Daily Fail: Rayish Battleplane
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"-Ish".
As a suffix, it indicates approximation. You've probably heard it used it yourself - "The banana was sort of greenish - I didn't want to eat it." Or even "The MegaBloks were LEGO-ish, but clearly inferior."
It's an unusual grammatical construct - and one I was surprised to see appear in the name of a bootleg. Behold!
As a suffix, it indicates approximation. You've probably heard it used it yourself - "The banana was sort of greenish - I didn't want to eat it." Or even "The MegaBloks were LEGO-ish, but clearly inferior."
It's an unusual grammatical construct - and one I was surprised to see appear in the name of a bootleg. Behold!
The Rayish Battleplane - The bootleg they couldn't quite find the words to describe clearly.
Today we return to the normally-sized impulse sets from our "friends" at Zephyr Knight. Rayish Battleplane is number 1010 in the series, placing it next in line after Awoke From The Nightmare.
The box art shows us roughly what to expect from this toy - a clone of the LEGO Life on Mars alien (a strange Mustard-yellow clone) riding a...well...."rayish battleplane". "Plane" as in "a very flat surface", apparently.
The imagery suggests an underwater scene, with our yellow friend gliding along with the Manta Rays that may have inspired the model. The presence of Grecian columns suggests that this is either happening in the sunken city of Atlantis, or maybe in a financial district of San Francisco after the ice caps finish melting.
The imagery suggests an underwater scene, with our yellow friend gliding along with the Manta Rays that may have inspired the model. The presence of Grecian columns suggests that this is either happening in the sunken city of Atlantis, or maybe in a financial district of San Francisco after the ice caps finish melting.
Part of Zephyr Knight's ever-present "Series Transformation", the Rayish Battleplane has four different builds. All of them are shown skipping across the top of the water like a jet-ski - not exactly something you'd expect to see a Manta Ray doing. Oh well, they only promised us "ray-ish."
The included clone alien has the same face design as shown on the box, but the Non-LEGO yellow coloration has been replaced with a close-to-LEGO lime. Of course, since they decided to use that lime color for all the parts, it appears our alien friend is butt naked. A shame really, since the red hair and freckles suggests that he's going to sunburn easily.
Here's the Battleplane itself. They came really close to matching the color scheme from the box art. As far as impulse sets go, it's not a bad build. The blue side wings extend on a hinge to create a "swooshable" shape. But it wouldn't be a bootleg without some sort of fail, now would it? So let's try and put the alien onboard....
The strange choice of controls (a gear shift and a spout) may look alien, but making the alien use them requires our pilot to really contort him-(her? it?) self. Maybe this is why so many of the Zephyr Knight sets lack any sort of control surfaces for the drivers - they can't figure out how to have the pilot reach them.
Or maybe it's because they're cheap, crappy bootlegs.
Or maybe it's because they're cheap, crappy bootlegs.
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As always, many thanks to Joe from The Undiscovered Playthings for sending me this set to review.
As always, many thanks to Joe from The Undiscovered Playthings for sending me this set to review.
posted by Christopher Doyle at
4/27/2009
4 Comments:
that rayish title seems very fishy to me!
if you look at the box the alien shown is all yellow like the all green scheme of the one it comes with so either way if you got yellow (wich means zephyr knight is taking in some qaulity control) or the green one he's still a crappy Lego-offending naked bootleg.
nudity... these bootlegs just get worse
maybe they meant to say RayFISH battleplane. Hence the fact that there are manna rays in the background.
Even so, that means its got even worse quality control than we thought. (But not by much.)
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