Review — Fanhome’s ‘ET: The Extra-Terrestrial’ Build-Up Kit, Stages 15-20
by Brendan M. Allen
The fifth package for my Fanhome ET The Extra-Terrestrial Build-Up Kit has arrived! We’ve also arrived at building stages that require a lot more attention to detail, as mistakes made beyond this point on Zrek’s head will be very difficult to backtrack in order to fix. I’m not saying it’s impossible (as we will discover together in just a moment), but it gets exponentially more complicated.
The first stage in this package (15th overall) is to attach the last piece of our short, rotund friend’s skull. This part is still relatively simple. Tab A in Slot A, Tab B in Slot B, secure with a couple screws. Easy peasy.
Stages 16-19 involve assembling and reinforcing the little guy’s pelvic floor and the inner structure of his legs. Nothing terribly exciting to look at here, but it does give an idea of stages to come.
The final stage in Package 5 involves removing the top of the model’s skull to attach the wiring harnesses for the facial servo motors to an electronic circuit board and installing a contactless sensor on top of Zrek’s skull. This is where that aforementioned attention to detail comes in. It’s very easy to route the wires around the wrong corner or through the wrong hole.
If you were to, say, route the eye switch wire through the neck hole where the creature’s cervical spine is expected to go in later stages, instead of the correct hole located half an inch or so to the front of that, it would be a huge pain in the ass to correct. Hypothetically. Leave me alone.
After fixing any wiring errors you might have allegedly made in previous steps, it’s time to reattach the top of the skull, with contactless sensor, tighten everything back up, reattach the face, and stick everything back in a big box to store away for another month or so until the next shipment arrives.
There’s an extra level of anxiety with the finished stages of this shipment. It’s impossible to check the wiring at this point. It’s all hooked into that spiffy new circuit board now. More pieces are required before the eyes and mouth will move again. I can still light up the finger and freak my wife out. She hates that thing.
I hope next month’s shipment has the rest of the head skin, and the remote, or the voice box, power source, and remote. We already have the face. It could be cool to play with the assembled face and voice box until the rest of the guts and skins arrive.
As far as subscription services go, Fanhome’s ET The Extra-Terrestrial Build-Up Kit has been fantastic. Some installments are obviously more exciting than others, but the fine folks over at Fanhome do a really good job of keeping things interesting, with the informational magazines and the odd little out-of-sequence pieces that they know you’re waiting for, e.g. ET’s light-up index finger and face skin. Off the shelf, this would be a great model to display in my bar, but the time commitment and process make it extra special.
