I'm A Grown Man And I Bought This: Little Terminator Bobblehead

I have a confession to make: I'm a grown man and I collect action figures. There. I said it. It feels good to finally say it out loud.

Note that I said I collect action figures. I don't play with them. That's for later on when I have to start wearing diapers again. I started collecting them as an adult around 1995. I'm not exactly sure why. It might have been because the big Action Figure Renaissance began around that time, and I decided to get in on the ground floor. Or maybe I'm just a giant dork. I even turned one of the spare bedrooms in my house into a toy room full of shelves where all my action figures are on display. By keeping them confined into one room like that, it helps make it look like a grown up lives in my house.

Anyway, with the recent release of the new "Terminator: Salvation" there's a ton of Terminator merchandise out there right now. As with everything in life, some of it is good, some of it is "meh," and most is not worth your time or recession-stretched dollars.

I found this little Terminator bobblehead a couple of weeks ago at Target. Normally I'm not much of a fan of bobbleheads, usually because they have to sculpt them "off-model" to conform to the bobblehead concept and specs. But this one was cool enough that I bought it anyway. It's an excellent sculpting job that manages to look cute and menacing at the same time.

Particularly impressive to me is the paint job. It looks amazingly like brushed steel and not the soft plastic in which it's molded. It's head turns and it's arms move as well, which as far as I know is pretty rare for a bobblehead.

According to the packaging material he's supposed to be a T-700 model of Terminator. In case you're not an uber-geek like myself, the model number that Mr. Schwarzenegger portrayed in all the movies is a T-800. Honestly, I can't tell any difference. I looked at photos of both endoskeleton models and they look the same to me. Maybe an even bigger nerd than myself can spot a difference, but if there is one, I can't see it.

One word of caution if you decide to buy one: Take a good look at the face while you're still in the store. The head is made of some pretty soft plastic, and after I got home I noticed the right side of my Terminator's head was kind of squished in. I had to soak his head in hot water, then mash it back into shape and run cold water over him to set the plastic.

Best of all it was only $9.99!. In this current dark period of out of control action figure prices, that's almost like I stole it!