Men from Kenya's World Found - Yay, Jay!

Scoop prize goes to Jay of the blog, Just Jay, for being the first to post about the male dolls, TJ and Dwayne. And Jay has photos of the Fashion Madness guys. I won't spoil the surprise for you. Let your fingers do the clicking and tap your way to the latest playscale guys. Jay's photos were fun and helpful for me. I have a better sense of the guy dolls now.

Enough said on my part. Except that on Kenya's website, the catalog shows the dolls I assume are available. So you might be able to order them online - yay! - to avoid the bad in-face "customer service" we encounter at stores. Grr ....

Oh and there is a Kenya blog, too. For serious fans.

Alert for Disney Little Mermaid Fans - Walmart Exclusive Gift Set

I almost decided not to feature this set because after 5 failed telephone attempts to get a price from 4 local Walmart stores, I feel pi**ed at Walmart. I placed the calls, asked for the product, told the individuals answering the phone that the item is NOT on their website, and waited for 10-20 minutes each call only to realize that no one would return to the phone until I hung up. Three of the workers tried to help, but they were in other departments or happened to find the phone off the hook. Puff.

Little Mermaid fan? Do you know one? Well, you might be interested in this Walmart Exclusive Little Mermaid Lagoon Gift Set. The set includes a humanized Ariel, human Eric. a yellow fish, a cooked but talking lobster, and a musical boat that SHOULD NOT be placed in water.

Two aspects stand out for me about this set:

1. that the boat should not be placed in water

2. that the red lobster looks alive

Shouldn't the boat be able to float on water? But then, it is a musical boat. It plays tunes from the movie ... according to the box description. Why does the boat play music? To set the atmosphere, I suppose. Wouldn't it be more fun if the boat could float? Shrug the first.

The lobster next. Okay, Disney is full of animals as friendly, happy, cheerful chatterers. And Ariel as a [once/former?] mermaid has lots of sea creature friends. Including fish and lobsters. That lobster though is red. I mean red lobster = cooked. Cooked = dead = not a friendly, happy, cheerful chatterer. I can suspend disbelief about Ariel changing from mermaid to human for love. (I can not imagine a love that self- destructive: possibly a shortcoming on my part.) But why is the dead red lobster all smiley-faced animated?

Then again, I did not see this movie - surprised? - so maybe there were extenuating circumstances. I dislike the original Hans Christian Andersen mermaid story so I assumed I would like the Disney version even less. (The treacly Disney version does not depress as the Andersen story does. Whew. But the goo factor leaves me cantankerous.)

As for this gift set, I wish those interested MUCH luck in finding them. I am going to send a tweet about Walmart customer service and send a Facebook post about my difficulties. Waste my time ... I'll show them.