Allan Velez lit up like he was meeting an old friend when he spotted Derrek Shephard at the Wal-Mart store on Brookpark Road in Brooklyn last Saturday.
Allan is a 10-year-old fourth-grader at St. Leo the Great Elementary School in Cleveland. Shephard, a genial young man on hire from Pro Model and Talent Management of Akron, wore a white T-shirt identifying him as a Battle Master giving demonstrations, tips and -- what could be better? -- free samples from the Bakugan Battle Training Tour.
So while Allan's mom, Nicole, went on with her shopping, Allan and the Battle Master leaned over a plastic "battle arena," playing a game that looks like a blend of marbles, craps, backgammon and Yu-Gi-Oh, punctuated by exclamations of "Bakugan brawl!" and "Bakugan stand!"
Its ultimate goal is to "save the Earth from destruction," a tall order for any game. But if the planet can be saved by 10-year-old boys burying it in action figures, Bakugan appears up to the challenge.
The name is pronounced BACK-oo-gon, and it comes from the Japanese words "baku," meaning "to explode," and "gan," meaning "sphere." In the world of kids' toys, where hype and reality can be impossible to tell apart, Bakugan is exploding.
What it is, simply, is a line of marblelike plastic spheres that magnetically pop open into warrior-action figures, or Bakugan Battle Brawlers, when rolled onto laminated magnetic game cards. When two Bakugan land and stand on the same card, they do battle. The winner is determined by points on the bottom of the card and the Bakugan's "special abilities."
Strategy is involved in picking the cards and Bakugan to play. Skill enters into shooting the spheres to land and stand, and not just roll around.
"It took me a long time to figure out how they open," Shephard confided while demonstrating technique.
In Canada, where manufacturer Spin Master introduced Bakugan last summer, it passed Star Wars and Spider-Man to become the year's second-ranked toy line for boys, behind Transformers. With more stock available, it could have been first.
It hit the U.S. market in January and started selling like a holiday item. At Wal-Mart, "the products are flying off the shelves as soon as we stock them," a spokesperson said. At Target, "the best way to describe their performance is exceeding all expectations," a spokesman said. "It's doing very well for us."
