6125 Sea Sprint 9

In my attempt to restore some sort of blogging regularity, it made sense to start with something fairly simple, like a set review. Given that I have pretty only brought my Aquazone sets with me from Boston, you can expect that they will appear here over the course of the summer. In case you didn't deduce that from the punchlines of some of the Aquazone Breakfast News issues, I don't have a large Aquazone collection. Indeed, of the sets that I own (as opposed to piecemeal-acquired Aquazone elements), the following set is in contention for the largest one I own:



Yes, that is 6125 Sea Sprint 9 (apparently called Aquanaut Octopod in some places), and yes... it was the smallest set in the original 1995 Aquanaut release. The thing is, though, that EVERY Aquazone set I have (for the purposes of this post, I am *not* counting the 2007 Aquaraiders or Atlantis sets as "Aquazone," though I normally consider them as belonging to broadly the same theme) was the smallest in its line--or smaller (in two cases, I acquired a polybag set that was released later and trumped the original for small size).http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

I originally acquired Sea Sprint 9 in the fall of 1996. I no longer remember whether I bought it or whether it was a gift (or a bribe), but I think I bought it. It was my second Aquazone set, after 6115 Shark Scout, and my first "good guy."

I suppose that if one looks back, this set was one of the first steps in the direction of eventually producing Aquazone Breakfast News. Not only was this my first Aquanaut, but it established the Aquanauts as my favourite Aquazone theme. Years later, when I acquired another copy of this set for $3.00 as an add-on to a larger Bricklink order, it was a significant step in the direction of acquiring the medium-sized Aquanaut army that was the direct cause of setting my comic strip underwater. Because the wider Aquazone theme is one I used hardly at all, and because I like Aquanauts and wanted to acquire lots but couldn't justify them in that context, they were the perfect fit--or the perfect misfits, one might say--to host the comic.