Spider-Man Fun Pack (Hunter Lesiure)

Background

Hunter Leisure is a Australia/NZ brand which produces the occasional Spider-Man activity pack. They seem to specialize in complex bundles - everything comes with pencils or crayons, and consists of several different components which are individually not very large. Variety is definitely their differentiating factor.

Story Details

This is the earliest Spidey offering I've managed to find from Hunter Leisure, it's dated 2004. That means it came out around the time of the first of the new movies, though the styling is actually based on "Ultimate Spider-Man", and has nothing to do with the film at all.

First up, the crayons. A typical pack of four small cheap crayons - red, blue, yellow and green. Add a small sheet of stickers... seven in all. Six feature Spidey slinging in various poses, and the final features the SPIDERMAN logo.

So where to put the stickers? Well, there's a "sticker book" in which to stick them! It's a tiny notebook affair with slippery pages, so the stickers will probably remove and re-stick. But why remove and re-stick? All of the pages are blank white pages! There's no villains or scenery, so no reason to re-arrange the stickers at all. Even more amusingly, the book features eight blank pages. Seems a little excessive for seven stickers.

Disappointment is already starting to settle in here, but we're not quite done. Maybe the last two components can rescue this "not much fun pack". There's a "scribbler", a top-bound pad featuring 64 plain white pages. Nice paper, but not very exciting.

OK, last chance then... the "Activity" book. Sixteen pages, but eight of them are blank. The covers are glossy paper, not card. Fine, so we have eight pages of art - kids can still have fun coloring that in. Well, maybe. Most of the "art" is actually very elaborate twiddly made-up "Spider-Man" logos. Only two or three actually feature Spider-Man, again in poses.

General Comments

What a massive disappointment.

The whole thing stinks of "Designed by somebody who knows nothing about Spider-Man" and "Made in china as cheaply as possible." These things look great and colorful and full of entertainment on the outside, but opening the pack you find they're as shallow as a Britney Spears interview.

Overall Rating

Full marks for variety, but depth and quality are totally absent. One web.