It can't be on the site if its not sci-fi or fantasy.  That's the rule. Its MY rule. What kind of asshole goes around breaking his own rule? I can't. I won't. Somehow I will justify reviewing this damn thing.  I can't think of any way I can do it right now, but I'm hoping if I just keep writing, something will come to me.  'Cause, damn, brother, this thing is CHOICE. 

SPOILER ALERT: I'm working on a ninja article for the site, and the next episode o' the show be all about pirates.  Arrr! Big Lots has a new selection of inexpensive pirate toys which I really want to buy 'cause when all is said and done, I'm basically a 31 year old infant with a steady income.  I'll review the Pirate Expeditions figures on the air, so you'll have to tune in for that.  But those pirates got me thinking back, and I remembered that Big Lots also carried a selection of cheap ninja figures a couple of years ago.  They were called Ninja Fighters: Hero Of The Dark, and they were your usual ghetto action figs: no joints at the elbows or knees, figure and weapons made of soft, cheap plastic, minimal manufacturer's information because they probably bootlegged the molds from some other toy… the usual.  However, these figures stuck in my mind because they were particularly well detailed and beautifully painted for a bargain toy, and they came with a lot of really cool accessories.  No joke, some of these things had better paint jobs and mold details than some G.I. Joe figures I've owned. Alright, own.  Anyway, these things were the upper echelon of Bangladeshi sweat-shop dollar toys, and now that they're relevant to my life, however fleetingly, I want them. Bad.

Depending on your area of the country, Big Lots may be called Odd Lots or Odd Jobs, but its probably all the same crap.  My obsessive compulsive ass could not get these things out of my mind, and I eventually found myself in a Big Lots in fucking Indiana, scouring the toy aisle for Ninja Fighters figs.  This weekend I plan to get my crunk on, if it ain't real ain't right, and head up to some Big Lots in the seedier parts of the Cincinnati hood to look for these fucking things, so it was nice knowing you all, and give my love to mom.

I've also looked all over northern Kentucky, and that's where our story begins.  I was walking through a local Big Lots, and what to my wandering eye should appear but this glorious bright beam of sunshine from baby Jesus in heaven.

See that kid on the box?  That kid's dead.  His name was Timmi Zell, and he was an up and coming Tasmanian child actor.  He and his mother and two sisters were shot during the Port Arthur Massacre; click on the link to read more about it. Crayola had taken some photos of the kid the previous year and nobody knew they still had them.  Eight years after he was murdered, Crayola slaps his picture on a box and ships it all over Europe and North America.  Of course once people eventually realized what was up, a lot of parents went apeshit.  Crayola pleaded ignorance, saying that the picture was used from a "stock image bank," but because the company has apparently never heard of the internet, I guess they though no one would ever notice that they used a completely different  box in, survey says… Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania. That's one hell of a coincidence, huh?  You can see a picture of that box down on the right.  Pretty fucking sleazy for a company that makes products used primarily by children, but it gets worse.  It turns out Crayola does this shit ALL THE TIME.  Since the late 1950s, Crayola has been notorious for putting the faces of dead kids on their products to skirt paying royalites to live people.  In 1967 they actually used a photo of a little girl who had died in a car accident on her way home from the goddamn photo shoot.  How horrible is that?  A little girl dies and two months later her mother sees her dead child on an ad for Crayola Crayons in the store where she was shopping for back-to-school supplies for her other kids.  That's how the family found out, and Crayola never paid them a dime.  Its pretty fucking deceitful and loathesome, but not as deceitful and loathesome as someone who would just make all this shit up to fuck with his readers.  Oh, yeah, admit it – I had you.  How pissed were you at Crayola?  I made you hate the people who brought the world Lemon Yellow and Periwinkle.  That'll teach ya to believe everything you read.

While its pretty cool, the prospect of making my own crayons honestly doesn't thrill me.  I hardly ever play coloring books anymore when people can see, and I've worked with melted wax before, so that's nothing new. About six years ago one of my major hobbies was candlemaking.  No, I'm not gay.  I'm just a man who's comfortable enough with himself to display his artistic side by making interestingly colored and shaped scented candles for the rest of the girls in his quilting class.  Also, I used to have a vagina. It was the prettiest little vagina you ever did see, and it told me that I should make candles, and buy candle molds, and learn how much scenting to use, and understand the importance of thickness of wick to candle radius, and that lead core wicks are bad, bad, bad, and that the girls down at the craft store really believed me when they saw me with my girlfriend.  Not my sister, my GIRLFRIEND.  And they believed me.  Honest, they did. STOP JUDGING ME!!!
Anyway, I've melted down my fair share of crayons to color candles with, and let me tell you, crayons make SHITTY candles.  They're not meant for burning.  Especially the yellow ones.  Fucking god, I swear I'm not gay. 

It stands to reason, though, that melted down crayons might make pretty decent crayons.  Its not much of a leap of faith.  And even though I've established that the prospect of making my own crayons doesn't thrill me, I TOTALLY dig on the idea of making my own crayons and then coming up with clever names for them, which I can then put on the SWEET ASS CRAYOLA LABELS INCLUDED WITH THE MACHINE!  Those labels took this thing from just plain old "interesting" to "holy fuckin lord, I would ass-rape a 95 year old nun to own one of these!"  I couldn't believe it was only ten bucks.  Plus, it was the last one on the shelf.  I immediately grabbed it, and pointed at the little chubby smelly kid who was eyeballing it in my arms.  

"I got the last one, fucker!" I screamed at him with malicious delight. "Why don't you and your white trash mother go back to your piece of shit hovel and you can watch her give out 50¢ dick suckings for the rent while I go home and melt crayons with MY awesome new crayon making machine! HA HA!  Maybe you could ask for one for Christmas, but guess what?  THERE'S NO SANTA CLAUS!!"  And then I kicked him as hard as I could square in the chest.  Because I'm territorial.  Like a man.  A manly man who is NOT GAY. 

I knew I was gonna need some raw materials from which to manufacture all the coolness.  I went looking for crayons.  Fortunately for me, Big Lots supports all manner of third-world child slave labor, so you can buy a 64 pack of crayons, complete with crayon sharpener in the back, for fucking 88¢.  88¢! Which makes this the first Sci-Fi Guys article in which I used the "¢" symbol more than once.  So fuck you, little malnourished Sri Lankan child with a life expectancy of 14; your poverty and indentured servitude means my fat American ass can melt cheap colored wax for just pennies!  I got out the store with the machine, a two pack of light bulbs (not included), and two boxes of crayons for under $13, and only 41 starving Asian children had to die to make it happen.  It was shaping up to be my kind of day. 

Because I run in to so many of them, a big pet peeve of mine is overpackaged toys.  Males my age might remember opening a GI Joe vehicle and being faced with forty sealed plastic bags, each containing plastic rectangles full of vehicle parts and stickers.  Putting the toy together really wasn't my problem; I actually liked the idea of building an awesome new toy, and I have a feeling that Hasbro purposefully cashed in on this sense of accomplishment to make us 80s boys love these toys more.  Hell, the instruction sheets usually had realistic blueprint schematics of the toy detailing its weapons and secret features as if it were a real life vehicle.  It was all good.  But even back then it bothered me that after you put your toy together, you were left with a pile of packaging as big as the toy itself.  I don't know why it eats at me so much, but it bothered me 20 years ago and it still bothers me now.  Fortunately, the Crayola Crayon Maker is relatively free of that crap, so once you open it up, there's little to throw away. 

Now we just need to open it up and install the bulb.  To melt the wax we gotsta have heat, and we gets the heat from a lightbulb. I was thinking that the 60 watt bulb (not included) would be underpowered.  You know what that means…

But I was wrong.  In fact, the 60 watt bulb may be a little TOO powerful.  Because I'm a cheap fuck and I'm not willing to pay GE four dollars for a 3¢ light bulb in some way overpriced packaging, I got the ghetto bulbs from Big Lots. They'll probably work for about 15 minutes, but these crayons should melt in 10, so I win again.  A little scrounging around the racks of crap netted me an overpowered, unsafe 45¢ lightbulb, which from this point forward I shall call the "photic thermal core." Maybe if I'd sprung for the GE SoftLite gynobulb with the estro-friendly pink coating the crayons would have melted more evenly. What I actually bought was apparently the bargain basement unfiltered Eye of Sauron, which melts these little fuckers like it ain't no thang.  Seriously, its like I put these crayons into that reaction chamber that fried Spock at the end of Wrath Of Kahn. This thing gets fucking HOT.

The more I look at this thing. the more I like it.  It looks like some kind of retro-future, art-deco fun machine.  It may not be sci-fi, but you can fuck me in the nostril and call me Pearl if this thing isn't ninety kinds of beautiful. Its almost perfect.  Now, all it needs is a better name.  Since it makes crayons and its heat comes from a light bulb ala the Easy-Bake Oven, I almost decided that CRAyon + eaSY-BAKE = Crazy-Bake.  The Crazy-Bake crayon oven. After I realized that was just fucking stupid, 'cause you don't bake crayons and there's no z in easy, I decided what I needed was a serious name.  A strong name.  Something inhuman and vaguely threatening.  A sci-fi name. Something like: 

The Melt-O-Tron 6000X's instructions warn you to use only Crayola crayons, and its more than just a marketing ploy, my man.  Its fucking SCIENCE. If you've ever used cheap crayons you know they don't color well.  That's because ghetto crayons are made of a different wax than Crayolas; organic chemists call it "ghetto wax" after its inventor Leroy Tyrone Ghettolicious of the South Harlem House Of Wax 'N Shit research and development department. Ghetto wax melts at a lower temperature than Crayola wax, which is scientifically referred to as "fine-ass wax."  When you melt ghetto wax crayons, they turn very transparent and the coloring settles out of them fairly rapidly.  I used to run into this problem when I made candles, and that's why the crayons I made from the ghetto wax turned out with a very glossy plastic sheen.  Ghetto wax is very thin when melted, and the colors run together too much to create a nice swirl pattern.  This quality of wax is not good for crayons; its more suited to scented candles where you want the glossy finish and the quick, thin melt so your scenting will be distributed evenly throughout the candle, which is something I know despite the fact that I AM TOTALLY NOT GAY AT ALL NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT SO SHUT UP.

Leroy Tyrone Ghettolicious III, Ph.D., father of ghetto wax.

My first couple of attempts at crayonmaking were pretty weak.  The crap crayons I bought look decent enough out of the box, but in the Melt-O-Tron 6000X they turn into little puddles of faintly colored liquid shit, and then cool into hard plastic glue sticks.  They color decently enough if you can hold one without it snapping. They were leaving my boat noticeably unfloated.  I tried the unlabeled crayons I got at Big Lots as well as some Raymond Geddes brand. They both suck. Time to go back to the store for the real deal. 

I now own two 64 packs of ghetto color sticks and two 64 packs of proper crayons. When you include the 12 crayons the machine comes with, plus the 8 pack of Raymond Geddes that I don't remember buying, that brings the grand total of crayons that I own to 276.  I'm pretty sure that's more coloring potential than I've ever had in my life, which is not exactly something that a 31 year old man should be bragging about.  I only mention it here for the sake of completion.

Look at my little sacrificial victims in the melting chamber. They have no idea what's in store for them. By the way, I have discovered the secret to making these crayons well, which no child will ever do, because stuff like this isn't fun to normal children with friends and lives and well developed senses of self esteem.  Only people like me discover this sort of thing, which I suspect is the sole reason that society continues to tolerate us. Anyway, the secret to good homemade crayons is two-fold.  First, always use Crayola.  Second, and this is vital, choose your main color, the lightest color in your soon-to-be crayon, and use a LOT of it.  Whatever your darker secondary color is don't use much, and put it all at the pouring end of the melter.  Otherwise you just end up with a crayon that is one single, ugly color.  Considering that this is marketed to kids, they really should have included this in the instructions. 

You can make even cooler crayons by filling the mold partially, then melting a bunch of different colors and filling the mold the rest of the way.  Crayola knew that kids would figure this out about 30 seconds after they bought the thing, and because Crayola hates kids and lawsuits and me, and because they are apparently run by the same people who made every television show from the late 70s though the mid-80s have a "locked in a bank vault 'til morning" episode, they built a fucking time lock into the machine.  A fucking time lock.  You can't open this thing up for 20 minutes after you start it up.  This irritating little feature needs to go, so here's how you do it:

See that little plastic tab?  That's the fucker causing all the problems.  Solution: remove it.  The transparent plastic is pliable enough that you can just use a pair of scissors to snip it off without worrying about cracking the casing. Now I can add colors at the last minute or play mad scientist with other things I want to melt over the hellish inferno of the Melt-O-Tron 6000X's photic thermal core.  Fuck yeah!  Removing this thing makes the Melt-O-Tron a lot more fun, but I was serious about what I said before: this thing gets HOT.  Hey, kids, follow the instructions above for great crayons and even better burn scars.  Scare your parents!  Impress your friends!  And when you get to the hospital, be sure to tell 'em Uncle Chris sent ya.  Enjoy the skin grafts!

The Sci-Fi Guys – keeping child burn centers in business since 2003! 

You know, it really destroys my "I'm not gay" arguments that I sat around the house and office for the last week making colorful little wax penises.  I have not had sex in a very long time.  To make myself feel better about my crayonmongering and acute lack of fuckability, I have chosen not to think of this experience as sad display of immaturity and regression brought on by sexual frustration, but rather as an organic chemistry experiment involving the artistic use of chromatic hydrocarbons.  That at least sounds adult, and if I can't get laid, then I can find solace in using some big words to make myself feel smarterer. 

I also chose to think of this little adventure as a way of testing myself to see if my creative skills are powerful enough to let me turn this into a sci-fi article.  And guess what, they are.  Here's how I'm going to make this a sci-fi article:

I've given some of them some pretty obscure names; see if you can ID them. Here they are:

Weird West

Devastator 

Away Team 

Unibihexium 

N. T. I.  

Ambassador Kollos

Lifeline 

Latveria

Hoist

Porte 

Orion Slave Market 

Mista J. 

Six Demon Bag

Serpentor 

Harvey Dent

Court Martial 

Blood Of The Sith

Galvatron 

Leonardo

Michelangelo

Raphael

Donatello 

The Slaughterhouse 

What Is The Matrix?

Starscream 

Skywarp

Thundercracker