October has been a big month for Diamond Select Toys, from the Munsters to the Universal Monsters to X-Men: Curse of the Mutants. Well, we’ve got one more specialty-market ship date left in October, and it’s a doozy! Not only will comic book shops and online retailers get the first box set of Femme Fatales Minimates (with Dawn, Darkchylde, Tarot and Lady Death), they’ll also get the long-awaited specialty assortment of Minimate Vehicles Series 2!

The blue MAX Tech Stealth Jet with Pilot, the glow-in-the-dark Pirate Raiders Ship with Cartographer and the Back to the Future II Hover-Mode TIme Machine (phasing version) with Jennifer will all arrive at stores this Wednesday, so hit up you LCS or your favorite online retailer for your set. Check out the pictures below, and check out the glowing ship’s debut in the first episode of “Calico Jack’s Pirate Raiders”!

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This Christmas, you’re getting a car. Not just any car — the Knight Industries Two Thousand, or “KITT” to his friends! That’s right, our third assortment of Minimates Vehicles will include not only a new Pirate Raiders pirate ship and a Minimates MAX Armored Personnel Carrier, but also KITT himself, star of the Knight Rider TV series in the 1980s along with some guy named Hasselhoff.

The 4-inch-long vehicle will come with a two-inch Michael Knight, with opening doors and room for a passenger, and it will only be available at Toys R Us in late November, along with Robert Deal’s pirate ship with Undercover Anne Bonny. But, since KITT needs his nemesis, we’re also releasing the evil KARR with Garthe Knight in that wave’s specialty-store and comic-shop-exclusive assortment, along with a British Navy ship with officer! Order both through your local retailer!

And if that’s not enough? A special-edition version of KITT, featuring his Super Pursuit Mode transformation, will be available a month later, just in time for the new year and only through Diamond Comics Distributors’ Previews catalog. Which means you should tell your local comic book shop to order it in! Don’t get left in the dust!

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Our Minimates photo contest is over, and we got a ton of great entries! Over 50 shots from around the world, featuring Marvel, Halo, Universal Monsters, Pirate Raiders, Ghostbusters, Minimates MAX, Back to the Future, Terminator and Playstation characters! While we loved them all, only one could win, and that was Les Koting of the Philippines. He’ll be getting Minimates from every line we make for his shot of Captain America and the Red Skull brawling, above! We’ll also send swag to the three runners-up — Don Brosius, Philip Mailloux and Brad Martin — but there were so many great shots we had to share some of them here!

Check ‘em out in the gallery, then head over to Facebook to enter our Marvel and Universal Select Photo Contest, starting soon!

With the second wave of Minimates vehicles hitting stores soon, there are a dozen different ways for Minimates to get around, and they certainly do get around in style. Each Minimate vehicle, be it an adaptation of a famous conveyance from television, movies, the newspapers or the history books, takes the original design and adapts it to accommodate the blocky little bodies of multiple Minimates. So how does Minimatization happen? It’s a multi-step process, but we talked to project manager Robert Yee and vehicle artist Mark Wong to find out how much is planned and how much is just a series of happy accidents. (Larger pictures at the end)
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