Fans of The Muppets are bound to be excited; A new Muppets movie is about to be released: Muppets Most Wanted!
It stars Ricky Gervais as “Dominic Badguy”, Tina Fey as prison officer “Nadya” and Ty Burrell as Jean Pierre Napoleon from Interpol alongside all of the well known Muppets.
If you are still looking for a couple more stocking fillers for the Kids then the Gacha range from Tomy may give you a few ideas. Gacha is a range of pocket money toys featuring loads of well known licensed characters, so there is sure to be something to appeal to most children.
We were sent some assorted samples from the range to try out as you can see below:
The boys favourite is the little Mario car. They all love cars, and Mr Z is getting very interested in games like Mario and Sonic at the moment so he was happy to see this character! This one was one of the larger packets and comes straight out ready to play.
Some of the other packets available are build-able characters, like the Monsters Inc character shown above (bottom right). This comes with a few piece which are quite easily put together by a child and then can be attached to the display stand as shown. This was fun for the boys to build, even though we are not familiar with that particular Monsters Inc character (they haven’t yet seen the film so we only know the main ones)
There’s also a range of Furby figure charms which is bound to be a hit as Furbys are set to be such a popular choice this Christmas.
Tomy have expanded their license collection to now include Hello Kitty, Disney, Nintendo, Sega and more. Characters available include Disney Planes, Where’s my Water, Marvel’s Iron Man and lots more.
These little stocking fillers are all very affordable at £1 or £1.49 depending on the range so are ideal for filling out their stockings a little bit more, and will keep children entertained with their favourite characters.
DAY 5
Win a Mickey Mouse Fly n Slide Clubhouse from Fisher Price
The Mickey Mouse Fly n Slide Clubhouse is a great play set for any little Disney fan. It comes with Mickey, Minnie and accessories.
We have reviewed this toy a couple of months ago, to read our full review click here
For your chance to win, enter via the Rafflecopter below:
Mr T has been keen on Mickey Mouse for quite a while now, whenever he sees Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on TV he is really interested and if he spots a picture of Mickey out and about, he will eagerly point! So I was interested to see what he would make of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse toys from Fisher-Price. Mr R was also very interested once he saw it!
We were kindly sent the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Fly n Slide Clubhouse to try out, along with a selection of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse vehicles and figures.
The clubhouse comes with a pair of Mickey and Minnie figures as you can see above, along with a few play pieces such as a sea saw and picnic furniture. When the clubhouse comes out of the box, there is some very minimal construction involved. It’s really just a matter of clicking the slide, plane and the top of the clubhouse into place and I was able to do this in a couple of minutes with both Mr T and Mr R eagerly waiting by my side so it is nothing difficult at all.
Once the clubhouse was ready for them, they were really keen to get playing with it and found it a lot of fun. You can open the door at the side of the club house so that when you drop mickey down into top, he will slide all the way down his slide! Mr T and Mr R both enjoyed this and they also loved placing characters into the plane and flying it around the clubhouse. The plane is attached by a special stick that allows you to move it along, so that is can fly around the clubhouse without getting lost which is a great idea! Both boys (2 and nearly 4) spent quite some time playing with the club house and putting the characters in and out, so I would say it is perfect for its recommended age group of 2-5. As they can play at both sides of the clubhouse, there is enough room for the two of them to play together without getting in each other’s way or fighting. It’s also great that there are 2 figures included rather than only one, for the same reason. With the addition of the vehicles which come with extra characters, we actually have plenty which is great for expanding their play as they could have a full Mickey Mouse Clubhouse get together in there with all their characters!
All of the pieces are nice and chunky and not flimsy at all. With having to fit the pieces of the clubhouse myself, I did wonder whether this would make them more likely to come apart and have to be refixed but this hasn’t been as issue at all as it has remained firmly in place.
The vehicles are great – an ideal size for Mr T and Mr R as they are big enough not to get easily lost, but not so big that they take up loads of space in their playroom and they fit nicely into their hands. The characters are easy enough to place into the vehicles, and there is a good range of vehicles available. We have the boat, car and tipper (which even comes with a boulder)
This is a lovely range. I do like to see them playing with Mickey Mouse as he is such a classic character (I admit, I do like him myself too :D) The clubhouse would appeal equally to boys or girls and there are loads of Disney toys available from Fisher-Price so do have a look here!
There will be a competition up on the blog to win the Mickey Mouse Fly n Slide Clubhouse as a part of my Advent Calender competitions coming up in December, so make sure you check back for that – It will be a great event with 24 prizes over the 1st 24 days of December in the run up to Christmas. Very exciting!
Let me know in the comments what you think of the toys 🙂
We recently went to see the Disney Planes movie on our trip to Westfield Stratford City and we all really enjoyed it. This was no surprise as we do love Cars, and Disney in general so I was expecting it to be great and we were not disappointed.
Planes is the story of a little crop duster plane named Dusty Crophopper (voiced by Dane Cook) who has big dreams. He wants to become a racer and take part in the Wings Around the World Race. When another plane is disqualified for using illegal fuel, Dusty finds out that he has moved up to 5th place meaning that he has qualified to take part in the great race!
There are seven legs to the race and we see the highs and lows of Dusty and the other competitors as they all try their best to succeed, with Ripslinger even going to sneaky measures to try to sabotage Dusty’s chances.
We have been sent a digital copy of the Disney Planes soundtrack to review. The soundtrack includes 29 tracks, and is composed by Mark Mancina. Many of the tracks are instrumentals.
The track listing is as follows:
I found the soundtrack enjoyable to listen to. It is quite atmospheric and reminds you of all the different moments and moods within the movie. You can really hear the music tell the story. Skipper’s Story is a good example of this as you can feel the ups and downs within even this one track.
My favourite of the instrumental tracks is Dusty and Ishani. As it has a strong Indian influence the sound of this track is quite distinctive from the others and it is very atmospheric. During the movie this was played in the scene were Dusty and Ishani were flying around near to the Taj Mahal and this indicated the start of some blossoming romance between the two planes. I really liked the character of Ishani (Priyanka Chopra) who is a very sleek looking plane. She betrays Dusty by giving him the wrong suggestion to fly low through the mountains and he ends up dangerously flying through a disused train tunnel but you can see she regrets this and over all is a wholesome and great character.
One of the other really memorable tracks from the movie is Love Machine which is performed by Carlos Alazraqui and Antonio Sol. This is the song which the Mexican Plane El Chupacabra sings to win the heart of the French-Canadian plane Rochelle. It’s a great scene as El Chupacabra has been trying with no success to win her over for quite some time but his serenading with this song really turns things around!
I also really liked the first couple of tracks which are Nothing Can Stop Me Now performed by Mark Holman and Don’t You Stop (NYC) by Chris Classic and Alana D. These are full length songs with vocals. Nothing Can Stop Me Now is very positive and upbeat and has a rock feel to it. Don’t You Stop (NYC) is more R&B and has some rap from Chris Classic. That is more the style of music I normally listen to, but I enjoyed both of these and Nothing Can Stop Me Now fits in really well with the atmosphere of the Planes movie.
There is also Fly performed by John Stevens of the Dead Daisies. This song is less my taste but it does fit in perfectly with the movie, and fits well into the soundtrack.
I would have really liked it if the soundtrack also included some of the extra songs like this song by Ishani:
It is not actually in the movie, but it is great! And would have been a really nice extra.
The soundtrack can be bought from Amazon for £8.49 for the mp3 download and £18.50 for the audio CD* (which also comes with a free download or cloud streaming). You can also hear some clips of the songs on the Amazon product page so it is worth having a look. It is also available to download here via iTunes.
If you still haven’t seen Planes, have a look at the trailer here:
And why not like Disney Planes on Facebook?
We have also reviewed some Disney Planes Puzzles which you can see here.
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*prices correct at the time of publishing but may change in future.