Daily Fail: Speed Racing

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I know what you're thinking. "Oh, no...not another stupid race car bootleg." Trust me, I'm tired of them, too.

Speed Racing from the Super Bricks Series. That sounds suspiciously like "Speed Racer", doesn't it? And LEGO had a line of licensed Speed Racer Toys just last year. Could it be....?

No.

It's better.

Well. Sort of.

My friend Joe of The Undiscovered Playthings sent me a box of six new "sub-impulse" bootlegs - each one packaged in a box roughly the size of pack of playing cards. BRICK is back, and this time it's personal.

Of course the first thing you're going to notice is that instead of Speed Racer, we're looking at another hero....Spider-Man! The second thing you might notice is that the BRICK logo looks almost identical to the LEGO logo. The third thing might be the tag line "Handsome Appearance". After that, your eyes will glaze over and you won't have to face up to the fact that the car part of the toy is a slightly-modified clone of the LEGO set 1363 - Stunt Go-Cart.

The back of the box is pretty much the same as the front, minus the part counts and branding. The classic BRICK slogans do re-appear:

Vivid Andgreat In Style
Handsome Appearance

I really wonder why the "Andgreat" typo continues to appear. Are the BRICK graphic designers just cut-n-pasting from one line to another? (The answer: Probably.)

Speaking of the Cut-n-Pasting of errors we've seen before, the side of the box has this to enjoy:

Most New Catena
Completely New To Come In To The Market
More New Items Available

The instruction sheet is a fairly tiny scrap of paper - about 4" on a side. Note the super small Spidey figure in step 5.

Speaking of Spidey - here he is. As usual, the actual toy is complete crap - look at all that excess plastic around the edges of the molds. The fact that his mask is a printed piece only helps a little...

...considering his hand won't stay in his arm. The poor quality of the hand casting is at fault this time - there's no friction points to attach the hand to the inside of the arm.

Spidey's head isn't a LEGO part - it's actually lifted from a MegaBlok set! (The MB figure is shown at left.) Check out the square peg-hole in the neck on the BRICK version - it almost fits on the round peg from the LEGO-mold torso.

Almost.

The other parts suffer from the same lack of trimming as the mini-figure. Here's a close up of the steering wheel - that's a huge chunk of sprue still attached.

Finally, here's the completed toy. Due to poor castings Spidey won't click onto the car - and the entire rear "jet assembly" falls apart at the slightest touch.

You might notice that one of the flames has fallen off in the photo above, along with Spidey's hand. After five failed attempts to get a decent shot with both attached, I just gave up. This is one Bootleg that refuses to stay assembled.

Will any of the other five sets in this series do better? Stay tuned...

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As always, many thanks to Joe from The Undiscovered Playthings for sending me this set to review.