Re: Art Asylum/Diamond Star Trek TOS Communicator, TOS Tricorder, WOK phaser at Toy F
Somebody needs to tell "The Experience" here in Vegas that they sell for $30.00. The price tag on those are usually $47.00. :lol
Well those are actually a different version, made for sale thru the Vegas attraction...
The Vegas and Art Asylum comms are both externally very similar to the Master Replicas version (probably made from the same molds)... Here's a composite pic of the Vegas on the left and the MR on the right, you can see that they are nearly identical
The Vegas version is more cheaply made of course (retail is $50 as opposed to $300!)... but both feature spinning moire patterns, light up LEDs, and sound effects.
The Vegas though has much lower sound quality (I would classify it as "crappy"), gold paint on the brass flipgrid, chrome plating on the aluminum parts, and a shinier black plastic case with the texture pattern running the wrong way.
Also, out of the box, the flipgrid "stops" at a ridiculously shallow angle of about 90 degrees (but the "stops" can be removed or broken, which will allow the grid to rotate all the way back as the original props did).
All this contributes to the Vegas comm having a more garish and cheap appearance than the MR.
This new AA/DST communicator seems exactly the same, except it's not yet known whether the parts that are supposed to be metal, ARE metal, or just plastic as they were in the toy Phaser.
Also it is rumored that the moire pattern does not spin as it should, and that there is only some kind of lenticular or holographic "effect" of motion.
On the plus side, the new version of the comm has many more sound effects, including voice clips. The MR and Vegas comms only had the call beep, the flip-open "chirp", and a "static tuning sound".
The Vegas was not bad though, and for $50 you got a decent replica with spinning moire. Plus if you took a dremel polishing wheel to the flipgrid antenna (as my friend Centralrepair did), you got a nice shiny bare brass lid under the paint, which is how the original props looked. He also seems to have hit the shiny black shells with some clearcoat to dull them down. Now it's a decent replica!
Here's a comparison of all the various Communicator toys that have been available (my IPI is missing the Clock and Calculator parts)
Well there was one other, the Mego toy from the mid Seventies. But we don't count that one. :lol
And around the time of Trek 5 there were these comms, available as premiums from Crest Toothpaste.
- k
