Night of the Living Action Figures

As you probably already know, I work two jobs. One of those jobs is for a large retailer which shall remain nameless until I quit or the company collapses from economic problems. But until one or both of those things happens, I'm stuck working in the electronics and toy departments. So when I'm not pretending to be an expert on cameras and wireless routers, I'm usually cleaning up action figures.

Now you may be wondering what my point is in telling you all of this. Well, toys and electronics are the two top-selling kinds of holiday gifts, so this time of year I get a general idea of what's popular with the kids. Though you'd think they're all going for video games these days, you'd be sorely mistaken. No, this year the kids are crazy for Bakugan.


If you haven't heard of Bakugan, it's actually a pretty original idea. The franchise is based on a Japanese TV series in which a team of kids battle with monsters contained within tiny, colored balls. Wait. On second thought, that sounds a lot like something else.


Oh...right.

Okay, so they borrowed one idea from a popular franchise. Lots of companies do that. But Bakugan is different, in that the monsters only battle when the kids play a magical card game. That's totally original. Unless, of course you count that other show...


Alright, alright. So the creators of Bakugan had to draw some inspiration from a couple of successful programs. But unlike the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, the monsters can talk! Plus, the main character is this hotheaded kid who wears goggles on his head. You don't see either of those things in many shows.


Oh come on!

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a franchise with no honor whatsoever. Bakugan is a TV show that exists solely to sell toys, and it's ripped off from three other series that were also created to sell toys! At least Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Digmon had some integrity. I mean they all had card games, but the toys were optional. With Bakugan, the toys are actually a necessary component to gameplay. This is because in the TV series, the monsters are summoned by throwing the balls containing them onto the game cards. If they lose the game, the monsters may be banished to the "Doom Dimension," a Hell-like plane similar to the "Shadow Realm" from Yu-Gi-Oh. And by similar, I mean it's exactly like the Shadow realm. It's a place where the monsters are tortured and corrupted by evil. See what happens when you play with your balls?

With the ingenious combination of card games, toys, and an unoriginal-yet-mesmerizing tv series, we can't keep Bakugan toys on the shelves for more than a minute before they're sold out. I mean that literally; we can barely get them out of the boxes before rich children with disposable income and weary soccer moms lurk through the aisles to consume their only desire, like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The walls are stripped clean of Bakugan merchandise, much like flesh rended from the bones of the living.

So if all the toys are gone, can someone please explain to me how that area of the toy section is always so messy?