So I was in the convenience store the other day, getting my requisite Friday night Twizzlers, when I saw a cardboard display by the door featuring some items of particular interest. The top shelf of the display featured a small poster with a pen-and-ink rendering of Darth Vader and a small inset of the Emperor, just for fun. The quality of it was highly suspect—like fan art gone horribly wrong—and it reminded me of when I was 15 and won that Budweiser bar mirror from the carnival. But below the poster were the real objets d'art: a row of child-sized plastic guns with "Space Weapon" emblazoned across the packages. The font was designed to mimic that sweeping, sci-fi text we're all accustomed to seeing from George Lucas's scrappy little film franchise. It's clever—when you glance at the logo, your gestalt mechanism kicks in and instantly translates it as Star Wars. But it's not Star Wars at all. It's Space Weapon. And it's not some cheap replica toy that's intended to resemble some particular weapon in the movie—it's a cheap replica that epitomizes non-specific science fiction concepts and features a little button that you depress to make a chirpy weapon sound. Cheeeep-cheep cheeeep-cheep cheeeep cheep! Space Weapon is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

As such, I can't help but love it.

I like it that not only do we have major brand spinoffs of popular culture in this country, but we also have this shadowy underclass of derivative wannabes that are several steps removed from the real thing. You want a Disney's Princess Collection Little Mermaid tiara? I can give you a generic Fish Princess bejeweled crown-type thing on which the glue marks are still visible. You want a Harry Potter action figure? I can give you a Boy Wizard with Forehead Blemish toy. The whole phenomenon reminds me of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," what with the cascading representations of reality, each one more and more removed from the original truth of the thing. I'll spare you any further gratuitous philoso-blather on this issue (mostly because I'm not smart enough to be witty about it), but I do think I'm onto something.

Oh, and as a side note, I'm still annoyed that those Reno 911 action figures aren't actually for sale. "I'm undercover," says the pink boa-draped Lt. Dangle doll. "Deep undercover."

Other favorite off-brand toys:

1. Potato Patch Tikes
2. Doubly Famished Hippopotami
3. G.I. Jedediah
4. Loose Lips Sunk My Battlecruiser
5. My Apologies
6. Robots in the Ring
7. Poorly Behaved Adolescent Girls with Fashionable Clothing
8. Thermogenic Matchbox Cars
9. Friedrich the Locomotive Caboose
10. Alan the Assembler