first Wall-E toys!

OK, I've never had three entries for one day before, but today, I can't help myself.

We were at the mall today running an errand and decided to wander into a couple of shops, one of which was KB Toys. We don't buy a lot of stuff from them, but we sometimes find some gems, and today, we hit our first Wall-E jackpot. I knew that merchandise was usually released a little before the film came out, but I hadn't expected to see any yet, though I know the Wall-E iDance is imminently supposed to be available in stores. (The cashier mentioned that they'd gotten the Wall-E merchandise in on Thursday.)

Well, what greeted us in the store but an eyeful of Wall-E toys! Yes, I got a lot of them, but no, I didn't get them all.

My favorite is the U-Repair Wall-E, an action figure that breaks apart into "20 highly detailed parts" that you can snap back together. He's also fully poseable, and he's the only one of the toys I've seen so far where his wrist turns left and right, instead of just having arm movements and rotation. He's also got working treads.

Then there's the Cube 'n Stack Wall-E (for some reason, Toys R Us calls this toy the "Wall-E Lift and Load"), where he can pop out compacted trash. The treads themselves don't work, but there are wheels underneath, and you can pop each of his arms into two different locations. He comes with two trash cubes, and you can make him "pop" one of the cubes out of his compartment. You can also make additional cubes yourself with play dough, and the panels imprint trash details on two sides.

There's also the Dance 'n Tap Wall-E with wacky action. When you pull the cord on his back, he dances and taps. What he really looks like he's doing is frenetically whacking himself on the head with the hubcap. The description on the provided link confuses me as some of the stuff it describes doesn't seem to be true. Pushing him forward just moves him forward - nothing else. And I've tried to open the front panel but the only way that would seem to work is if I break it. BTW, none of those extra points is indicated on the toy packaging.

It's not just Wall-E though. While he's already got me, I'm not as enamoured with Eve, but that might change after I've actually seen the movie. She doesn't have the automatically cute features that Wall-E does, so I have to get to know her better, but we did get Search and Protect Eve. You can press her head to change among her six eye expressions. That part is really funny. She has a button in the back that you can push to reveal her secret compartment in front, which fits both the plant-in-a-boot and light bulb that comes with her. Her arms also pull away from her body, and you can also replace one of her arms with a cannon blaster arm (which looks cool but doesn't actually do anything). Also included is a rock with a button you can push to simulate the rock exploding.

The packaging also indicates that there's a "Space Adventure Wall-E" where he's holding a fire extinguisher, but there's no indication of what that does, so I hope we'll find that sometime to have a look.

We saw the Clean 'n Go M-O, but he didn't seem as cool, so we didn't get that.

They also have three scenes from the movie, and I picked up one of them, called "Wall-E in Awe", which has Eve with a light bulb and Wall-E with the hubcap and his little Buy 'n Large mini-ice chest, which actually has the little bug crawling on it.

There are also individual action figures of the various characters. There's two of Wall-E, a regular one and a "factory new" version. They're pretty much the same except that factory new Wall-E is perfectly clean whereas regular Wall-E has been dirtied and banged up. They have decent posability factors, so they're cool. There are a few others in the collection (defibrillator-bot, vacuum-bot, beautician-bot, massage-bot and paint-bot) that I might be interested in once I see their figures and probably after I've seen the film.

This Wall-E is not one I've heard of before. We dropped by a Target last night, and they had no Wall-E merchandise yet. Really need to go to Toys R Us tomorrow.

Here's a page with a little more information about the toys I've talked about.

All of these toys are from ThinkWay Toys, and the weird thing is that there was nothing on their website about Wall-E at about 3:30 this afternoon, but when I got home tonight, there's this whole page up, which includes things I hadn't heard about. I am assuming that the U-Command Wall-E is the Ultimate Wall-E we've been hearing about. But oh my gosh, did you see Transforming Wall-E? We've been saying wouldn't it be cool if they had one that actually was a cube like Wall-E does when he's scared? And this is the most information I've seen about iDance Wall-E. He sounds so cute. The Electronic Truck Playset sounds cool too. This is going to be one seriously expensive movie!

BTW, in case you haven't already seen the video of walk-around Wall-E, check out a friend's post about that.

We have our tickets to see the movie already, opening night at the El Capitan Theatre!