Cyborg, Beatniks, and Blood

Again with the books and grab-bag magic! This one comes with yet another Imperial monster toy as well! I could keep talking and talking and talking and... well, you get the idea, but instead let's take a look at what I brought home this time, shall we? 

Trotting right out to the front we have this Imperial beauty which, after a little bit of research turns out to be their idea of a Pegasus... but I call bulls--t and say this thing is a Jersey Devil!!! It's meant to stand on its back-legs with the tail propping it up, but when I found it, it was broken off, and so had to be super-glued back into place. I was lucky to even find the tail if we're being honest. Usually that stuff is nowhere to be found, and alas, that would have precluded me buying this guy at that point. But here we are dear reader! Tail glued firmly back in place, this guy looks downright MAJESTIC posed with the rest of my Imperial toys in the cave.

Now let's pick through that grab-bag. HEre are the total contents. We will NOT be going over the entire contents, as there were only a handful of things I even wanted. There was a ridiculous overabundance of Night at the Museum knight/top toys from Wendy's (oh how the mighty have fallen...) and though I don't feature it here, I did end up keeping the Easter Bunny toy because there is a disturbing lack or representation for the Easter Bunny here in the cave. But let's look at the other stuff now:

First, flying out of the DCU animated television universe, we have a "Beware the Batman" Happy Meal toy and a "Teen Titans Go!" Cyborg toy. Both of these dudes were judged "worthy" of positions on the Batman/DCU shelves, even if Cyborg is missing his projectile fist.

Let's be honest. The reason I bought the grab-bag was for Maxwell the pig here. He's one of the apparently hundreds of spokes-things for Geico insurance. He's somewhat lost his charm as they've begun to overuse him... but back when he first appeared in the "Wheee! Wheee! All the way home." ad... he was HILARIOUS:

"MAXWELL!"

And what I originally took to be some sort of bootleg Sesame Street merchandise (Can you tell me how to get to "Sesame Place?") actually turned out to be merchandise from a Sesame Street THEME PARK that I had previously not been aware of. Sesame Place is my Graceland folks. 

I also found these, which I found fascinating, in the cassette section. "The Beat Generation" vols. 1 & 3 (I did end up finding vol. 2 on another day). Thee include everything from readings from books, songs, and interviews that have to do with the Beat movement. Artists include Kerouac, Burroughs, Gilespie, and more. This is one of those situations that I genuinely regret not actually owning a tape-player to play this stuff on.

More cassettes include "Captain & Tennille's Greatest Hits", and "Creedence Clearwater Revival". I'm a sucker for music from the late 60's-70's.

To kick off my book finds from this particular trip, we have the horror anthology, Psychos which I promptly added to the Halloween read pile for this fall... and Tales of the Cthulu Mythos which is really interesting to me because it is an anthology containing not only H.P. Lovecraft's tales, but stories from other writers who have borrowed Lovecraft's concepts for their own, building on them.

I found an extra copy of Spaceballs: The Book and the strangely appropriate companion volume of Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters which is a Star Wars anthology of EU fiction that I just couldn't pass up. I've mentioned my disinterest in most Star Wars EU stuff here in the past, but The Mos Eisley Cantina, Han Solo, and Lando Calrissian have all made me contradict that in the past, and no so have the Bounty Hunters.

I found these novelisations of Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge and almost peed a little. My friend Miss M over at the Diary of a Dorkette blog (and podcasting companion on both Geek Fallout and Eclectic Mayhem) is a big fan of all things Jaws, and that interest has infected me as well. Her favorite was Jaws 3 and I was disappointed not to find that particular volume... but still. 2 Jaws books are pretty great. But I have to be honest... I was even MORE excited to find the NEXT two novelizations:

Gremlins and The Return of Swamp Thing!!! Again, potential urination threatened. And Peter David wrote the Swamp Thing one!!! Can I just say how much I adore the Swamp Thing live-action costume? Man that thing is gnarly, both literally and figuratively.

So that's it kiddos! Between that Jersey Devil toy, the Geico-pig toy, and those kick-ass novelizations, I was pretty pumped to bring home this particular haul!

I will be back (hopefully sooner rather than later...) to share more Geeky Goodwill Goodies with all y'all! Until then, Happy Hunting!

Quick Stop: Books!!!

On the way home from a trip I recently took, I took a few minutes out to do a Quick-Stop at the Bangor, ME Goodwill. I didn't find much of anything for toys (except one grab-bag, shown at the end of this entry) but I did find a pile of books. There's always books. But I was pretty excited about some of the finds in this particular crop. 

First up is the novelization of Back to the Future. Paxton Holley of Cavalcade of Awesome and Nerd Lunch fame is a huge BttF fan, and is always talking about novelizations and how they can expand on the scripts of movies. So, even though I'm not usually a huge novelization fan, whenever I see one for a cool 80's movie I pick them up now. If I don't end up reading some of them, I still find them to be cool pop-culture artifacts. This revered piece of pop-culture ephemera cost me .99 cents. 

I can NOT pass up vintage CYOA books when I find them. After all, I'm the star of the story! .99 cents for this one. This one is from 1985, and the sequel to the earlier The Cave of Time. 

A few quick notes here, The Saggy Baggy Elephant I picked up for the cover only. The interior is destroyed. It's missing pages, and is horribly defaced. No one's going to buy this thing as a collector's item. But the back cover and the spine are just beautiful (now kicking myself for not taking a shot to show this...). This is from back when you could buy a LGB for .25 cents new. The Crispy book is not a genuine foil-spine LGB (it's a paperback with a printed-on spine) but it's cool. It was a free give-away with Crispy Critters cereal back in the 80's. The Gingerbread Man was in good shape and looks pretty nice and old. I like the illustrations and the overall look and feel of the book. All three were .99 cents apiece. 

I paid 1.99 for this collection of Jack Kerouac's books. I've never read anything by Kerouac, but have been planning to read On the Road for years now. Finding a nice cheap collection in a nice, hefty book like this was a really cool surprise. 

They had what looked like an entire set of these Time/Life Mysteries of the Unknown books, but to be honest, these were the only three I wanted out of the lot. I already found the UFO book back in October last year, so this brings my collection to a close. I didn't really want the books on Alchemy and Astral Projection, although I think there was another book in the set about ESP (which I did not see there, come to think of it) that I may look for in the future. For now, Phantom Encounters, Mysterious Creatures, Hauntings, and the UFO Phenomena will be all I own. These books are not as... useful/informative (I guess?) as the Enchanted World series books, but they sure are fun.

I pretty much vowed to never spend 2 bucks on single issues at Goodwill back when I picked up the Nestle Quik Bunny comic book a while back... But then I saw a HUGE pile of old comic books and I just couldn't resist. I shouldn't have even flipped through the stack. I realize these are all probably quarter-bin finds somewhere else, but the idea that I'd never find some of these issues again was too much to bear, so I did it. I paid 1.99 for each of these 8 comic books. The first one is an issue of Marvel Comics Presents, which is an old Marvel Anthology comic that I genuinely loved back when it was being published. It contains 4 stories starring 4 different Marvel characters, and many of them are serials that run throughout 8 to 12 issues until the story wraps up. This one features continuing stories for Colossus and Man-Thing, and self-contained stories for Ant-Man and Slag, from the Wolf-Pack. The issue of Daredevil takes place near the beginning of the X-Men Inferno crossover that affected so many other titles. Daredevil really went whole-hog with the demonic-city stuff, and this awesome issue features Black Widow in a prominent role fighting possessed city fixtures, while DD spends most of the time out of commission. 

I've never seen the Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension, but this 2-part adaptation was too cool to pass up. Ugh, I'm weak. And the Inhumanoids comic was a no-brainer for any child of the 80's. So cool.

The truly awesome comic find for me was this threesome of Ralph Snart comic books. If you've never read Ralph Snart before... don't bother trying it now. It's the worst kind of low-brow crass humor, and without the wry intelligence of an episode of Beavis and Butthead. But I read the HELL out of this comic when I was a kid, and to find some old issues of the series was an awesome surprise for me. I honestly can't believe my mother let me read it, seeing all of the HEAVY beer drinking references, sex references, and to be honest, HORRIBLE spelling and grammar typos. 

This giant book of pulp crime stories was impossible to pass up for 1.99. I am salivating while I think of reading it. LOOK at that cover art. 

And finally, there was this .99 cent grab-bag full of Peter Pan toys. I really just spent the .99 cents on the Tick-Tock Crocodile head emerging from the water... but thrown in were the Captain Hook and Peter Pan Figures, and the other Crocodile, which is technically a Peter-Pan toy, just not a Disney one. It's from the 2003 Peter Pan film out of Columbia pictures. 

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