Hello there my kind readers. So as some of you might know, I’ve been attending the American International Toy Fair convention for the past six years and generally all of that coverage has gone over to the PiercingMetal.com website where I would focus on the superhero and monster movie geek stuff.  However, with that said I decided a couple of years ago to share additional event coverage on The Chronicles for the vendors and companies that didn’t fit within the context of my Metal and Pop Culture site.  Folks who are interested can click on THIS LINK to open a tag of said content.  All of this leads me to this event being discussed in the narrative before you which focuses on a brand new convention to my eyes called the “Sweet Suite”.

The “Sweet Suite” is considered to be THE BIGGEST NIGHT OF PLAY and comes care of the fine folks at Toy Insider.  This is connected to their “Blogger Bash” event which I shall discuss in a later post.  “Sweet Suite” was all about toys for a traditionally younger audience and instead of in your typical hotel or convention center would be on this beautiful boat called the Cornucopia Majesty.  I was excited because I had not been on a boat since a couple of years ago excursion with friends on the Circle Line and while this was going to be docked it was still cool.

My media badge sported the PiercingMetal branding since I’m more known for that outlet than The Chronicles, but perhaps in time that will change and this one will be as loud a voice as my Music Media one.  Only time will answer that one.  As you can see the badge says “Blogger Bash” and I guess this is because the “Sweet Suite” is only a smaller portion of this two day conference.

For this event I would be joined by the one and only Skeleton Pete and actually was able to make the connection with these folks based on his attending for the past couple of years.  Device wise I was using my Smartphone and my Samsung point and shoot since I felt it would suffice.  The way “Sweet Suite” is set up is that assorted companies set up small areas on the three available decks of the ship.  Let’s begin this adventure with Mattel and a blocked by exterior light pair of wrestling figures.

These are the DC Super Hero girls action figures.  I first managed to see them at the Play Fair portion of this years Toy Fair.  To date we’ve never managed to get into the Mattel showroom at the Toy Fair so it was nice to see a few of the things that I know you folks would find interesting.  I love the idea of these action figures for the younger girls because so many of my friends have daughters and they deserve to geek out as well.

As you can see in the images we have a couple of different choices in size for these dolls.  A smaller, only plastic styled costume along with something that will work well with the Barbies in anyone’s collection.  There is a joke about a Ken doll vying for the attention of Wonder Woman or Batgirl in there somewhere for sure.

Mattel also had this awesome radio controlled “Dinotrux” thing.  It looked menacing and I envisioned being able to go to town on action figures that were of the 3.75″ scale.  Like the older Star Wars and GI Joe figures.

Here are some “Minions” playsets by Mega Bloks which is now a subsidiary of Mattel Brands.  I like their character licenses too and had documented some of their wares in older Toy Fair coverage.

Sadly this big old coolness was too hard to photograph for me but its a massive playset with miniature members of the Justice League as figures.  Its definitely designed for the younger fan in your world and in a sense this reminded me of the smaller superhero figures that I used to have.  I think they were called “Action Heroes” or something.  There were Marvel and DC Characters to these sets.  I no longer have these and if I did I would have a very productive eBay account 🙂

These are called “Tsum Tsum” and its a brand new thing to me.  They seem geared towards the very young toy enthusiast in your world unless you are one of those people who keeps little doodads and toy coolness on your desk at the office.  We all get fidgety so that wouldn’t surprise me.  I used to have about five different Toy Biz Marvel Super-heroes on my desk way back when I had an office of my own.  As you can see there are NUMEROUS character licenses to enjoy with the Tsum Tsums.

They called this “Gift Ems” and they amounted to smaller figures that all came in little gift boxes.  It was cute and seemed like something you could play with if you also collected those Shopkins things that all my friends kids are rabid for.

I might get in trouble with my friends for posting these couple of images because I know that their kids will want these if they see the photos.  No I didn’t get into the carriage for any sort of photo.  They asked if I wanted to but no thank you.  I didn’t want to break it LOL.

Now let’s look at all the awesome stuff that Lego brought along today.  I’ve loved this brand for decades but sadly don’t have anything still in my stockpile of boxes in the closet.  Now that they make all of these Star Wars and Marvel and DC Super-heroes things though I might have to change that.

Now over to Hasbro who had this cool little princess playset.  Miniature activity item and smaller figures for a certain age.  Good stuff.

You most likely know how much we love the people at Hexbug and we’ve been making sure to cover them every year at Toy Fair.  This year they are lending their creative energies to the “Battlebots” franchise.  It should be interesting and those destructive robots fascinate me.  Perhaps this playset will inspire the engineer in your own little one.

I’m going to close up my first chapter of this event coverage with the general practice of only putting about “50” images in each post. I’ve done this in my NY Comic Con and Toy Fair stuff for the most part as it allows an easier visual digestion of all the awesome. I’ve also loaded up a score of photos on the Official Instagram of PiercingKen which you can find by clicking that highlighted text. I’ll return in a couple of days with more but until that time please click through onto some of the website links below since you can learn more about the people and brands that we encountered and featured in this installment. Until next time, cheers.

Official Websites:
Toy Insider: http://www.thetoyinsider.com/
Blogger Bash: http://www.bloggerbash.com/
Sweet Suite: http://sweetsuiteevent.com/
Hasbro: https://www.hasbro.com/en-us/
Hexbug: https://www.hexbug.com/
Lego: https://www.lego.com/en-us
Mattel: http://www.mattel.com