I just don't know.)

Finally, a shot of the assembled Photo-Graph Car. Is it a simple documentary aide, or is it a weapon of mass destruction?

The answer is: C) None of the Above. This is a piece of crap bootleg.

But I bet you knew that by now.

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Once again, many thanks to Joe from The Undiscovered Playthings for sending me this set to review.