A Trade With Adam Nori!

You know how I'm always cracking wise about how "timely" my posts are... like when I post about Christmas a month after the fact, or Valentine's Day in April or some crap? Well, yet again, this is one of those posts that are WAAAY past due, and this time it is almost criminally negligent. 

I received a package from Adam Nori of Who Ya Gonna Collect, as well as the author of a book, Adventures of a Ghost Hunter, in which he details some of his career as a professional Ghost Hunter! It is safe to say that Adam has a bit of an obsession with 1) ghosts and 2) Ghostbusters. 

I don't originally remember what put Adam and I in contact, but as happens with the many folks I interact with online, a trade of goods was discussed at one point. So we sent each other packages full of junk, and you can see what Adam ended up with over on his blog. 

So I received my package from Adam sometime last SUMMER. Like in JUNE. So this one is WAAAY overdue. I genuinely owe Adam an apology because this one got forgotten about and I hate to think that he for a second thought that I wasn't INSANELY grateful to receive this package:

First off, kudos to Mr. Nori for repurposing his Nerdblock box for this package! He made a lot of stuff fit in this space! Let's explore.

Comic books, trading cards, and VHS tapes are all standard-issue staples for these sort of trades. A lovely assortment was included, and if I'm playing favorites, that pack of Rocketeer cards had me drooling at first sight!

There were some awesome fast-food and cereal premiums in the box, including this Guardians of the Galaxy bag from Subway, and these Dinosaurs toys from McDonald's! In an ultimate act of heresy, I removed the hoses from Fran and Earl and used them as figurines on mt Henson shelf (they go back in pretty easily, so I'm not too worried).

So many toys!!! Here's the first of three pics detailing all of the toys included. If I had a gun to my head and had to pick some faves from the picture above, I'd single out bendable Shaggy, the Inspector Gadget figure, and the two Busy Town cars in the very front. But there's so much here! Muppet Babies! Toy Story! LEGO!

This fleet of vehicles is AMAZING! from some awesome Hanna Barbera characters, to Fraggles, Rugrats and Robin... But again, if I'm being super honest, my absolute FAVE in this shot is Snaps of the Burger King Kids Club riding a purple cricket/grasshopper/locust/something. I already have Kid Vid riding a scorpion and I/Q riding a millipede, so now that I have Snaps, I only need two more toys to complete the set! (Jaws riding a Spider, and Boomer riding a dragonfly, if you're curious...)

Finally, I sorted out some of the crème de la crème of the package for this final shot. I now officially own one of the movie-Turtles which I've been eyeing but not pulling the trigger on. The C3-PO is a bobbler and looks great on my Star Wars shelf. Solomon Grundy, Snap from Rice Krispies, a McDonald's Changeable, Snoopy in his flying Ace outfit, a Rizzo Disney Vinylmation Muppets toy, a Mr. Burns from the Burger King Treehouse of Horror line, and a couple of DC Scribblenauts, Blue Beetle and Bizarro are all welcome additions to a bunch of other collections I have stacking up in the Geek Cave.

This package was SUPER generous, and full of fun! I can't thank Adam enough for sending me these things in exchange for the box of junk he received!

I'll be back soon with some Geeky Goodwill Goodies to share! So until then, Happy Hunting!

A Package from Miss M!!!

I have been a little MIA blog-wise for a little longer than I usually like to be... and there are several reasons for that, some real-life in nature, others blog related in general, as October creeps closer and closer. But it was not my intention to fall completely off the face of the earth in the meantime! I still have some content I desperately want to get posted before the last day of September... and I fear I won't get to it all. I will be trying to blog through November this year, so hopefully I'll get to a bit more of it before December and its prerequisite countdowns kick into gear. 

For now, I want to post about this awesome package that came to me in the mail from one of my absolute best friends on the internet, and my podcasting comrade-in-arms, Miss M!!! We along with our other good friends Brian (The Trash Man) and Jason are the forces combined behind the Eclectic Mayhem Podcast. 

Let's take a look at what the amazing Miss M of Diary of a Dorkette fame sent me, shall we? 

Here's a quick peek at the box itself. (Miss M always includes a card or handwritten note, which is extra awesome) Now let's look inside!

First up, M knows I have a lot of love in my heart for The California Raisins. So to express this love, she sent me a box of Valentines featuring the raisins, and four of the classic PVC figurines, two of which were Valentine's Day themed as well! I owned both of these heart-hugging heroes as a kid, and having them back in my collection really has me pleased. The two mallrat Raisin gals on the right were Hardee's premiums from the period of time near the end of the Raisin's run. These were some of the last figures produced as their popularity was beginning to wane. LOVE THESE!!!

Miss M also knows ho much I LOVE Sesame Street, and not only did Applause do some great PVC figures for the aforementioned Raisins, they also did a wonderful line of figures for the Street! I think my absolute favorite of the bunch is the Christmasy (or at least Wintery) Snuffleupagus.

Next up were these incredible Disney themed figures! I am a HUGE fan of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, so getting Sunny and Cubby Gummi here is very exciting! That Mickey figure has an awesome retro vibe to him as well that I just love.

Next up we have this groovy Frankenstein's Monster (I think it's him anyway... this may just be a ghoul or a zombie honestly... he's holding a skull and looks suspiciously stitch-free now that I look at him closer...) push puppet. I have a Halloween collection of these things that this will go along with beautifully!  And check out this Choose Your Own Adventure book "Terror on the Titanic!" I think this is the one where you get to choose if it's Jack or Rose that freezes or floats at the end. Based on the cover, Jack floating while Rose is left to freeze just may be the popular vote.

But this guy... THIS GUY. This is the true gem of this package. I loved EVERYTHING, don't get me wrong, but this is the item I was most tickled to receive. I mentioned wanting this guy on the episode of Eclectic Mayhem where we discussed Robots in pop culture. Miss M said she had an extra one she would toss my way, and MY DAY WAS MADE. This, for the uninitiated, is a Z-Bot from 1993. This specific one was from the series of Z-Bots given out as Burger King Kid's Club premiums:

And honestly, because of this, these are the only 5 Z-Bots I am interested in owning. Thing is, this guy here, "Bugeye" was the fifth and final Z-Bot I needed to complete the quintet! 

Back row, left to right: Skyviper and Turbine. Front Row, left to right: Jawbreaker, Bugeye, and Buzzsaw.

My deepest gratitude to Miss M for all the Geeky Goodies!!! She's got to be one of the most genuine, generous, honest, and friendly folks I have yet to meet in internet land. I am so lucky to be able to call her one of my friends, and I'll be putting together a little thank you package for her soon enough!

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back sometime soonish with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies (or maybe another package...) soon enough! In the meantime, Happy Hunting!

Liberace, The Frighteners, and Ice Age, Ice Age, ICE AGE

Not a huge one tonight kids, but some fun finds nonetheless. Only one major toy find, and the rest is all cassettes and books. But let's take a look and see what we shall see, shall we? 

Here's the pile of loot that I brought home. A few details may jump out to begin with, but let us take a closer look.

First up, the cassettes. We'll probably take a closer look at the Halloween Songs and Sounds from Walt Disney Records when October hits. Likewise, I'l probably wait until December to dissect Liberace: A Christmas Medley. So that leaves the one in the middle: the "Working Girl" soundtrack. It's really most significant for Carly Simon's "Let the River Run" which is a pretty great song if I'm being honest. Chris de Burgh's "The Lady In Red" is on here too, which I absolutely adore. I really need to go watch Working Girl again sometime.

Speaking of movies I want to revisit soon, I found this novelization of Peter Jackson's "The Frighteners" I think I may add this movie to my Halloween watch-pile for this year, since it's been years since I've seen it.

Or maybe I should just add this novelization to the ever-growing Halloween read-pile? I dunno. I always felt like this movie was a bit of an underrated gem. Seeing some great horror/genre vets like John Astin and Jeffrey Combs hamming it up always does my hear good. "I like it when they lay still like that..." and "My body is a road-map of pain!" are lines I quote to my wife on a regular basis to this day. Classic.

I feel like I overpaid slightly for this Ray Bradbury collection of short stories, by Goodwill standards anyway. I would have paid waaay more in a used book store I guess, so thanks for small favors. I buy Bradbury books as "collectible" now without hesitation.

The grab-bag you saw above is really what had me most interested honestly. It was packed with a huge variety of Ice Age Burger King Kids Meal toys from 2002, based off the first movie in the franchise. I'm a complete nut for the first film, and don't really care for the others in the series AT ALL as  I may have mentioned in a post on another blog, a long.. long... time ago.

What's funny is that if you read that post from my other (now defunct) blog, at the very end you'll see me struggle with trying to remember what is is that the tiny Sid the Sloth toy was originally encased in at one point. This find answered that question! It was one of the ice-block toys you can see on the bottom left of the picture above.

This picture, by the way, shows that the grab-bag contained almost 15 whole sets of toys from that series of Burger King Toys. Funny thing is these are all duplicates of 5 toys out of a set of 10 different ones. So even though I have 15 sets here, I still only have half the set!!! It's kind of interesting looking back at the toys they were putting out 13 years ago compared the toys they do nowadays.These things are elaborate in and of themselves:

I won't go into great detail about every single toy, but I will take a moment to say how excited I was to finally track down a "Pinky" toy (the human baby, who is technically named "Roshan") to go with my other Ice Age Toys.

Each set has several pieces to put together and features a character from the movie, doing something from the movie. It's pretty awesome. If I had room to set these up somewhere all the time, I totally would.

But here's the REALLY excellent part: They connect together! I know this is nothing new but back in 2002 it was still a kind-of/sort-of relatively new concept in Happy Meal toys. The Inspector Gadget set from 1999 really kind of revolutionized the idea of collectible/connectable sets, and they were still refining the concept with this one. 

So not only do each of the toys have a cause-and-effect pay-off, you can connect them all in one glorious chain of chaos. It works with mixed results, but for the most part I got this thing to trigger off flawlessly 3 out of 5 times. I dabbled with the idea of taking a video of the whole Rube Goldberg affair... but it was too unpredictable and quick moving to even attempt it. Again, keep in mind, this is only half of the Ice Age set BK was offering that year. So if I had all 10 can you imagine!?

Well that' it for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!

Giant Bots and Legs from Butts.

So here's a pile of loot from last fall or early last winter, sometime shortly after Thanksgiving, from a trip to the Brewer, ME store. It's a nice haul, and it's waited a while to finally be seen. So let's dig in! 

Right off the bat, I am ALWAYS on the lookout for these Napa Valley CD cases, because they so perfectly work as little knick-knack shelves to display toys in. So bringing home my THIRD case was pretty exciting. All of these are on my desk, facing me, so I make sure to put all my very favorite toys on them so I can look at them all the time.

I brought home a pretty big grab-bag too, so let's see what's inside.

Here are the contents, all piled together, and as you can see, there was a pretty diverse collection of good trapped in this bag, waiting to be set free.

First up a couple of Animaniacs toys. I like Animaniacs toys, don't get me wrong... but I'm not a huge fan of those weird, plastic accordion tubes that are holding these together. They're weird, and as a kid, any toys that had them attached would ALWAYS get stretched out too far and destroyed. So as much as I like the characters, I passed these along to a new home.

These are from 1993's "Makin' Movies" Happy Meal toy line. They weren't a licensed property, so this was just one of those McDonald brand sets of toys that I absolutely ADORE. I missed these as a kid, mainly (probably) due to the fact that I was 15 when these came out and was past caring about Happy Meal toys (for a while). But I can love them now. I do love them NOW.

There were four... FOUR of these Dr. Robotnik (or Dr. Eggman or whatever) Burger King toys in the bag. That is all I have to say about that, really.

These are quite possibly my two favorite items from the bag. The first one is "Rhino" (no not "Rhinox" apparently...) and despite not being even a LITTLE BIT of a a fan of Beast Wars Transformers, I have a ridiculous affection for all of the Happy Meal Beast Wars Transformers toys. It's true! I currently own three of them, and I have no idea who the heck they are, but they are all so impossibly awkward in their design that I can't help but love the ever-loving HECK out of them. THIS ROBOT SPROUTS ITS LEGS OUT THE BUTT OF A RHINOCEROS. Your argument is belong to us.

Ace Ventura: Beast Wars Edition

Beside that beautiful and artfully designed Transformer, I also found a Z-Bot in the bag! This fellow's name is Buzzsaw, and he is yet another one of the Z-Bots from Burger King, in other words: one of the 5 Z-Bots ever produced that I am actually interested in owning. (I have Turbine, Jawbreaker, Skyviper, and Buzzsaw here. I only need Bugeye to complete the quintet).

I so completely remember the first half of this commercial (before the Z-Bots are introduced)... it's downright creepy. 

Creepy Pocahontas head in a basket, like some weird Disney Native American version of SE7EN, and Phoebus from the Hunchback. The random Disney characters Happy Meal toys portion of our program is now complete.

Another HUGE highlight of the bag is this little guy right here. This is Doodle Bug. He's from the Glo Friends line that accompanied the Glo Worm line of toys, who all additionally starred in a cartoon. I used to have a Glo Worm. The original. The long green Mr. Hanky shaped toy from the 80's.

The guy on the... ri-- no the left. The guy on the left.

I LOVED MY GLO WORM. So much in fact that I was constantly running through batteries and in need of another glo-fix. It got bad man. But I got help. And now I'm the man I am today and I am not defined by my Glo-diction. Except now here's Doodle Bug. 

And I'm back to square one. 

I am a sucker for these wooden push-puppet toy things, especially when they are holiday themed. I didn't notice when I took the picture, but the black thing on its underarm is not a weird mole that needs attention. It's actually a crow that should have been flipped up the other way so it would be facing us.

Now for the books!

A couple of nice Thanksgiving themed books to read to my kids when the holiday rolls around.

I picked up this copy of Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron specifically for the cover art. It is amazing. That's part of what convinced me to pick up Adventures in Time and Space as well, because I liked the cover art so much... but I also hope that one's a good read as well. I already know the Black Cauldron is a good read, as this is like... the 3rd copy I now own, and I've read it almost as many times.

These were both nice surprises. I have a long-time love of Garfield because of my childhood association with it. So finding a copy of the very first collection of Garfield strips was a must-have. The Batman digest is nice because if you flip it over, there's a Superman comic book on the other side! These are both done in the style of their respective animated TV serieses as well.

How can you lose when it's a Bugs Bunny Little Golden Book? You can't. That's how.

I never knew that the Iron Giant was a book by Ted Hughes and Dirk Zimmer before becoming one of my favorite animated films of all time.

However, the book has a MUCH different skew to it than the movie did. I much prefer the movie, I must say, but this is an interesting story too, In the book there is a monster that is giant even when compared to the Iron Giant. So there's that to deal with.

Finally, I found a couple of cassettes. These are some excellent, EXCELLENT cassettes to have found. Joe Cocker is f**king amazing. He just is. If you don't think so then you listen to music wrong. And the Eric Clapton edition of Unplugged is easily on of the best sessions to ever come out of the "Unplugged" concept. So... I was pretty happy to have found these.

Well! That was quite the journey, but we got through it together, and now it is time to rest our weary heads. So... that's all there is for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies. So, until that time Happy Hunting!

Another Trip to the Old Schoolhouse Antique Mall

There's an antique mall out in Brewer, ME that I've only dropped in on a couple of times now, and this post to follow reflects the second visit I've made out there. It's a fun place to check out once in awhile, as the stock doesn't really change frequently enough for me to make the trip out there more than maybe once or twice a year. But when I do, man the finds are fun! 

Here's a quick glimpse at everything I brought home from The Old Schoolhouse. But let's take a closer look, shall we?

First up, I already had a capeless version of this same Shadow action figure. But since this one HAS the cape, I couldn't pass it up, This is pretty much the one action figure from the line put out to support the 1994 Alec Baldwin film that actually just looks like the character without any weird bells or whistles. Would I love it if I had the pistols that go along with this shadowy hero? Yes I would. But at least now I have an action figure that represents the character as he should look.

This Miss Piggy in repose is a Benjamina Gunn Muppets Treasure Island Happy Meal toy from 1996. I love the look of this toy, and the colors are amazing. So far I have Piggy and Fozzie from this set, and I honestly wouldn't mind tracking down the rest. I made the mistake of finding and passing over a Gonzo toy from this same line about a year before this, and have been kicking myself ever since!

This little Green fellow is an "Outer Terrestrial Creature" toy produced by Marty Toys back in 1983. This guys name is "Mooky" and on top of being a bendy toy, he's preternaturally top-heavy due to a special "Somersault Action" that these toys had, which basically meant that if you toppled them over, they flipped. I absolutely ADORE weird old toy lines like the one Mooky here comes from. It's precisely these kinds of discoveries that keep me picking through old junk as a hobby.

This might not strike you as ridiculously exciting... but for me, finding this 1996 Burger King wind-up "Scud" toy from the original Toy Story movie was a dream come true. I've been eye-balling these things on eBay for years now, and all because I wanted a Scud toy of an approximately appropriate scale to display with my Toy Story Buddies collection:

And this Scud fits the bill perfectly. (P.S. If anyone has an extra Etch-a-Sketch with Chickenman, Snake-and-Robot 2-pack, or any mini toys of the mutant toys from the first film... contact me. There's only like 5 toys left that I want or need to finish this collection off).

I used to religiously track down the M&M tubes every Christmas JUST for the ornaments on top. I don't do it anymore because they don't really make them either a.) new every year... they just recucle old designs repeatedly... or b.) they don't make them at all. Couldn't spot any M&M ornament tubes at ALL this past year... -sob-. So finding this little brown M&M skier really made my day!!! I feel like the brown M&M's are seriously underrepresented in toy/ornament form, since the reds and yellows and greens are so much more festive... so this guy really stands out!

I am now 1/6th closer to having a complete set of Fisher Price Little People to represent each of the Village people. I could literally NOT be more excited than I am about this fact. Look at this guy! I apologize if this toy is seen as horrifically racist. I really do. But it came from a time when toys like this were beloved.

And I belove him.

Please don't hate me.

I am not afraid to admit that I adore Marge Simpson. Probably to an inappropriate degree. And disturbingly, there is a whole LOT of inappropriate material out there on the internet (please, for the love of all that is good... do NOT Google it, as some of it will just make you lose faith in humanity) to support a man with my kind of carnal cartoon lust. Fortunately, I don't need to go looking because my collection of Marge Simpsons toys is growing healthily, (can the jokes you pervs) thank you very much. I now proudly own two of the toys from this, the very first line of Burger King Kids Club premiums to feature the Simpsons.

There was also a handful of fun books to be had while I was picking around the Old Schoolhouse too! This Bugs Bunny's Adventures copyrighted from 1948 is practically an illustrated chapter book. I picked this up with a friend in mind.

I will never not buy illustrated adaptations of Garfield TV specials. This one is from Garfield On the Town, which was the second special to star Garfield. In this one, he meets his mother and the rest of his extended family, and learns to be (somewhat) thankful for the life he leads with Jon and Odie. If this was being produced today, you wouldn't see the cigarette butts on the ground near Garfield's feet. Just a random observation.

Have I mentioned my undying love for Punky Brewster on this blog before? I think I have. So finding a kids' book dedicated to one of her animated adventures (with Glomer in the mix!) would obviously be a Holy Grail for me. So I brought it home. 

So that's it for tonight kids, but I'll be back soon with Geeky Goodwill Goodies before you know it! Until then, Happy Hunting!