Author: Eric Fritzius
June 12, 2018
I’m pleased to announce that my latest effort as an audiobook narrator, Mississippi Nights by D.M. Webb, is now available. It’s a Christian fiction romance/thriller set in my home state of Mississippi.
I had a lot of fun narrating this because, in addition to getting to voice some colorful characters, I was impressed at the how the author deftly and playfully lampoons many of the tropes of the Nicholas Sparksy-style romantic fiction genre while still writing a legit romantic thriller. I also appreciated that the book tackles some serious real world issues in a way that does not suggest easy answers to the problems.
I can also report that it got a little dusty in the ol’ recording booth at times, as I, the narrator, was sometimes unprepared for the emotional impact of the story. (While I admit to bawling my eyes out watching movies, I rarely cry reading books. This one got me more than once.)
MISSISSIPPI NIGHTS– Two brothers, one death – the bond of brotherhood and family faces its greatest challenge. When firefighter David Boyette’s fiance perishes in a car accident, he blames his brother, Sgt. Jeremy Boyette, for her death. Three years later, David returns home with a dark and devastating secret. With the help of family, a woman’s love, and a child’s devotion, can David overcome insurmountable odds as he and Jeremy face the bitterness that enslaves him?
Author: Eric Fritzius
May 21, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
There are a few white whales out there in terms of TARDISes that are not in my TARDIS collection. Some of these, such as either of the hand-made polystone TARDIS “diorama” models by Big Chief Studios, are pretty damn pale in terms of white whales. They seem like gigantic, 20″ high versions of my beloved Electronic Flight Control TARDIS, complete with lights and sound, but with a huge boost in quality. And as much as I would love one, the reason I’ve not bought one is because they are just stupid expensive even at base retail price, going for between $250 and $400 depending on the retailer. I buy one of those and my wife will probably see it as grounds for divorce.
However, there are other TARDIS models and toys that were well below the Big Studios threshold when they were first offered for sale, but which, once out-of-stock, became rare and saw their price triple. One such specimen is the TARDIS Special Edition Figurine released by the Eaglemoss model company.
For those not in the know, Eaglemoss is a company that specializes in spaceship models and sculpted figurines of pop culture characters, usually cast in metal. They have figurine lines for Star Trek, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, The Walking Dead, and others, but have spent most of the last decade producing a line of Doctor Who figurines as well. And the fact that I don’t own any of the figurines from this line is pretty much down to marriage preservation, too, for each of the Doctors originally retail for $17.95, making a 12 Doctor set cost-prohibitive unless purchased in the $35 four-pack sets, and even then… really?
Eaglemoss made a TARDIS, though, which is a white whale that’s been singing a siren call to me for several years. It originally retailed for $35, which seemed not unreasonable to me. Trouble was, shipping was another $15 on top of that, which I could not justify. Of course, they usually offer free shipping on orders of $60 or more, but that meant having to buy two of them, or finding some other stuff to order with it and before you know it I had well over $100 of stuff in my cart when all I really wanted was one stinkin’ TARDIS and I’d get fed up and walk away. After, let’s say, two years of doing this, the Eaglemoss TARDIS went out-of-stock. And even though they have a little box where you can leave your email in case they re-stock, they are not known for actually re-stocking what was the whole time intended to be an individually numbered limited print run, so that’s not happening. I soon began seeing my former $45 TARDIS for sale on eBay for upwards of $100. And when it was anywhere under $50, it was always a seller in England and they tacked on another $40 for shipping to the U.S.–which was never gonna happen on my watch. I sadly resolved myself to the likelihood that the Eaglemoss TARDIS, much like the Electronic 4th Doctor TARDIS set from 2010, was a whale that had slipped my clutches, escaping into the vast sea of prohibitively priced merchandise. I mean, it didn’t stop me from setting up a saved search for it, though, since you never could tell when one might find an auction for one at a reasonable price point. This never seemed to happen, though.
Then, last month, something even more unlikely than a cheap auction happened. I received an email ebay search report that someone had posted a new listing for an Eaglemoss TARDIS for $25 and with free shipping and it was BUY IT NOW!!!! And I happened to be looking at gmail on my phone when the listing hit, so I couldn’t load my eBay app fast enough. The whole time, though, I kept thinking that there must be something wrong with it for it to be listed for such a low price. Surely it had been dropped, or gnawed by a dog at the least to go for only $25. The listing indicated nothing of the sort, though, so I fired my whale spear and it struck home in white TARDIS flesh. (This metaphor is really getting strange.)
A few days later, my new Eaglemoss TARDIS arrived and was something of a surprise, mainly because it was three times bigger than I expected it to be. The Eaglemoss figurines I’ve seen and owned are around three inches in height, so I assumed somehow that the TARDIS would be as well. Nope. It’s to scale with the Doctor figurines, so it’s a full five inches from the base to the bottom of the roof lamp. The other surprise was the material it was made of. While I don’t own any other Doctor Who Eaglemoss figurines, I do own a Starman and an Ambush Bug from the DC line; they’re both cast from metal, so I expected the TARDIS would be metal as well (hence the huge shipping costs for most folks). The TARDIS, however, is cast with some sort of resin. I imagine a TARDIS of this size cast in pewter would probably weight at least five pounds, so it’s probably for the best. I’d say this thing is still a solid 2 pounds.
As far as TARDISes go, it’s mostly decent. The sculpting is nice, though there is no wood grain, but I’m okay with that. Where it kind of misses the mark for me is in the detail work of the painting. The windows are especially sloppy, with the gray paint of the frames occasionally splashing up onto the blue of the exterior TARDIS walls or onto the white of the “glass” panes. It looks like it was painted by a fairly skilled 10-year-old. The sloppiness extends to the painting of the roof lamp. Also, the decal for the door sign was applied skewed to the left side of the phone-cabinet instead of centered properly. Again, it looks like a skilled 10-year-old might have done it, so, again, I’m going to blame child labor.
Despite these complaints, though, it’s still a nice piece that I’m proud to have in my collection. And a white whale hunted and killed and flensed and turned into 19th century lamp oil. I give it 3.5 TARDI. 
Author: Eric Fritzius
May 17, 2018
Eric is making signing and speaking appearances to promote A Consternation of Monsters. (He also occasionally does some acting.) You’ll find those appearances and roles here.
May 18-19, 2018 — Eric is the director for the 2018 Opera House PlayFest at the Pocahontas County Opera House in Marlinton, W.Va. Featured plays will include “Petting Zoo Story” by Jason Half, “Daughters These Days” by T.K. Lee, “Beans and Franks Never Tasted So Good” by Jon Joy, “A Game of Twenty…” by Eric himself, “Riding Lessons” by Brett Hursey, and “Bankin’ on the Grand” by Chris Shaw Swanson. Featured actors will include Chris Curry, John C. Davis, Eric Fritzius, Janet Ghigo, Charlie Maghee Hughes, Kim King, Jay Miller, Bill Mitchell, Joanna Murdock, Rhonda Pritt, and Shenda Smith. Tickets will be available at the door.
Author: Eric Fritzius
April 16, 2018
I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to write about the passing of Art Bell, purveyor of strange ideas and the poser of questions concerning all manner of mysteries of the universe. He was for many years the host of Coast to Coast A.M., one of the most successful radio programs of the last half century. Art’s was a fantastic and fascinating format, as he basically just opened the phone lines to anyone who wanted to call about whatever topic he was covering in a given night. Ghost stories? He took `em. UFO sightings? He wanted to hear about `em. Were you a time traveler? Give Art a call if you were in the same year. He might not believe you, but he’d let you tell your story.
I wish I could say I grew up listening to Art Bell, but if a radio station in my area of Mississippi broadcast his show I was unaware of it. I learned of him in the late `90s while working as a radio DJ myself in Tupelo, Mississippi. I can’t recall for sure how I came to know of him, but likely from one of the various conspiracy, UFO, or cryptozooloigic websites I was a fan of in the day. I know for a fact that I had read a creepy story or to featuring his show in an encyclopedia of Fortean topics I owned at the time (but which has mysteriously disappeared from my shelf now). He was a fascinating figure, even if I couldn’t hear him on a regular basis. I was able to download clips of his shows from his website, but streaming was an odd creature in the late 90s. And then, in 1998, just as I was learning of Art to begin with, he retired under mysterious circumstances. It was to be the first of many such retirements, almost all of which didn’t take for very long. Art was soon back on the air.
When I moved to North Carolina in 1999, Coast to Coast was broadcast by one of the sister stations to the one I worked for in Charlotte. And during the two months or so I did an overnight shift there, I often found myself switching over to the AM feed and listening to Art in real time, rather than downloads days later. It was always entertaining. However, my thankful departure from that shift and Art’s various other premature retirements kept me from regularly hearing him much after that.
Bell is, of course, the inspiration for my fictional character of radio host Rik Winston and his UFO All Night program, who is referenced in my short story “…to a Flame.” (You can read more about that story in the Moths & Men blog series elsewhere on this site.) In the story, one of the characters, Virgil–loyal Rik Winston listener–tells the tale about a “doctor guy” who calls in to Rik’s show following an alien encounter. This was inspired by a real series of calls to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM from the 1990s. The real story turned out to be a complete hoax, of course, which the “doctor” guy eventually admitted on Art’s show. However, this hasn’t stopped that guy from trying to make money off of it to this day. (UFOWatchdog has more about the real story and the “doctor’s” actual identity HERE.)
While Rik is also the “author” of the foreword to A Consternation of Monsters. But he’s only turned up in one short story, so far. However, he’s been referenced and even makes an audio appearance in three of my short plays. I call them the Ellipses Cycle, as they all have titles featuring ellipses and are thematically tied together by their strange and unusual (and often West Virginia-related) subject matter. They also all mention Rik Winston. They include the stage adaptation of “…to a Flame,” the inspired-by-a-true-story African lion adventure “…and Tigers and Bears,” and a third play set in the waiting room of eternity called “A Game of Twenty…” It’s a story about a guy who finally gets to ask for answers to all the questions about strange and unusual things he has wondered about. Naturally, he loves every single answer he gets. That play has been produced for Greenbrier Valley Theatre as well as a staged reading at the 2016 West Virginia Playwright’s Festival. And, in May, it will again be performed as part of the Opera House PlayFest 2018.
I’ll have to dedicate it to Art Bell. Hopefully now, the man has all the answers. But here’s hoping it’s another early retirement.
Author: Eric Fritzius
March 30, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
The very smallest of the shotglass TARDISes in my collection is the TARDIS Rotating LED Cell Phone Charm. It’s a tiny tiny TARDIS encased in a plastic bell jar dome that screws onto a plastic base bearing the Doctor Who logo used during the David Tennant era of the show. While mine hangs in my car from my rear view mirror, the device is meant to attach to a cell phone. The base has sensors within it that can detect incoming cell signals which activate the device to cause the TARDIS within the dome to spin and LED lights in the base to flash, signaling you that you have texts or calls when your phone is on silent mode. Sounds mildly handy, no? Turns out, not so much–at least in the way that I used the device.
The first time my TARDIS charm ever activated was at night, as I was driving home. There I was, driving down the straightish stretch of highway near my house, preparing to turn onto the lane that leads to my neighborhood, when unexpectedly I am blasted at eye level by flashing blue lights seemingly from somewhere on the road ahead. In that instant my brain became convinced that, at worst, I was about to be t-boned by a police cruiser coming out of the neighborhood to my right; or, at best, said police cruiser was not in motion but had turned on the blues in order to pull me over for some unknown infraction. It was startling and I screamed aloud, much like a little girl. Then I heard my cell buzzing and realized what was going on and felt the kind of shame one only feels when startled by tiny sparkly lights. And this happened on more than one occasion as the days went by. I also learned that the effect wasn’t that much less startling during daylight hours.
Fortunately, the batteries in this device didn’t last very long, no doubt owing to it having sat in on a shelf and/or in a warehouse for years before I purchased it. I have yet to replace them, nor are their any plans in place to do so.
As far as TARDISes go,
I cut this one a lot of slack on the detail side because it’s so tiny. It also gets extra points for looking cool under the dome. It’s almost like the Master was able to somehow use his Tissue Compression Eliminator on it to finally trap it in some sort of time-travel-proof bell jar. It’s a novelty item with a lot of novelty. I’ll give it four Tardi.
Author: Eric Fritzius
March 24, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
The die cast TARDIS keychain was the first TARDIS keychain I purchased and I like it a lot.
As a TARDIS it’s a lovely representation of the Pertwee/Baker era flat-roofed, dark door-signed TARDIS, though this one has a much better paint job than the TARDIS of that era ever did. (Not a chip to be seen.) It’s also pretty well in scale with the modern era TARDIS keychain, showing the size differential between the two models, even though they’re made of entirely different materials.
As a keychain I think this would function pretty well, too, as the metal die-cast nature gives it a satisfying weight and sturdiness to withstand the wear and tear keychains often go through. As with all my other TARDIS keychains, I ditched the chain early on. But I have kept the ring, which pokes from the top of the roof lamp itself, in case I ever want to use it for another purpose. It could make a nifty ceiling fan or lamp chain pull, for instance, though is probably too heavy for, say, an earring.
Author: Eric Fritzius
March 9, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
This “shotglass” TARDIS used to be the smallest TARDIS I owned, and was for a few years. This particular police box was made by the Hornby company (R8696 Skaledale Blue Police Box 1/76 Scale) and is meant to be scenery for a model railroad setup. As such, it’s more to the specs of an actual police call box than it is to the various props from Doctor Who. You can find them online, often on ebay, though they’re starting to get more expensive than the one I bought. (I seem to recall it being fairly cheap when I bought mine, under $10. The ones on ebay now start at nearly $30 before shipping, which is a lot to pay for a chunk of painted resin in my book.
For most of the years I’ve owned the Hornby it’s been on display atop an upside down clear Listerine measuring cup–which is the same size as a shot glass, hence the name “shotglass” TARDIS. And while it was the smallest TARDIS in my collection for some time, that honor has gone to another for the past four years or so.
Author: Eric Fritzius
March 2, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
This is Funko POP! Vinyl’s version of a TARDIS keychain. It’s meant to be a miniature version of their TARDIS POP! Vinyl Toy, albeit one without working doors. (Or, rather, door, but that’s a complaint for the future.) For those unfamiliar with the plague that is Funko POP! Vinyl, the toys are primarily figurines of pop culture characters with disproportionately large heads and black circles for eyes. The figures are usually about four inches in height, but Funko made a series of keychain models that shrunk them down to around an inch and the TARDIS is just a smidge over that (unlike the larger toy version, which is nearly half again as tall as the figures).
I call POP! Vinyl figures a plague because, while I own around ten of them myself (of the Doctor Who, MST3k, and Portal 2 varieties) I don’t give the ass of a flying monkey about 90 percent of their output and kind of resent the fact that there are now layers of them under foot in all nerd/videogame/movie/music stores, where they glut entire walls. I weep for our landfills.
Like all the other TARDIS keychains, I ditched its chain as soon as I was able to. It’s super-blocky size would make it inconveniently large to use as a keychain, though I must note that Funko’s choice of a rubbery plastic for the production would lend itself to durability. (At least for the TARDIS, as most people I know who have bought and used any of the figure-model keychains quickly find they have nothing left but decapitated character heads dangling from their keys after the bodies snap off.)
Much like its larger counterpart, there’s not a lot of detail on this thing. But that’s the POP! Vinyl aesthetic to start with, so one cannot complain about the lack of woodgrain or the fact that it’s super chunky. (It’s so chunky, in fact, that I’m not sure it would actually fit very far into a standard shot glass.) I t’s fine. I’ll give it a full four TARDi and save the tale of the larger model for another time.
Author: Eric Fritzius
February 26, 2018
Over the weekend, I finally finished the second season of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which has gathered in my DVR. While the season felt like it took a while to get going, I truly enjoyed where it went and, more importantly, the strange places each of the characters wound up.
Much like season 1, it was a fun journey with lots of twists and turns and some truly great characters both old and new. I’m a sucker for a story with a good family dynamic and this develops multiple ones. And, much like Douglas Adams novels, it does a great deal of world building along the way with some pretty cosmic concepts that look like they would have continued into season 3 had BBC America not cancelled the show.
Not since Firefly have I wanted a show to continue so much only to have it snatched away. (The fact that Alan Tudyk is in both shows is also not lost on me, as his character of Mr. Priest is now one of my favorite over-skilled, overzealous government badguys ever.) Maybe this is down to me being such a Douglas Adams fan that I would want one of his creations to continue its life. However, I suspect the real attraction here is mostly down to the quality of what the cast and creators of this show put together. The books are great, mind you. But Dirk, as depicted in the show, is not precisely in line with the Dirk of the books–who is far less personable than Samuel Barnett’s charming portrayal. It’s quite possible that the Dirk of the books might be unsustainable as a character people would want to root for–which may also explain that while he’s the central character of the books, they’re both told from the perspective of another character looking on. Barnett’s Dirk, however, is just a chipper champion of the universe, even if he doesn’t know why. And while the show isn’t an adaptation of the source material anyway–which it seems to mostly treat as backstory–I firmly believe Douglas Adams would have been on board with what they’ve done 100 percent. It’s VERY Douglas Adamsy. And I can’t believe he would not have found the concept of a Holistic Assassin (Fionna Douriff’s character Bart, who is simply amazing) one he would have wished he’d thought of himself.
A quick search for “Bring Back Dirk Gently” took me to a Change.org petition. Dunno what good it can ultimately do, but it’s at least a way to voice an opinion. If you’re of a mind to voice yours, I invite you to do so and perhaps to tweet about it as well. #bbcamerica #SaveDirkGently
Author: Eric Fritzius
February 23, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
The newest TARDIS in my collection is also one of (though not the) smallest. It’s one of three keychain TARDI that I now own and is one of my favorite among the three. (You can actually see all three, plus another, in the accompanying image, but we’ll get to the others later.)
These “shotglass” TARDI are so called by me because each of them could fit into a standard shot glass (though not any of the standard shot glasses that I happen to own, which are all either opaque or super tall and narrow–hence their inclusion atop a stack of CDs for scale).
The new TARDIS keychain is one made by Underground Toys. It’s of the Matt Smith/Peter Capaldi TARDIS model. It’s a hollow shell made from a very light weight plastic, but the sculpting on it is really nice. No woodgrain, but I’m not complaining because it just looks like a tiny replica of the TARDIS USB hub sculpt. Alternately, you could use it as the miniature TARDIS that appeared in the great episode “Flatline” from two seasons back, cause it’s about the correct scale when compared with one of the Flight Control TARDIS models. (Though you’d probably have to use it on the Matt Smith FC TARDIS, cause the blacked out windows won’t look right otherwise.) The keychain model is beautifully made, though.
As far as its ability to be used as an actual keychain, though, I don’t know that I could recommend it for use in that capacity. I am pretty sure the light and airy nature of this model would never be able to stand up to the kind of beating it would take in my pocket. (The wife uses a pewter Serenity keychain that has already started to lose its fine detail. And she only has, like, one key. This plastic TARDIS wouldn’t last a week with all my keys.) Since I’ll never use it as a keychain, I pulled the chain off it as soon as I got it out of the package, leaving a small metal ring located just behind the roof lamp which I’ll eventually snip off. I’d like to give it four full TARDi, or maybe even 4.5, cause it really does look nice. However, because I think it would truly suck when in use as its labeled function, I’m going to go 3.5.
Author: Eric Fritzius
January 26, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
CONTINUING THE TALE FROM PART 1 and PART 2…
Underground Toys, thankfully, wasn’t done with their 5.5″ line, but they also weren’t done making frustrating choices with it.
Oh, sure, they still put out some classic ’80s figures in that scale, such as new versions of the 8th Doctor and the War Doctor, to reflect their appearance in Night of the Doctor and Day of the Doctor. And after Peter Capaldi was cast as the 12th Doctor, they quickly released a 5.5″ figure for him. Except, it wasn’t Peter Capaldi in his actual Doctor Who costume (the black coat with red-lining and all), but was instead the post-regeneration Capaldi wearing Matt Smith’s final, pre-regeneration, purple-coated costume from the Name of the Doctor Christmas Special. It still looked great, cause the purple coat was a look that worked well, but it was still very annoying since it wasn’t Capaldi’s official costume. This meant that folks like me who had previously bought the 11 Doctors figure set, and who have them on display on a shelf by their desk, could not really add the 12th in there cause he just didn’t look right. Or, we could add the 3.75″ Capaldi figure in the proper costume and have him out-of-scale from all the others. However, for quite some time, these were the only Peter Capaldi figures to choose from.
Around that time, 2015 or so, I began paying attention to a Facebook page called Save Doctor Who 5 Inch Figures in the hope for word on an eventual properly costumed Capaldi who could join the ranks on my shelf. The site had, in fact, floated a rumor that such a fig was in the works. And this page was also where I first heard Underground Toys/Character Options were working on a 12th Doctor Flight Control TARDIS for the 5.5″ scale line. Supposedly, the rumor went, the new TARDIS would not only be in a truer blue to the new TARDIS prop, but would also be returning all of the functionality of my beloved 10th Doctor TARDIS with one major change–it would come with a lighted door sign. Turns out these rumors were all true.
On the thorny topic of the lighted door sign…
See somewhere during Matt Smith’s run (I think it was during The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe that I first noticed it) the TARDIS developed a light up door sign. And by door sign, I mean the instructional sign on the left hand door, which actually serves as a smaller cabinet door behind which is the direct-to-police telephone unit which puts the “call” in “call box.” The text of the sign begins “Police Telephone Free For Use of Public…” and ends with “PULL TO OPEN.” For some half-assed reason–I expect just cause it looks sort of cool–the TARDIS on the show began backlighting that sign, as if it were made from semi-transparent plastic. It wasn’t lit all the time, but in most night shots they turned it on. And, y’know, the TARDIS can do what it wants, I guess, but I just never saw the logic of it. Certainly the original police call boxes which inspired the look of the TARDIS never had this feature. While I was and remain critical of the addition, at the exact same time, I have to sort of admit that it did look pretty cool in those night shots. It just helped make the TARDIS read as being more TARDISy on a graphic-design level. You could instantly recognize it from its silhouette, lighted windows, above door signage and now stupid door sign, and didn’t require the entire front be lit from any separate light source. A toy that did the same thing, I supposed, would be interesting, even if I still thought it was essentially of questionable worth. It would also mean that such a TARDIS toy would be the most functional TARDIS yet.
Low and behold the rumored figures and TARDIS were released and–shockingly I know–I bought `em.
And this is where Underground Toys’ continued making of frustrating choices comes back into play. Cause the thing is… while I am delighted that they were kind enough to produce another TARDIS and restore the features of the 10th Doctor’s Flight Control TARDIS, the end results did not quite match up to the wondrous thing that existed in my head. (Again, I’m ruled by my inner 4th grader who had vivid dreams.)
Yes, all the light and sound functions of the 10th’s TARDIS were restored, as well as the addition of the dumb/cool door sign. But–and this is pure speculation on my part–Underground Toys was probably able to afford to do all this by skimping in other areas to make up the cost. My theory, based solely of the evidence of the thing itself, is that they wound up skimping on the quality of the plastic used in its construction.
Like the Tennant TARDIS, the Capaldi TARDIS has lights inside that illuminate the windows, the interior area, and the Police signs above each wall. But the plastic for the roof and doors is so thin that you can completely see the light bleeding through it from within (as illustrated in the image at right). Even in daylight conditions, this bleed can be seen all along the edge where the doors meet. This might have been better concealed with a layer of paint, but this model (unlike the 10th’s) is unpainted. Now this unpaintedness is nothing new, as the blue sections of all subsequent models were also unpainted. It’s just that this time it hurts the overall design. I’m of half a mind to add a coat of blue myself to see if it helps.
The other irritating thing, which was not true of the Tennant model, is that the windows themselves, when illuminated from within, allow something of a view of the inner workings of the toy behind the curve of the screened interior card. The Tennant model’s windows were more opaque while the new Capaldi TARDIS has relatively clear windows. Through them, you can clearly see the back of the interior card itself and even the backs of adjacent windows. The other difference that affects this is that the light on the interior underside of the roof is a good deal brighter than that of the Tennant TARDIS, possibly so that it will be able to illuminate not only the windows and CALL BOX signs, but the door sign as well. The roof lamp is also brighter and the light bleeds through the paint of its cap. Further adding to the frustrating nature of this toy, the plastic POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX signs do not quite fit snugly within their frames, allowing light from within to bleed over the tops and bottoms of them.
As for the dumb door sign… it lights up. yay. But in doing so it has now lost its function as a cover for the phone. Not that I mind this so much, because the phones can make the left door difficult to open, depending on their design. But having a phone there was a key plot point during Capaldi’s first episode. Granted, it isn’t as if I was planning to recreate that moment, but it’s nice to have the option.
It’s a poor thing to complain about the flaws in something that is so basically cool. The 4th Grader in me would have LOOOOOOVED to have owned this. (He would also wonder why it is blue when the poor color of his 10 inch Zenith television had led him to believe it green for most of his school years, but that’s another story for another time, if I’ve not told it already.) It’s just that Underground Toys came SO close to getting it right. It pains me to do so, but I’m going to give this a 3.5 TARDI rating.
I look forward greatly to Jodie Whitaker’s run as the Doctor. The media shot that has been released of her costume and TARDIS gives me hope, because it returns the TARDIS to the dingy greeny blue of the ’70s and restores the dark, non-glowy door sign, yet keeps the illuminated call box signs and windows. Seems ripe for a toy that hearkens back to Tennant’s toy in many respects.
Author: Eric Fritzius
January 19, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
Around the time of the introduction of Clara Oswald as the Doctor’s companion in 2012, Underground Toys, in my humble opinion, lost their way a bit. They made the bold move to switch their main line of Doctor Who figures and toys from the former 5.5″ scale used since 2006 to a 3.75″ scale. 
One might speculate that this move was decided in an effort to continue to keep manufacturing costs low, and one would be correct in this, which Underground themselves said as much at the time. And so their figure line for 2013 was at the smaller, less-detailed, 3.75 inch scale. This, naturally, annoyed me greatly, but only to a point. While I was irritated at the scale shift (as a fellow who’d invested a good bit of cash on an 11 Doctor figure set and a number of TARDi might be) I also knew that the new scale would mean a new TARDIS in that scale and I was pretty interested in owning one of those.
Soon enough, Underground produced a scaled down TARDIS to accompany their new Doctor and Clara figures. Instead of calling it an Electronic Flight Control TARDIS, they switch the title to Spin & Fly TARDIS. This is because this TARDIS wasn’t simply a miniaturized version of the Flight Control model, but they’d changed up (i.e. further reduced) its features a bit. Instead of a concave spinning spindle on 
the bottom, allowing the TARDIS to rotate when spun via the roof lamp, they included a clear plastic base that fit into the bottom of the TARDIS itself, which allowed the whole thing to be spun when set upon a table, or even in the hand. (Alternately, you don’t need the base bit at all, so I don’t choose to use it and am uncertain what I’ve even done with it at this point.)
The Spin & Fly TARDIS still has the opening doors, the dematerialization sounds, and the lighted roof lamp. It also has the interior background card of the redesigned TARDIS from the Clara era of Doctor Who. But gone bye byes are all the other features of its larger predecessors. Now, granted, the reduced size of the toy also reduces the space for all the electronics necessary to make all the previous functions work. (Also, the doors of my particular TARDIS refuse to both stay open, which is one of the only remaining non-electronic functions left.)
Ultimately I felt the reduction in size of the line of figures, as well as the TARDIS, was a cheapening of the toy line as a whole. And, apparently, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, for Underground Toys soon issued statements about the matter saying that it was necessary in order to be able to continue making toys at all. Still didn’t mean I had to like it.
Now, all that said, I still really dig the 3.75″ scale TARDIS. There’s just something about the sturdiness of the basic four posted design that I find satisfying, reduced sounds and lights be damned. Even in the smaller scale, it loses very little of that satisfying feeling for me. I’m going to give it a 3 TARDI rating and will even admit to wanting to give it four. But the cheapening of the line, to me, is not something I support so I’m sticking with 3. I even wound up buying a 3.75″ scale Peter Capaldi to go with it, but only cause Gamestop was having a nice sale.
It seems that the 3.75″ line has kind of petered (no pun intended) out. Underground did some play sets for Matt Smith and then a cursory few things for the first season of Capaldi, but not so much in terms of the most recent season. They did release a third wave of figs, including a David Tennant figure, whose appearance is reflective of the flatter-haired version of his Doctor from Day of the Doctor. And, for a hot hour or so, I became wildly excited because I found the image at right which appears to depict not only a 3.75″ scale Tennant figure, but an Amy Pond in that scale (not his companion, but what evs), and, most amazing of all, a Tennant era TARDIS done in the 3.75″ scale. I was very excited indeed, because this would definitely be something I’d want for the collection. However, upon further research, this appears to actually be a die-cast TARDIS toy from 2006 that so happens to almost match the scale for Tennant’s newer 3.75″ figure (though not perfectly, to my eye). See the image below for the products that were apparently combined to make this “set.”
Now I have to start scouring ebay for the die-cast TARDIS. It’s nice to have a quest.
Author: Eric Fritzius
January 12, 2018
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
11th Doctor Flight Control TARDIS (left) and 7th Doctor TARDIS (right)
We were recently covered up in snow and arctic winds. Seemed like a good time to get out and take some lovely snow shots with a couple different versions of the electronic toy TARDISES that I own in honor of the very snowy ending to Peter Capaldi’s run in the 2017 Christmas Special. I intended to pick one of them to write about but discovered that it was difficult to tell either of their stories without telling not only the story of the other as well, but also a completely different previous electronic TARDIS toy that I’d not intended to write about yet. I had really hoped to space out the electronic TARDISES a bit more, as they tend to be among the jewels in the crown of my collection, but it looks like I’m just going to have to recklessly burn through all three in a multi-part saga just to get it all right.
I’ve gushed rhapsodic here about my love of the original Underground Toys Flight Control TARDIS from the David Tennant era. It’s maybe my favorite mass-market TARDIS (i.e. one not uniquely and painstakingly crafted using a combo of skill and love by my mother-in-law). When Matt Smith took over the role, a Smith era TARDIS toy soon followed. It looked fantastic, with the darker shade of blue and the St. John’s ambulance badge restored to the door. It had the interior backdrop of Smith’s first, brighter, earlier sheet-metal TARDIS control room, and an updated roof lamp. Plus the windows of this were completely blacked out, which looked really cool–except there was kind of a reason to black them out. It seems that this version of the TARDIS lost some of the previous TARDIS toy’s functionality in terms of having no interior lighting and non-illuminating Police Public Call Box signs. (No need for transparent windows if you’re not going to light up the interior, eh?) It retained the dematerialization sound effects, the control room sounds when the doors were opened, the roof light, the whooshing sounds when spun via the spindle on the bottom and the spacey sounds when shaken. Pretty great and still quite playable, despite the lack of all the lights, but it kind of just screamed “CHEAPER-TO-MANUFACTURE” in big bold type. But, man, does it look cool, so I’m going to give the 11th Doctor Flight Control TARDIS a solid four TARDI.
(Side note: Underground Toys also produced an even cheaper version of the 11th’s TARDIS which didn’t have lights or sounds of any kind, but did come as a “Christmas Adventure” set with 11th Doctor and Amy Pond figures. On the surface, the set is a misnomer because the figures it includes have nothing 
Christmasy about them, as Amy is wearing her police officer outfit. However, if you stop to think about it, Amy Pond had returned to her police outfit for some honeymoon bedroom role-playing with her new husband Rory for the first Smith Christmas special. They just fail to specify what kind of… um, “Christmas adventures” Amy happened to be having on the trip, nor do they include Rory in his Roman Soldier attire to seal the notion. The packaging, as you can see in the accompanying image, boasts that it is non electronic and has opening doors. Those doors even have transparent windows, which I guess means Underground Toys just said “Hey, if we tell them it’s not electronic, we don’t have to hide it by darkening the windows. EFF it!” I declined to purchase this model. And I have half a mind to give it a two TARDI rating to spite Underground Toys for being cheap bastards on a Christmas cash-grab. However, Amy’s Role-Playing Honeymoon Bedroom garb alone may technically qualify this set as the most “adult” toys in the whole Doctor Who line–at least until they come out with Madame Vastra and Jenny figures–which is worth at least and extra few points. So I guess I’ll give this unpurchased-by-me set three.)
Author: Eric Fritzius
January 9, 2018
Our smoke/carbon monoxide detector had been alerting us for three days that its battery is low. It started with just a high-pitched single beep, but we could never tell which of the two detectors in the room was doing it at first, the one by the front door or the one on the ceiling of the upstairs landing. We used an umbrella to reach up and press the downstairs detector’s test button. It’s the fancier unit, so in addition to blaring its alarm multiple times, it also shouted “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” and “CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTED!”, but only as part of the test. I then hauled our step-ladder upstairs to press the button on the less-fancy one. It beeped just fine. Our mystery remained.
The next night, the downstairs detector began blaring a single shrill beep and shouting “LOW BATTERY DETECTED!” It started this at 10 o’clock at night as we were settling into bed. I decided I was too tired to haul my butt upstairs to retrieve both a new 9 volt and the step-ladder I’d left up there. So we lived with it for the night. It only interrupted sleep on a semi-hourly basis.
The next night I marched upstairs for both the new 9v and the step-ladder only to find that the last 9v in the pack had no charge when touched to my tongue. (You gotta touch it to your tongue. It’s a 9 volt, after all!) So we lived through another night punctuated by *BEEEP* “LOW BATTERY DETECTED!”
Today I went to the store and purchased a new pack of 9 volts. I chose the two pack rather than the cheaper four pack because the only thing that uses them in the house are the smoke detectors and this will make twice we’ve had to change them in the past five years. No use letting another $10 worth of batteries die in the pack.
I returned home, climbed the step-ladder already positioned beneath the detector, removed said detector from the ceiling, and discovered that it actually took three AA batteries the whole time.
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 25, 2017
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection. Find previous entries HERE.)
This is the second of the Kurt Adler TARDIS ornaments that I own. This one’s made o’plastic instead o’glass.
It’s your basic TARDIS design, Matt Smith/Capaldi era TARDIS. The Christmasy bit of it–beyond it being a Christmas ornament to begin with–is that when you flip a switch on the bottom its windows light up with LED lights that cycle through a number of colors, from yellow to green to blue to purple to red, etc. Kind of neat.
My major complaint about this model, however, is that while the sculpt is basic but good, it’s kind of cheaply made. Mine has molding flaw lines in the plastic itself. And while the windows have a lovely silver paint job on their framework, the company didn’t see fit to add any paint detail to the roof lamp, let alone an actual light within it. Still, it also wasn’t very expensive.
These days this model is not as easy to come by. There are newer editions of this ornament with fake snow in the sculpting and others with a dumbass Santa hat glued to the top, which just violates… I don’t know… good sense, or something. They’re also pretty cheap, but I’m still against them and will have no part of them. This ornament, however, I’m okay with, flaws and all.
Still only gonna give it three TARDI, but it’s not out of meanness.
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 21, 2017
My latest effort as an audiobook narrator, The Last Archer, by S.D. Smith, is now on sale. It is set during the events of Smith’s Green Ember series, but tells a side story to those events with some new characters and a few familiar faces.
You don’t have to have read the Green Ember series to enjoy this story of rabbits with swords (or, as is often the case, bows), but I recommend you read them anyway cause they’re great. (Or pick up the audiobooks for those, narrated by Joel Clarkson.)
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 18, 2017
I am pleased to announce that my short play “Fargo 3D” will be produced as part of the 10×10 Play Festival at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. The festival will run February 15-March 4, 2018.
This will be Fargo 3D’s first production north of the Mason-Dixon. I hope to attend.
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 15, 2017
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
Back in 2013, I got a wild hair up my butt to order a bunch of Doctor Who stuff from ThinkGeek.com. Really, what probably happened is that they had a massive sale, the savings for which really kicked in once you ordered multiple items so I went down my wish list and picked out a few. Naturally all of mine were TARDIS-related and will likely be chronicled here one day. But of the two holiday-related TARDIS items among my purchases, the TARDIS Figural Holiday Ornament was one of them.
As far as Christmas ornaments go, this one is fairly standard. It’s a hollow glass TARDIS, lovingly reproduced in the kind of rounded style as many such glass ornaments of other shapes. This means you can’t go deep on the details, like woodgrain or hard corners, but you can do highlights such as a dusting of blue glitter that gives it that ornament feel without resorting to adding bows and snow, which I’ve seen on some other ornaments. And that stuff’s fine, but it’s not what I wanted. I just wanted your basic TARDIS in super fragile ornament glass form and this one’s pretty sweet in those terms.
The same company that made this one, Kurt Adler, made some others, including different Dalek glass ornament designs that Think Geek still has in stock. They no longer have the TARDIS, but Amazon has it for a very reasonable price. They give it a nearly five star rating, too, so how can I give it anything less than five full TARDI.
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 8, 2017
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
A few years back I saw a TARDIS lamp on ThinkGeek.com. I fell in love instantly. Then my wallet saw how much they wanted for it and I decided my desk didn’t really need a lamp all that much after all. I was also a bit suspicious of it, because I couldn’t get a good look at it from the pictures. The angle ThinkGeek took their pictures from made it seem as though the lamp’s center pole came right up through the roof lamp of the TARDIS itself. I suspected, though, that the pole was actually not centered in the base of the lamp at all, but was off to one side and what I was really seeing was the pole behind the TARDIS, separate from it, yet aligned, intentionally I suspect, in a way that would suggest it came through the center of the TARDIS. And this was pretty much the only angle photographers of that particular lamp used, and continue to do so to this day. I also didn’t care for the lamp’s shade and would have preferred a simple Tardis-Blue shade. Were I ever to acquire one, I would have to remedy that, I thought. But the price tag on it, of around $45, was the major drawback to the purchase. I decided to bide my time or come up with another solution.
By this point I had enough TARDI in my collection that I figured I could probably make my own lamp, especially if the retail TARDIS lamp itself was only a display base lamp in the first place. If I could find one of those, I could just put one the TARDIS of my choice on it and call it a night. The trouble is, while I can call that style of lamp a “display base” lamp in writing, that’s probably not what it’s really called–or, at least, if you search for that term you’ll see any other kind of lamp than the style I was actually looking for. After haunting lamp sites and unsuccessfully searching on and off for a few days with various other terms, I gave up.
Three summers ago, while visiting my parents in Mississippi, I popped by a local remaindered store called Dirt Cheap, located in a repurposed former Kroger, across from my old high school. And there I found a literal pile of display base lamps, pre-painted in a blue color for my convenience, for $11 each. Granted, the shade of blue was not so much current TARDIS blue, but was more of a Sylvester McCoy TARDIS blue. However, I was the owner of a Sylvester McCoy TARDIS toy, so it was kind of perfect. And, I figured, if it was ever important for it to be any other hue of blue, they ain’t quit making Krylon. I took it home with me and plunked the Sylvester McCoy TARDIS onto it at my earliest convenience. It was a great fit. In fact, I found that if I substituted the David Tennant era Flight Control TARDIS, it actually hung off the edge of the base a little, while the smaller McCoy TARDIS did not.
Jump ahead some months. That sultry temptress ThinkGeek.com once again began whispering sweet nothings in my ear by adding a TARDIS bluetooth speaker to their stable of nerdy ‘ho’s. (She was paired with a bluetooth Dalek speaker `ho as well.) However, it was a bluetooth speaker TARDIS that cost well over $100. No dice. Not unless it was made by Bose would I spend that kind of cash on a single speaker. I saw it offered on other sites for a bit less, but it was still just dumb.
A year later, though, Amazon ran a special. You could get the TARDIS bluetooth speaker and a blue ray of all the Christmas specials to date for under $70. That seemed about right, especially considering the good ratings the speaker seemed to be getting. I snatched it up, plunked it down on the display base, and instantly had my very own, possibly one-of-a-kind, bluetooth TARDIS speaker lamp.
The speaker itself is indeed a good one. It’s not going to fill a room with sound for a party, but it’s fantastic for playing music or podcasts that don’t have to be floor to ceiling. It’s portable, rechargeable, and it lights up and makes TARDIS sounds. When you first turn it on, it does the TARDIS takeoff sound in time with the flashes from the roof lamp. You can skip this by hitting the volume button, cause it goes on kind of a while. It then makes strange whooshing sounds and flashes the Police Public Call Box lights as it searches for a bluetooth connection. When it finally gets one, it sounds the cloister bells (proving that bluetooth connections are a danger to the space-time continuum), turns the Police Public Call Box signs on solid and you’re good to go.
As far as its design goes, the speaker TARDIS is pretty darn good in almost all respects. It’s of a comparable size to the Tennant TARDIS, so it does hang off the edges a bit, but I can live with it. While it has woodgrain sculpting on most of the usual surfaces (roof, door edges, base, etc., all going in the proper direction) it is oddly lacking in woodgrain sculpting on the inset door panels. It’s a questionable design choice and feels like either a move to cheapen production or maybe was intentionally done by a designer who somehow didn’t think the TARDIS had woodgrain in those panels. The windows are also not “glassed” but are used as the speaker sound ports. (Sound’s gotta come out somewhere.) They’ve kept the T-shape to the window panes by using the blacked out sections with open slots as the speaker ports.
The lower section of the front has four buttons set two each into the lowest inset panels. (Ooh, maybe they didn’t put woodgrain in the panels cause it would somehow interfere with the aesthetic of having buttons poking out of those lower ones?) Two are volume buttons while the other two are a pause/play button and a phone button in case calls come in while it’s connected to your phone. So the speaker then becomes a speaker phone (which, while I’ve never actually used it for this purpose, makes the 14-year-old me from 1986, who was fascinated by speaker phones after seeing the character Cameron use one in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, very very happy).
If I had a complaint beyond the woodgrain thing, it’s that when the TARDIS speaker eventually runs low on its charge it emits a crazy-loud and very non-Doctor-Whoish alarm sound to warn you that it will soon need a charge. The first time this happened, though, I was at a complete loss for why it was happening. It was VERY startling and then, as it continues every few minutes until you finally plug it in, remained irritating because it’s a full stop interruption to whatever you’re trying to listen to. I understand the need for s
uch an alert, but I don’t understand why it has to be so jarring. There are dozens of quieter little sounds the TARDIS makes on the show that would be more appropriate. Even the cloister bell sound would make more narrative sense, as the bells are intended to be a dire warning in the first place, and what would be the worst thing that could happen to a rechargeable speaker–beyond getting dropped in the toilet, or something.
These days, the TARDIS bluetooth speaker is far more affordable, being available for around $50 online. If you’re in the market for one, I recommend it. In fact, I give it four TARDI.
Author: Eric Fritzius
December 1, 2017
(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
The TARDIS USB hub is one of the more useful TARDi in my collection. And one of the handiest, as it’s always there on my desk, faithfully being all TARDISy and stuff.
As far as USB hubs go, it does the trick, having four ports, two on each side allowing me to plug up to four USB cabled devices into my computer via the single cable running from the hub to one USB port on the actual desktop unit. As ya do. But adding to the rollicking fun of all that, the optional cool bit is that when you plug a USB cable into one of the ports on the TARDIS hub, it not only flashes the roof lamp, but also plays the TARDIS wheezy takeoff noise. Huzzah. Or, if you’re somehow sick of hearing the TARDIS wheezy takeoff noise (you deluded monster!) you can flip a switch on the back of it and it shuts up (though it still flashes the light). For those who are not sick of hearing the TARDIS wheezy takeoff noise, though, another feature allows you to press the door sign on the left, which serves as a button to play the noise and flash the lights.
As far as styling goes, the hub is middle-grade in the detail department. It checks all the boxes on shape and proportion and signage of your standard Matt Smith-era TARDIS, with a very respectable roof lamp, and painted door hardware, including the keyhole. However, there is no wood-grain to be found. This is actually fine by me. I’d rather there be no wood grain than shitty wood grain. (Still lookin’ at you, Light Up TARDIS “kit.”) I give it a solid four TARDI.
A side story to the above picture: a few years back my sister gave me a mug very much like the one pictured beside the TARDIS hub. It is a mug of the sort that when you pour hot liquids into it the TARDIS on one side vanishes and reappears in outer space on the other side. Trez cool. Only trouble is, it comes with a number of notices and stickers warning you to never ever EVER put it in the dishwasher. And I never ever EVER did. However, while emptying our dishwasher one day, what should I find but my mug within it, sans any illustrations. I was sad to have lost all the TARDISy bits of my TARDIS mug, but figured it had been a mistake made by our cleaning lady, who had not been given the memo on the washing of the mug. Later I mentioned it to the wife, whose eyes shot wide. I could see within them the guilt reservoir beginning to rise. Yep, she’d been the culprit the whole time.
We made the original, now blank mug, a new receptacle for pens. But since my sister was coming for a visit a couple of months later, I decided to get a replacement mug so she wouldn’t feel bad and so I would have a TARDIS mug again. Then I went and told her the story anyway, cause it was funny. These days the mug lives on my desk, far away from any dishwasher, and is used as another receptacle for pens, its dematerialization circuits temporarily at rest.
