Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Hot Wheels Spotlight-
Klingon Bird-Of-Prey

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Item Name: Klingon Bird-Of-Prey
Manufacturer: Mattel (Hot Wheels Division)

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The Bird-Of-Prey was released boxed as part of the Hot wheels Die-Cast Star Trek assortment.

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The Rundown: There's a whole lotta companies getting a piece of the Star Trek pie right now thanks to the movie hype. One of those companies is Mattel, which recently introduced it's assortment of Star Trek Die-Cast Vehicles. The Klingon Bird-Of-Prey here shipped in the second case assortment and is a bit tough to come by. Here's what you're getting if you take the time to search one out-

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The number one coolest thing about the ship is the elevating wings. It's a feature that I think the ship should always have, but is sadly missing on allot of it's releases. Thankfully, this one has it and it works great. The wings have sort of a ratcheting movement which keep them in place in 3 positions: fully elevated, midway, and fully lowered. The ratcheting system works really well and enables you to keep the wings displayed in whatever stage you choose without them flopping around.

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The sculpting and paint jobs are beautiful. I have the dies-cast Hot Wheels refit Enterprise and Reliant, and really this one puts those 2 to shame. I really didn't expect allot out of this one after getting those, so I was pleasantly surprised to see such nicely detailed work on this one.

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They even cast part of the back half of the ship in a translucent red plastic to give it a more authentic look! Nice job Mattel!

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Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention the base- Mattel didn't skimp on this either. The top half of the base is molded in a translucent green plastic, as opposed to the blue on the Federation ships, and there's a nice little Klingon insignia on there.

Okay, so the ship is great, but the hunt for it is not so great. At one per case right now, the ship is a little tough to come by. So tough to come by that I eventually broke down and ordered mine from toysrus.com. Time for me to get on a soapbox- Toysrus.com has some of the worst shipping quality I've ever experienced. I got the ship 5 days after I ordered it (despite it coming from a distribution facility in my state) and when it did arrive I was incredibly disappointed in their packaging job. They just threw the box in a giant bubble envelope! No packing material, no box, just a giant thin bubble envelope! Oh, and it was half open when it arrived too since they didn't even bother to put tape on the envelope. Nice one Toys R Us! The box had a rather large ding on the bubble, but miraculously survived other than that. Still, I think that was shear luck. If you need one of these, and you're thinking of going the toysrus.com route, be aware that you are taking a risk in it getting to you unscathed.

Okay...rant over...read the box bio!-

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-James

1 comment:

  1. This ship is AWESOME. I have the Enterprise D, and both regular and battle damaged Bird of Prey. I keep them on my desk at work.

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