And now, Scary-Crayon reviews...
Groovy Girls Minis: O'Ryan and her Bombastic Bed
by: Wes

Hello! My name is Wes, and I like toys. That last part's probably obvious to folks who've spent any time at all on Scary-Crayon (and must every article begin with some sort of reference to general trends and themes and subjects that have been employed on the site at one time or another?), but perhaps it needs a bit more of a qualification. When most people my age say that they like toys, they mean specific kinds of toys. If you visit the Mikey'sTMNT forums, there's a definite focus on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys among the registered users. If you swing by Seibertron.com, you'll find that Transformers are the flavor of the month. You'll find collectors of Marvel Legends action figures, DC Direct releases, Barbie dolls, and even rock 'n' roll themed bobbleheads, but it's rare that you'll find an adult "collector" (adult should probably be in quotes too, but eh) who'd just as soon pick up a random girly doll at Dollar Tree as snag a Jungle Leo figure at the local Wal-Mart. Poseable. Portable. Totally collectable.Granted, that's partly because the vast majority of toys that I buy are purchased with specific intent to review and/or feature on the site, but I wasn't even running SC when I bought that discounted Rosie O'Donnell doll during my college years. It's still MISB, too.

So given my interest in neat toys of all kinds, I simply couldn't pass up this Groovy Girls Minis figure. With her fashionable packaging, quirky outfit -- purples and blues are always "in" in my book, and where else have you seen a blouse with a Rorschach inkblot collar? -- and sassy "I'm a little teapot, short and stout" pose, this totally collectible lass seemed well worth the $1 price of ownership.

There are actually quite a few girls in the Groovy Girl Minis gang -- the package features six (and two pets!), and there are quite a few more pictured on the website -- but O'Ryan was the only member of the crew available at the local Dollar Tree. Considering that the other girls have names like "Gwen", "Vanessa", and "Yvette", I'm guessing that O'Ryan got the dollar treatment because nobody wanted to buy a girl whose name evokes images of a potato famine and returns a plethora of sites for some lame R&B singer when googled. Even Chi Chi Dog and Kikko Cat beat poor O'Ryan out in the name department.

As O'Ryan herself notes on the package in English and French, she is poseable in addition to being portable and "totally" collectible (as opposed to only partially collectible, I suppose). Granted, most toys boast some degree of poseability, but I'm still excited about it because I finally have a spelling reference for the word "poseable". I've seen it spelled both "posable" and "poseable" on various hobby sites, and, although I've used both spellings on SC, I usually prefer the latter variant despite dictionary.com's insistence that poseable isn't a word. But now that O'Ryan's actually used the term in print, I can confidently add the second spelling to the internal dictionaries of my various writing programs! Considering that O'Ryan is well-informed about her own features and bilingual, I'll consider her a reputable spelling authority.

Hello, world!Make love to the camera.Puce panties?

Yet despite the apparent similarity of the French translation, poseability isn't quite the same as articulation. O'Ryan's a 4" bendable figure -- not an action figure -- so she's only capable of a few pretty basic poses. Still, while her inability to move her arms forward or backward prevents her from walking like an Egyptian, her scant posing repertoire is otherwise in keeping with her status as a Groovy Girl. She can wave, hug other figures (sort of), and pull off a few simple dance steps, all of which are completely in character because Groovy Girls are girly girls and girly girls are social girls who never do anything that might induce sweating unless they're wearing cheerleading uniforms or stylish workout clothes. O'Ryan is also capable of sitting down, and if you place her on her back she can make half-assed snow angels.

O'Ryan also has the distinction of being the only non-Japanese bendable figure I've ever seen with removable clothing. She can't get totally naked, mind you, but for some odd reason it's possible to pull her skirt down to reveal her decidedly unfashionable puce panties. Or maybe it's the stockings that are puce and the panties are some other mystery color, or maybe O'Ryan's wearing puce panties over her puce stockings. I really have no idea -- I'm not even sure how I ended up discovering this undocumented feature in the first place. It's tempting to think that the toy's designers included it for the sake of having the Groovy Girls strip down for slumber party poses, but O'Ryan can't pull her skirt past her oversized tennis shoes to completely remove it. The fact that her legs are unconnected to her skirt does allow her a little more leg room for posing than she might otherwise have had, but I'm still hard pressed to come up with a reasonable explanation for the designers' decision to give O'Ryan limited stripping capabilities that doesn't include an accusation of pervertedness. It'd make a lot more sense if there were a Groovy Girls Terrific Toilet accessory, though.

O'Ryan's smile and fashionable clothes mask her inner turmoil.

Questionable design notwithstanding, O'Ryan is a cute addition to anyone's toy collection. I like to pretend that she's April O'Neil's kid cousin who had to move in after Tokka and Razhar ate her parents (the tragedy has made her kinda angsty, so she gets along well with Raphael), but she also moonlights as one of those annoying children with whom the Autobots consistently hang out for no good reason. That said, she also looks a little bit like Willow from the second and third seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", so you could easily use her as a stand-in if you lacked a Willow figure and needed her present for an action figure crossover comic. In addition to giving you an excuse to arrange scenes like this (I know, I'm terrible, and yes I'm aware that Willow didn't become a lesbian until Season 4), you'd also have a viable use for O'Ryan's pseudo-stripping ability.

Collect them all!

But that's not all -- in addition to O'Ryan, Dollar Tree also carried her Bombastic Bed! I'm not sure what's so bombastic about it -- and bombastic doesn't even seem like a very positive word to use according to the dictionary.com definitions -- but perhaps the original term was in French and "bombastic" is the only remotely similar word that the English language has to offer that begins with "B". As you see here, the Bombastic Bed comes from a not-so-long line of accessories with an alliterative naming scheme, though for some reason the theme was ignored when it came time to pick names for the Groovin' Scooter and Duchess the pony. At any rate, "Bombastic Bed" is probably a better fit than "Supernova Sofa", which sounds pretty cool until you consider that supernovas are explosions that, and I quote from the Wikipedia entry, "[radiate] as much energy as the Sun would emit over [ten] billion years." That's either incredibly sexy or extremely unsettling ('cause the sun is fucking hot and causes skin cancer and ten billion years is a really long time), but in either case I'm fairly certain that the Groovy Girls creators didn't intend for their miniature sofa to conjure images of frenzied, infinite orgies or scorched galaxies and dying Lakertyans. Out of all of the Groovy Girls Minis accessories, the Cheeky Chair wins the naming prize for fairly obvious reasons.

It's bombastic... semi-fantastic?O'Ryan and her Bombastic Bed: a pea and its pod.

Anyway, here's the Bombastic Bed out of its package. It's a pretty colorful bed to say the least, with lots of pink and neon blue flowers and pink swirls and orange tassels and a purple and pink headboard and blue sheets and purple and white alien writing and even a green pillow (with even more orange tassels). You'd expect to see this kind of scheme on the packaging of limited springtime edition kiwi Butterfinger-flavored Pop-Tarts with strawberry swirls and blue raspberry sprinkles, which is especially appropriate since that's precisely the kind of product that would show up on Dollar Tree shelves following its run in more established chain grocery stores. You can definitely see O'Ryan's fashion sense in the bed, though, which is kind of cool. But what's even cooler is that the plastic bed is hollow and has an open bottom, meaning that you can hide tiny monster figurines under it and give O'Ryan a legitimate excuse for inviting Raph over to spend the night. The bed isn't big enough to cover larger figures, but you can still use it to stage cool shots like this.

That said, recreating scenes from a much more horrific Monsters, Inc. isn't really what I had in mind when I got the bed. The hollow bottom was a welcome surprise -- as was the easy-to-miss interior packaging that reveals that the Bombastic Bed is, in fact, O'Ryan's sleeping platform, given that the image clearly depicts her sitting in the room (and in the Cheeky Chair at that!) along with a pile of pillows, both of the Groovy Girls Miniatures pets, some canaries making out, a dangerously low-hanging ceiling lamp, and a purple airplane flying by outside -- but I had entirely different motives for buying a bed to scale with 4" to 5" action figures. You see, given that previous trysts between my action figures took place on the floor (or, in some cases, atop Donatello's workbench), I figured that even a bed as gaudy as O'Ryan's would be perfect for supporting their future liaisons! And considering that my analysis of the bed and discovery of its hollowness had already inspired some rather strange ideas, I was thus compelled to create the disturbing scene depicted below:

Grandparents having sex... and MONSTERS!

And even though the bed is a bit small here, this seems like as good a way as any to end this article.

HEY! GOT SOMETHING TO ADD? LEAVE A COMMENT IN THE BLOG!
Return to the main page!
Copyright © 2003-2024 Scary-Crayon. All rights reserved.