THE Cub Report, 07.16.2012, Version- All Hail The King

I am writing this on Sunday evening before the season 5 premier of AMC’s Breaking Bad so I have zero clue if the new season will live up to some extremely high expectations or not. But any which way, I am certainly pumped that there will be 16 more episodes of the wacky adventures of Walter White and his nutty sidekick Jesse Pinkman ahead for our viewing pleasure. Btw, I hope if you are a new fan that you watched the first 4 seasons before attempting to view the season 5 premier, it’s one of those types of shows that requires some back story to fully appreciate.

Monster/PC/Kawi/Traxxas rider Blake Baggett put in two freak’n EPIC rides on Saturday at the Millville Minnesota motocross national. I dare say we haven’t seen anyone ride so possessed in the tiddler class since Stewart was wringing the guts out of his factory 2 stroke Kawasaki 125. If you haven’t gotten a chance to watch the moto’s yet, even if you aren’t a moto guy, check’em out (at Allisports.com). You can skip the 450 moto’s though, watching Dungey win by 45 seconds is about as fun as watching CA glue dry in Adam The Uber Interns hair.

Michigan Mafia member Nick Wey got pretty busted up on Saturday at the Millville national. He got squirrely in the monster sand whoops and went down hard, cracking his L2 and dislocating his hip. Thankfully, the early word is no spinal cord damage. Get well soon NW27.

So… the surprise I eluded to last week was about BigSquidRC getting to cover the HobbyTown USA National Convention in Lincoln Nebraska. That’s sort of a big deal seeing as how they have never allowed “media” coverage before, so we were pretty excited that they’d trust us to do the job. Why would there be trust involved? Because there are a lot of items intended strictly for dealer eyes, not consumers, displayed at the show. We were asked to cover the show under the condition that we didn’t leak anything. So as much as we hate to not leak a good story, we’ve held up our end of the dealio.

So how about an insiders look at the show…

If you don’t work in the industry (or don’t work at a HobbyTown) you’ve probably never heard of (or cared about) the HobbyTown national convention. But… their convention is a fairly big deal in our industry. Anywhere that Hobbico, Horizon, Traxxas, Associated and HPI turns up to is no joke. And yes you should care, because typically several new items get first introduced at that show, not to mention all the buying power of all those HobbyTown dealers can’t help but to influence future trends in the market.

And no, the HobbyTown convention isn’t open to consumers (although there are rumors that perhaps on certain days in the future it might be), it’s open strictly to manufactures/distributors and HobbyTown dealers. Their convention isn’t held in some giant expo hall, it’s held in a hotel where most of the manufactures “booths” are actually in hotel suites. But not all their booths are in suites, some are located in a huge, open, conference type room. The reason why I am mentioning this is because it’s a unique, and pretty dialed set-up. Why? Because if you need to get in 30 minutes of uninterrupted face time with the guys from Traxxas it is very easy to do at the HobbyTown show. As a HobbyTown dealer you can actually get the quality time that you need with all the right people. Having legit issues getting parts from “Happy Flower Car Company”? The HobbyTown show gives you a true opportunity to sit down with them and get the issue worked out, not be forced into some short convo about “how the show is going” like at some other places.

From what I’m told that HobbyTown convention has been going on now for around 17 years, and that this years event was the largest ever. There was a strong showing of rc surface manufactures, as well as manufactures from other aspects of a hobby shop (like kites, water balloons, etc). Dealer attendance seemed pretty solid, the conference floor seemed busy, but not so busy that you couldn’t get in plenty of quality time with the manufactures.

To do the HobbyTown show as a manufacture is fairly affordable. Manufactures run into some pretty massive bills hitting the bigger shows, but the HobbyTown peeps have arranged things in such a way to keep prices down. Kudos to them.

Hospitality was off the hook at the HobbyTown show, as was organization. I’ve attended dozens upon dozens of trade shows in various industries and the Hobbytown USA people solidly have their act together. Every little detail was taken care of, every small need was quickly taken care of without issue, huge props to the people that put on the show.

There were just a lot of happy smiling faces at that show. Maybe it was something in the water IDK, but everybody just seemed to be in a chipper mood.

And lastly before I get off of the subject, the show organizers had put together lots of things for the dealers to do. It certainly wasn’t some boring event for dealers, there was always something going on for those looking to keep busy (a good example of this was their carnival night on Wednesday). For those wanting to keep it laid back, that was fine as well. Oh and really lastly, there was food and drink Everywhere you turned. Seriously Very awesome.

On to some other business…

I’ve been working on a review of the MIP Losi Ten SCTE Pro4mance chassis and tuning package. With any luck I’ll get that busted out by next Tuesday. So far, so awesome.

I hear we’ve got a new contest cooked up, something that involves just how core of a basher you are. As always, keep your eyes peeled on the front page.

And really, really lastly… BigSquidRC has been blow’ing up like crazy the last 24 months, and we thank you all for reading and supporting the site. But we can get bigger, a LOT bigger. What I am asking is this- if you dig BigSquid, spread the love around. Mention the site to a friend, spread a link to an article you like etc. We aren’t in the biz of begging for hits around here, however we are at a big stepping stone. To make that next big leap in size, and to do bigger projects we would like to do, is going to require us to go WFO for all the readers we can get, and everyone from Brian, to Adam The Uber Intern, to myself would appreciate your continued help and support. To you guys already out there spreading the love, we salute you!

That’s it for this week ya bunch of mongrels, thanks for reading, and support your local hobby shops, tracks and bash spots!

YOUR Cub Reporter