Toy Fair 2009

I thought I'd just let all our regular readers know about this year's toy fair at Excel in London.

Bus Stop paid a visit on the opening day, when all the media types were around. We did some celeb spotting for you, of course. We were barely in 5 minutes when we encountered a couple of muscle bound Gladiators - Battle Axe and the pretty-boy one with the long hair. Next we were somewhat surprised, whilst browsing the Playmobil 2009 line up, to discover Samanda of Big Brother fame perusing beside us.

However the jewel in the crown came whilst Bus Stop was enjoying a sandwich in the main concourse of Excel. A vision of blue came jogging past, and on glancing up, it turned out to be none other than Sportacus (wife and eldest daughter very jealous when they heard). The geek in Bus Stop Toy Shop was hugely dissappointed to manage to miss the Tech Deck world champion in action and we're lead to belive that Brian Blessed was around too, but we didn't spot him.

Anyway - enough chat about celebs. On the toy front, it was great to see the industry in such bouyant mood, despite the current economic climate. We saw more superb new products than you can shake a stick at.

Amongst our current favourites, we saw some great new Magno-z and got a sneek preview of the new series of Crazy Bones. The toys coming out for the launch of the new Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds TV series also look fantastic. As we suspected, Thumb Wrestling Federation looks like it will be huge.

There's also a whole raft of new, exciting brands coming to Bus Stop Toy Shop over the coming year, but we won't spoil any surprises - you'll just have to keep checking back.