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!

League Post: Shelf Expression!!!

It's once more League of Extraordinary Bloggers time again!!! And what pray tell is our topic this week you may ask? Well ask and I shall answer!!!

It's pretty cut and dry this time around kids, Brian occasionally sets photography challenges for those of us that blog for the League, and this week I wanted to encapsulate my ENTIRE collector's sensibilities in one arranged shelf photograph. So of course I went with a 4-tiered knick-knack shelf. Take a look:

I'm hard pressed to find a property that I enjoy not somehow represented here. Sift through this chaotic mess and you will find shreds of my childhood mixed with things beloved by my inner child of today. Cartoons, advertising mascots, comic book characters, horror icons, and toys just for the sake of toys are all included in this menagerie. I took this one all-in-one-shot shot but I also took break down shots of each individual shelf in the 4 levels of my brain right here in display. Thought about talking all of this to DEATH... but I think I'll just let all of the images speak for themselves from here on out. 

Let's take a peak-see at some of the other League members' Shelf-Expression, shall we?

- Nerdy Life of Mine

- Revenge of the Toy Box

- Cool & Collected

- Stunt Zombie

- Erik Johnson Illustrator

- Midnight Monster Spookshow

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

Goodwill Cave Feature: The Curio Shelf

Lately, I've been meeting interesting people all OVER the internet, and I've been discovering a lot of awesome new blogs because of it. So when I was contacted here on Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks by one Laura Huey, I set about exploring her blog, boobobby.blogspot.com a little bit at a time. She only started blogging a little over a year ago (like me!) and went through a move shortly after (also like me!) so we get to see this transition on her blog. She has three kids (me too!) and loves showing off her thrift discoveries (ahem, me again!) on her blog. 

Laura Huey's "girl-ified" house shelf

She recently showed off a curio shelf she picked up second-hand, repainted, and filled with kitschy goodness. I just loved it. So I told her I had a curio shelf in my cave that I had filled with stuff in a similar way. I THOUGHT I had done a whole post about that shelf on here already. Turns out I only gave you a glimpse of it back when I first showed off the Goodwill Geek Cave back when I finally got it decorated the way I like a while back:

This is what it looked like then. Looking at it recently, I didn't like the looks of it anymore. It was just too cluttered. With Laura's awesome post fresh in my mind, I wanted to feature this shelf on the blog, so I tried to de-clutter it a bit. I half succeeded. Here's what it looks like right now: 

Before, there was so much stuff crammed into every square that you couldn't really see anything. I removed ANYTHING I wasn't immediately charmed by. I made a pile of stuff to remove, and a pile of stuff that would go back on the shelf. Then I picked a few new things that would look good up there now as well. This is still my homage to the kinds of toys that get lost at the bottom of the toy box. The stuff that get's scooped up in handfuls and donated to Goodwill (or worse THROWN AWAY) that people vaguely remember as those cheap but cool little doo-dads they had when they were kids. This is my paean to those toys. 

 Let's start with the very tippy-top shall we? We've got all kinds of plastic figure goodies up here! There's some spacemen I'm pretty sure are vintage, and some neon plastic dogs that I have NO information about whatsoever. A pirate and a skeleton warrior I found at Goodwill... and the best items up here: The Z.O.M.B.I.E. figures from October Toys (I picked these up at a local music/movie/game store called Bull Moose Music, where they just have a big dish of them by the register) and the Scooby-Doo plastic figures which are actually game pieces from some Scooby Doo board game I also found at Goodwill. 

This is my favorite corner of the whole shelf. There's a bunch of little rubber finger-puppet guys, and almost everything is monster themed in some way. The top right four squares, with the blue aliens, devils, clowns, and dapper monsters are some of my absolute favorite little toys of all time. 

The top left corner of the curio shelf is not without it's cool details. Plastic knights, plastic cowboys, a fez monkey, a cyclops surfer dude... these are all awesome in their own way. I think one of the best little toys in this corner is the little red camel with the canopy on its back. I don't know where he came from originally, but I do love him so. 

These are the middle two rows of the shelf, separating the corners I've just shown you from the top, and the bottom corners I'll show you next. There's some really great stuff in here. I have a square dedicated to giant reptiles, some vintage dinosaur erasers, wrestlers! and much more. The pink flamingo and the guy playing guitar are two of my favorite mini guys here. The gray astronaut being confronted by a yellow squid-like alien also floats my boat. Plus giant rubber ant!

Got a handful of deceptively girly items sprinkled through this corner. You can see a kitten in a Santa's hat, and a pink bunny. These are there to honor the holidays I feel they represent. I'm actually referring to the mouse in the pink dress and the flower fairy in the bottom left corner there. These used to belong to my daughter when she was little, and I always think of her when I see them. Among the crowd here you'll also see a pair of goofy old kangaroos getting ready to duel, a teddy bear ice-skating past a hungry tiger, a whole troop of fire fighters, rubber fish, and a set of red prehistoric creatures all together (I'm counting the crab because I know there were crabs back then... and it's my shelf, so I do what I want.)

Finally the last corner of the shelf holds my little purple afroed car washers, my suckling pigs (oh no! one piglet has wandered off!), my monkey themed square, my plastic divers-themed square, and my Halloween square. That little pumpkin you see next to the finger puppet is a cool little tin ring lacquered orange and black and it is AWESOME. Other stuff as you can tell is just sort of randomly wherever. Why Mr. Peanut is standing next to that little orange Asian kid I don't know. Why a mermaid is basking in the glow of a orange scorpion I'll never figure out.

A LOT of this stuff was picked up in grab-bags and sealed LEGO bins at Goodwill. Goodwill Geek Tip #394: ALWAYS buy the taped up tubs full of LEGOs. There is always a crap-ton of other stuff in them as well. Little plastic soldiers, Hotwheels cars, anything. They're almost never just LEGOs. It's like opening the Arc of the Covenant without getting your face melted off.

I want to thank Laura Huey for inspiring this post! She really has a great blog, over at boobobby.blogspot.com and great taste in general. She blogs about more than just what she collects, which is great. It's not all just about the vintage Raggedy Ann accouterments and 70's style owls.

There is... a like crazy-a** number of owls though.
But who am I to judge?

She blogs about her family, her beliefs, her friends, her conflicts... she's a well-rounded renaissance blogger.

Laura Huey plus kids, from the Boo Bobby blog.

With that said however, I want to take some time to point out some of the cooler posts she's written, dedicated specifically to her collecting: 

- In this one she shows off some of the incredible pieces she's collected and has on display in her bedroom.

- This post features a ton of vintage goodies that she displays out on the built-in shelves in her home. You need to see some of this stuff!

- This one showcases Laura's awesome ability to take old kitschy items and decorate a kids room with them in a way that makes them look new and fresh. Some of this stuff I wouldn't look twice at if I saw it at Goodwill. Seeing it up in Laura's daughter's room makes it look fashionable and cool.

- In this haul post, Laura shows off some thrifty finds. For every kitchen rooster or canning supply she picked up there was a Never-Endng story on VHS or an old Jack-in-the-box. I have no idea what's going on with the baby-limbs in the seashell... just go see for yourself.

That's it for me tonight folks! I'll be back in a while to show off some Geeky Goodwill Goodness. Until then, Happy Hunting (and check out Laura's blog!)