Little Wall-E

It started with the Beautician Bot, the pink one near the center of the picture. When we walked into the comic book store, the squat vending machine with its imprisoned mini plastic figures beckoned to me. I glanced at the Hello Kitty baubles and the Pokémon creatures, but stopped, my eyes growing wider with giddy excitement at the next compartment. Crammed into tiny plastic eggs were mini robots from the movie Wall-E, and I knew. I needed to have them.

I cashed in a dollar bill for quarters, dropped them into the slot and spun the crank. The eggs jostled. A metallic thump at the tiny door. I peeled away the tape surrounding my egg and brought forth the tiny Beautician Bot. A few weeks passed until we returned. Again, I dropped in my quarters and out popped another egg, this time with Mow Mow. And then, this past Friday when we entered the store, I noticed the Wall-E figures were gone from their compartment, replaced with Spderman and his gang. I almost said something to the clerk until I discovered a box near the base of the vending machine with 50¢ scrawled in large red letters along the front. Inside were dozens of the plastic eggs, many of them with a Wall-E paper showing through the plastic. I dove in, sorting through the eggs, unable to open them to make sure I didn't already have that particular bot. I'm sure the clerk thought I was crazy, a grown many tossing plastic eggs from a box. It didn't matter. I wanted those six remaining figures. And somehow, without being able to verify the contents of each egg, I managed to obtain all the figures without duplicates.

The picture shows them in all their glory, combined to form a scene from the movie.

(Okay, so I'm a little bit nuts when it comes to Disney.)