I apologize straight away for letting there be more than a year between installments on this series, but you don’t need me to tell you playsets are still few and far between.
Last time, I introduced hopefully a few of you to the Mattel WWE backstage modular playsets that popped up at K-Mart in 2015. And hopefully I did so in time to pick up a set or two because I haven’t seen one on a shelf in a long time. Part of that might be due to the current K-Mart situation, which is not very good. A metro area that had over 15 stores in a 150-mile stretch in the early 2000s is now going to have 3 by 2016. It’s not hard to guess where that number will be next year.
I’ve never had a major attachment to the old K-me Apart, but it has certainly offered up some good toy finds over the last couple decades. Unfortunately, most of them came when the stores were closing. This playset find is another one of those, and, I’ll tell you, the experience of walking around an expiring department store almost became an article itself. So perhaps we’ll talk about that another time.
For today, let’s talk about the Mattel WWE Create-A-Superstar Ring Builder Set. Fortunately, not store exclusive, so I have seen these around here and there. But I hadn’t seen them cheap enough to buy multiples until now.
Like the backstage sets, the modular design of these appeals to me greatly. The idea you can build and tear it apart quickly and easily to create different setups is awesome. The parts sets are pretty straightforward, giving you adequate material to craft dozens of different rings.
You add an extra set and you can start erecting all kinds of interesting scaffolding and arenas. Pretty cool in its own right and probably something you could use to build some type of industrial or construction site, or just a really crazy multi-level ring. So, just out of the box, they’re worthy additions.
I set up two boxes’ worth into this tower-ish set up. I liked it but didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with it. Obviously, it would serve me better as some kind of building, rather than a wrestling scaffold, so I experimented with some panels from a plastic folding crate, see if they could fill in.
I like ’em. And by just rough estimating at the store I managed to find one with sides that can “peg” into this setup without having to be fixed in place.
I suppose this combination would actually make a decent building, if you wanted. You could just stack sets on each other and add walls until you had a proper skyscraper. But I liked the spire and scaffolding above the first floor. I just needed something to tie it together. I found one of those expanding geodesic spheres you see at the learning toy stores and added it to the top:
Pretty cool, right? Could make a great base for a Daily Planet setup or something. But I had another, more esoteric idea. You gents play any Modern Warfare 3?
“The Dome” is a pretty iconic multiplayer map that even got its own awesome Mega Bloks playset, because those guys get everything. The signature dome is better known as a Radome, used to protect radar equipment from the elements in a way that doesn’t diminish the signals. They were a mainstay of the Cold War, like this one in Berlin:
And there’s dozens of them across the globe. I hiked to one in Oregon once, very cool and creepy. But for my collection and setup, what better playset than something my Nighthawk can try and air strike? I think some paint, some missile defenses, and a tattered-cloth covering could turn this into a pretty impressive, and totally destructible, battle scene.
But that’s obviously just one way a set like this could be utilized. I’d be interested to hear some of your ideas below!