We’ve had American Toys, Japanese Toys, and even Korean Toys on CollectionDX but this one is a new one – a South African Toy.

In 2005, Coca-Cola challenged 5 magnificent design groups from 5 continents to create and share interpretations and visions of optimism through music video short stories. One such design group was Rex&Tennant from South Africa.

Each group was able to create several different items for the M5 (Magnificent 5) Promotion, including a bottle design, shirts, and yes, even a toy.

I like to think that you are either a Coke person or a Pepsi person. Pepsi people aren’t allowed on my property, BTW ;-) In order to lessen our sugar impact we switched to Diet Coke, but that tasted like ass. Finally we found Coke Zero, and we were hooked. We drink a TON of that stuff, and we will likely get cancer from it at some point. But with each can we drank we acquired something called Coke Points. You can redeem these points on the Coke website for all kinds of junk. My wife is largely in charge of the points, and gets bags and such, but one day she had some left over points and asked me to look through the store. Lo and behold! They had TOYS in the Coke Points store!

Huzzah! Now I can combine two of my passions together – Caffeine and Toys!

We ordered the Rex/Tennant figure from the store and it arrived a few days later. The toy comes in a nicely designed window box. The box had been banged up a little in shipping due to them just placing it in a padded envelope.

The toy is surprisingly nice. It feels like a designer toy, but without all the pretentiousness. The toy is cast in white and is covered in a wonderful color scheme. It is articulated at the neck, arms and legs, and is about 5 inches tall.

The figure at this time has no name. There are several different toys available at the Coke Points store, so next time you have a Coke, save that cap and maybe you can turn in your points and get a toy. If that doesn’t symbolize optimism, I don’t know what does.