A friend of mine brought this back for me from the Supreme store in LA. I expect most people have seen the Kermit ads here and there but this little dude is the icing on the cake.
Quite an interesting move by Jim Henson's marketeers to join up with Supreme and BearBrick. I wouldn't have seen that collaboration coming. Supreme maintain the position of the coolest brand I know.
If anyone knows of any way I can be 8 years old again I'd like to hear about it. This looks awesome.
I nearly forgot about this little gem I picked up from the East German Toy Museum. This is such an amazing idea. A jigsaw of a naked girl that explodes out of the container! Wow, I mean seriously, how do you come up with an idea like that?
Check the film:
The jigsaw is without doubt the worst quality jigsaw I have ever seen, some of the edges of the pieces have frayed, none of the bits fit together and it was way hard to actually make. It was fun seeing it explode though. It’s going in the bin because I have two more in a drawer.
It’s bit of push to call this packed to the rafters shop a museum, but the place is so charming it doesn’t really matter. This is the East German Toy Museum (in Berlin) and it’s quite a site to behold. If there is any wall space, floor space or even ceiling space you can bet it’s covered by something. The toy-obsessed owner of the shop obviously loves toys more than most might think possible.
When you go through the back of the shop to get to the museum section. Philipp (below), the curator of this toy carnage explains which stuff is for sale and which stuff is for show. The items are mostly from the DDR era and are beautiful – hand painted wooden and plastic toys, bizarre exploding jigsaw puzzles, paper models and games.
The pictures show pretty effectively what the place is like.
The ever enthusiastic Philipp comes round from time to time to show you things you’ve missed and demonstrate how some of the toys work. He clearly loves this stuff and you might suspect that he plays with everything after closing time.
These puppets were pretty special.
There were quite a lot of instructional toys to help kids understand elements of grown up life like this nice collection of scales.
Philipp explained to us that he had scratched the ceiling quite badly when installing a Christmas tree one time. Did he try and cover it up? Re-plaster? Nope – he turned it into a feature. The little guy on the ceiling is a skier and the marks are naturally his ski tracks.
This shop in the Mitte area of Berlin sells coloured stuff for kids to play with and learn about palates and shapes. They had really nice things that looked all hand crafted.
The block sets below were just beautiful. There were sets of varying sizes and of course I wanted the really big one but I would’ve need a sherpa to carry it back to the UK, so I passed. The lady that ran the shop was very nice though and let us all play with the blocks for while.
This guy is pretty fresh. He just sold on eBay for 83 quid. He's 20" tall which is bigger than your average Lego man. If he was the old spaceman syle I would have bought him in a second.
ACADEMIC (ish)
