Tag: Hasbro

Will the shoe be given the boot?

Monopoly is a fantastic game. Next to Snakes & Ladders, it’s the only other game where numerous families have been nearly destroyed over long, drawn out games that take place over the holidays, and that’s just following the rules out of the box. Throw in special house rules and extra below the table agreements, and you’ve got “My First Totalitarian Rule” in a box.

But everything’s changing now! Hasbro has decided that it’s time to update the classic game, and as such, one of the long used pieces is getting the boot. Internet users can go to a Facebook page and cast their vote for their favorite piece.

Allow us to lobby for the end of the thimble. It’s the most boring piece out of them all, has no intrinsic special powers (unlike the other pieces: shoe gets to boot other pieces, battleship gets to shoot down houses, top hat has built-in extra money) and no one bothers with thimbles anymore. It’s time for the old to go out and make room for the new. Vote out the thimble, and vote in the robot.

Anything to get boys in aprons

A New Jersey teenager has decided that the time for equality is now. No longer will she suffer the slings of a gender-oppressed society! No more shall she have the characteristics of a gender heaped upon her!

As such, she’s set up a petition to have a gender-neutral Easy Bake Oven created by Hasbro.

Why? Because she doesn’t want to buy a pink or purple Oven for her 4-year-old brother. Meanwhile, the girl’s supporter, celebrity chef Bobby Flay, has managed to throw awash the entire basis for the petition:

‘If that’s what he wants, why not get it for him? I mean, who cares what color it is?’ he said.

Time to embiggen my score

Helpful hint: If you name your child QZJXK, that triple word score will be alllllll yours.

Scrabble is changing the game-big time. This July’s edition of Scrabble by Mattel will amend the rules to now allow proper nouns to be used in the game.

In everywhere but the the good ol’ United States of America.

Hasbro owns the trademark for Scrabble in the US, and Mattel owns it in the rest of the world. Depending on your outlook, this means that either sanity has now been restored in your world or your freedoms are being encroached upon once again. Of course, no one ever thinks about house rules …

Still, if you’d like to use the amended rules, challenging the veracity of a word might require a nearby computer, as Google might be the most reliable source for … well …. calling it fact-checking seems a little off.

The McBournie Minute: Still churning out crap, just a different shade

I’m not really sure what kind of a world we live in, anymore–at least as far as movies are concerned. Judd Apatow makes a serious (and disappointing) movie, Johnny Depp and Michael Mann somehow manage to flop at the box office, and some alien-Guantanamo thing is #1. What the hell?

The country right now is all about sequels or related spin-offs. Just take a gander at Transformers 2: Revenge of the Volume Dial and G.I. Joe. Hasbro is trying to get their nostalgia products formed into a movie genre aimed at the 25 and under crowd, plus toy sales. I get that movie makers want to stick with franchises that work, but do we really need a G.I. Joe 2?

Instead, let’s go with another Hasbro toy: Play-Doh. Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Still churning out crap, just a different shade

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Transformers’

Hey there readers. Chugs has had a ridiculously heavy week at work, and frankly, is frazzled at a creative standpoint. Truth told, that sentence may not have actually made any sense, or at least, the last part of it didn’t seem to. It doesn’t help that he’s still got stuff on his plate for the rest of the week. In the meantime, why don’t you enjoy a classic review of his? At least you can see what a good Transformers movie directed by Michael Bay is-as opposed to a more recent one.

Let the review for Transformers, the 2007 Bay-centric version, begin! By the way, there will probably be a few spoilers here and there, so heed that as the warning.

Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Transformers’