Little things which annoy

While in America I bought my first Hellboy merchandise, a Qee Chain Hellboy figure, and a BustUps diorama of Hellboy using the right hand of doom to punch the daylights out of a ‘bat god’. Both of them are from the Hellboy animated series, and I’m quite pleased with them. I would take them into work, but having little model demons on my desk might not go down too well in a Christian charity…

(Judge for yourself)


But anyway, one annoying thing is that the BustUps model came with a part of another model. Each of the five toys in the range had a different part of a skeletal ‘graveyard demon’, which looked just like a skeleton to me. The ploy is to make you buy all the toys, so you can assemble the bonus figure, but I’d only buy the other Hellboy ones. I’m not interested in the ‘Thunder God’ or whatever else is in the range.

Other toys do this too. I bought a Zapp Brannigan figure and he came with the Robot Devil’s arms. The idea is you buy all the Futurama figures and build the Robot Devil. Except, that would mean me buying the reissued figures I’ve already got, which I’m not going to do. So, like the Hellboy bonus, I’m left with some miscellaneous action figure body parts I’m not going to use.

The thing is if the RD was released as a figure in its own right, I would definitely want it. Making you buy all the toys to get all the parts is just annoying. In fact, it’s so irksome I’m considering not buying any more Futurama toys just on principle. And, as far as the Bust-Ups Hellboy is concerned, a skeletal foot is just a waste of time. I binned it with the box.

Another little thing which annoys me immensely is when bands release CDs with ‘hidden bonus tracks’. You know the sort of thing - there’s three minutes of silence in the last track before a random new track kicks in. I’d have thought now everyone rips their music onto a PC, this would have died out, because it completely messes up your listening when you’ve got your playlist on shuffle. But, no!

When the Killers released Sawdust last year (a compilation of their bonus tracks and oddments - well worth checking out) they added a minute of silence onto the brilliant Jacques Lu Cont remix of Mr Brightside before breaking into what sounds like a drunken rugby song recorded for a laugh. I love the remix more than the original song, but that added nonsense is so irritating.