A Sebastian the Crab Christmas Ornament from 1989! I paid 1.99 for this little guy, and he came with original box.
This was put out by McDonalds the same year the movie came out. The Little Mermaid was the movie credited with starting Disney's animation "renaissance" and Ariel the Mermaid was hella hot (to 11 year old me) and I had a huge crush on her. I was aware she was a cartoon at the time... yes. This did not matter to me at the time. I realize now of course that things probably wouldn't have worked out between us.
I have no idea why the image with this song is a picture of Baloo's ass in his grass skirt (I see a little crack there, right? I'm not imagining that?) but here is a version of Deck the Halls sung by Sebastian the Crab.
I'll be back with more Ever-Green Goodwill Goodies soon... so until then, Holly-Jolly Hunting!
I'm always excited about Christmas books, and kid's books in general, so expect to see some books featured here before the month is out.
The first one I'm featuring is The Vampire Who Came For Christmas from Apple books, by Dian Curtis Regan. I haven't read this one yet, but I look forward to it... as it looks 100% ridiculous. Ben discovers there's a vampire hiding out in the attic of the house he and his family have just moved into. Turns out Zander is a friendly vampire from Multiveinia, a member of V.A.M.P. (Vampires Against the Mutilation of People) in hiding from the Vampire King (The Big Guy, who's very name would cause you to melt into a puddle if you heard it, he's because he's that powerful) because he's gone good. Scary Christmas indeed!
I picked this up for .99 cents, and it looks like the kind of awesome book you'd expect from 1993, and from an author who's other works include My Zombie Valentine. Most of the chapters have titles like: "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Horror", Silent Night, Scary Night", and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Curtains". So pretty much awful. I can't wait!
In another bit of non-holiday related business, Eric Stettmeier over at Toyriffic did a post on the awesome retro rereleased Tim Mee Caveman figures and Battle Mountain playset. I remarked that I had a version of that same playset in red plastic that I found at Goodwill a few months back, and he said he's like to see it. So... here it is Eric!
If you look carefully at the base of the playset, there is a red tab that sticks down just under the big cave mouth that keeps mine from sitting flush on a flat surface... almost like it's supposed to click into a larger base or something. Anyone know what this tab might be for? I notice the reproduction in Eric's post does not have the same tab.
Anyway, that's it for today! I'll be back soon with more Never-Grinchy Goodwill Goodies... so until then Holly-Jolly Hunting!
Every week, the members of the League of Extraordinary Bloggers all join in on blogging about the same topic, and spend some time checking out and sharing each other's posts. It's all great fun, and this week, we have an appropriately festive topic:
Merry Geekmas! Write or photograph something festive and pop culture oriented.
Which.. c'mon... that's a pretty broad topic, right? I could fit just about ANYTHING in here now... but my original post for today was going to be a bit simpler, a bit more modest in scope... and I just don't feel like the League deserves that. So instead I decided to go with:
Homemade* ornaments! I'll be featuring a handful of ornaments that I put together myself for the tree that reflect my family's love of pop-culture!
* Homemade suggests a certain amount of arts and crafts on my part. Today you will see that when I say "homemade" I really mean "I glued something to it, and put a hook-eye in its head with some festive string to hang it."
So first up we have the Green Lantern! My middle son and I like watching this show together, and since this Happy Meal toy of Hal Jordan looks like he's using his power ring to create a little Christmas tree, it was a no-brainer! I hung a little green star off the side, poked a hook-eye in the top of the "tree" and voila! Christmas ornament! My son got to hang this one up this year, and he was so excited to have Green Lantern on the tree!
A Christmas Tin featuring the Planter's Mascot, Mr. Peanut! Normally, I wouldn't go out of my way to buy decorative tins with Christmas decorations... except... this has the hilarious new version of Mr. Peanut on it, voiced by Robert Downey Jr. Looking around the edges of the tin, you see all of the animal characters from the commercials, and of course, there on the top are his new sidekick/servant Benson and his nemesis/frenemy, Richard the Nutcracker, who goes all zombie-bitey whenever Mr. Peanut's around.
Mr. Peanut as voiced by RDj, and with his new image and personality have had his detractors of course, but I find him hilarious and charming, and just what the brand needed. I'm of course a fan of advertising mascots, and so when it comes to Planters... I like what they've done with the place (and face).
These images, are all pilfered from internet... though I think I pilfered them from pilferers, so I'm not sure who to credit.
I see they've got a new tin out for 2012 in stores now, but I find it much less interesting to look at, and so won't be going out of my way to purchase one. I picked this one up for .99 cents, and will be festively displaying it with the other Christmas decorations this year.
2012 Tin. Couldn't find any images without the card board wrapper.
And just in case your head is encased in wax and you haven't actually seen any of the new spots:
In this next one, meet Alejandro: This is where the brand goes a little more to the California Raisins end of the spectrum... which I don't hate.
Introducing Peanut Butter Doug:
And Mr. Peanut in the annual Tree Athalon.
UPDATE TO ADD: There's MORE... and it gets even awesomer! Try some action adventure:
And to finish: Mr. Peanut sings the Christmas Song:
I'll be back with more Goodwill (toward men) Goodies... so until then Happy Holiday Hunting! (Better, but not best... yet).
P.S. I edited to change the countdown to 23 days. I will NOT be posting on Christmas Eve. So... Christmas Eve Eve will have to suffice.
So yes... I'm attempting another Holiday Countdown... after the last one nearly killed me. NEARLY KILLED ME.
But I'm keeping this one simple. I'm going to feature one something every day, write a little about it, and move on with my life. I may still be posting other stuff as well, but as for my Christmas Countdown... that's it. They won't even all necessarily be things that I've bought at Goodwill. I am just playing it THAT fast and loose.
Here's the first item, which wins by the fact that I already have a photograph of it, and I don't have a ton to say about it.
Of course, you can see why I had to buy this item from Goodwill for .99 cents. It's the cowboy riding an ostrich from the Rankin & Bass "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" special, in bean-bag buddy form. He's beautiful.
Merry December! I'll be back with more Goodwill Greetings soon, so Holly Hunting! (Still working on the modified tag-line for December... because that... was crap. And the redress for the site is coming. Sigh.)
For sooo long I've been waiting to have a nice space to sit in and admire my bizarre assortment of things. And my wife has been waiting for the same amount of time, because it means my action figures won't be staining the atmosphere of the rest of our home. I've been waiting, and waiting... and now it's finally here!!! The day when I finally draw back the veil and reveal to you the Great Goodwill Geek Cave of Awesomeness!!! Okay, so really it's just the room where I keep all my crap out of everyone else's way... but it's all mine, and it's where I keep the things that I look at to make me feel sane in this world of stress and work and mortgage payments, etc. etc. It was one of my goals in moving to not only have separate rooms for the kids, and a big bedroom for my wife and I... but for my wife and I to also have our own separate spaces to do our own things. So she got a craft room and I got... this:
Here are two wide shots of the room, from one end to the other. Be careful... look too long and blindness due to the sheer, unadulterated awesome radiating from these images may occur. This top shot shows off the 'library' portion of the room (or at least most of it...) and about 85% of my current toy collection.
This bottom shows off the "office" portion of the room, with a few (okay a metric ton) more books and toys on display. What is not pictured is the huge, piled collection of boxes containing hidden Christmas toys for the kids that I had to keep moving so they wouldn't be in these pictures, or the pictures to follow.
See more close-up shots of the cave after the jump!
Well, it's funny, because I was actually just working on some pictures of the new Geek Cave since it is OFFICIALLY FINISHED and ready to be revealed... so it just so happens I have some shot of a shelf or two... but instead of tossing in pictures of every shelf in my cave today, I thought I'd just give you a taste.
So here it is:
Click it. You know you want to.
Go on. Do it. Click it hard.
Yeah...
What you're looking at is probably the worst picture of anything ever, but it's a huge cross-section of geekdom out on proud display. You'll see everything fro naked mole rats to ironic superheroes like the Tick and Darkwing... to Duff Beer and Pixar All-Stars... to robots galore, cuddly aliens, muppets, and video game villains. Oh... and of course the books.
Here's a bonus shelf for those of you who'd like to see one more (I'm just so excited to show off the Cave, honestly...)
This one is almost as bizarrely varied... what with the Star Wars Galactic Heroes, Californian Raisins, Action League GL Corps, and Halloween characters all proudly keeping each others' companies. This is technically a shot of the back of my desk, but there are little shelves there, so I'm totally counting this.
I'll be doing a full-fledged reveal of the new Cave in all its entirety in the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled!
Now see what the shelves of the other Leaguers have in store:
- Hobgoblin of the Monster Cafe shows off a few different shelf-fulls of excellent toys!
- Brother Midnight is BACK! And over and Green Plastic Squirt Gun, he's showing off a shelf from his misty history.
- Over at That Figures, we get a glimpse at a stunning glass case with one of my favorites: Marvel Superheroes!!!
- Random Nerdiness is all about the Masters of the Universe, and is a book collector after my own heart!
- Meanwhile, Reis over at the Lair of the Dork Horde has me green with envy over his sweet Funko figures... especially the McDonald-Land figures!
I'll be back with more Goodwill Goodies soon! Until then, Happy Hunting!
More content coming up soon. Prep and recovery for and from Thanksgiving is taking longer (not to mention a stomach flu working its way through the family).
In the meantime, I am trying desperately not to become this guy:
I'll be back soon with more Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!
With Thanksgiving coming, I thought I'd mention that I am thankful for a great many things:
My new home, my three beautiful kids, and my wonderful wife.
I'm thankful that I'm in a relationship with someone who may not always understands why I'm obsessed with the things I'm obsessed with... but cares about me being happy in my obsessions. With that in mind, she may not see the point in spending money on the things I spend money on... but that doesn't mean she won't spend money on things (she doesn't see the point of)... if they make me happy.
With that said... my birthday was in October. I didn't talk it up because I really wanted to focus on the Halloween Countdown... but now that's over, and I've been dying to blog about my birthday gifts.
There was a trip to Goodwill in Bangor as a part of my birthday OF COURSE. We also hit Target and Toys R Us, and there were a handful of self-bough birthday gifts I picked up for myself in the course of the day, including this :
First up my trip to Goodwill turned up this awesome find of a silo filled with Fisher Price Little People farm toys for .99 cents!!! You'll notice I took the picture on a Halloween background because I was considering sharing this post as a part of my countdown, and then changed my mind. I was sooo excited to find these toys, as I now have some people, animals, and accessories to display with the Farmhouse I fixed up.
See even more great Birthday finds...
And see how I tenuously tie this post to Thanksgiving after the jump!
So what story would I give the What if...? treatment to? I kept thinking, and I kept thinking... and one story kept springing to mind. It's a story that I would have gladly rewritten myself if given the chance:
But honestly starting to write, I think I just kept trying to fix all the problems I had with LOST, instead of exploring any unexplored avenues of storytelling. And WOOF were there some problems to fix. So... never mind. I want to have some fun, and explore some untapped storytelling. Like... What if the X-Men lost Inferno? So I'm losing LOST and I'm going for something more funtastic!
No idea why I felt it should take me two weeks to post about the stuff I bought last Payday Friday (Payday Friday came and went this weekend with NO trip to Goodwill... I'm slipping... but I did buy some stuff, and do some stuff, that I'll post about soon...) but this is the third and final installment detailing that trip to Goodwill.
First up is this Scooby-Doo Trick or Treat pail. I know it's not terribly remarkable, in and of itself, but it was the last one I needed to complete my set of 3 and I paid .99 cents for it instead of having to pay Happy Meal prices for it... and since it was the first one out in our area, I couldn't have gotten it any other way. So... I was pretty pleased to find it donated to Goodwill so soon after it was released.
All right back to the Payday Friday adventures!!! This is part two of a post I started back here. It was a mega payday Friday filled with two days and three stores. It was a wild bacchanalistic orgy of Goodwill shopping. Well, there's a sentence I bet you never thought you'd read...
As I mentioned last time, there was some last-minute Halloween shopping happening that day as well. Here's a little green Halloween Troll doll I found in a grab-bag with some other great stuff (shown after the jump). I don't usually care about Troll dolls one way or another... but this guy's okay. I think he's meant to be a Frankenstein's monster Troll... but he's also throwing off some major zombie vibes. He's the exact kind of balance between cute and Halloween-y that I tend to enjoy. The grab-bag he came out of cost me .99 cents, so any additional Troll reservations I may have had disappeared when I saw the additional contents of the bag.
I've been meaning to post about this for AGES but with the Halloween Countdown wrapping up, and so much other stuff going on, I kept having to put it off. But now it's time to shout it from the rooftops!
I am a Whedonite, pure and simple. The one Joss Whedon property I do not care for or about is Dollhouse, and I'll admit I never watched more than a couple episodes of it, so I could be totally off base. My love affair with almost all things Whedon began with Buffy, moved over to the occasional episode of Angel, knocked my socks off with Astonishing X-Men, broke my heart (in the good way) with Dr. Horrible, and later (much too much later) Firefly pistol-whipped me in the face and took a few teeth with it. Then of course The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods came along just to stop my heart and put the nails in the coffin.
So when Brian announced he had this stunningly gorgeous book: Firefly: A Celebration from Titan books (it is a collection of material from three different Titan books dedicated to the show) up for grabs, I knew I HAD to own it. And... now... thanks to Brian... I do.
Shaking off the post-Halloween doldrums has not been easy. But I've redressed the blog, and redressed my house, and redressed my spirit as well. I've decided to roll with the fact that Christmas EVERYTHING is out in stores now, before Thanksgiving is even really a thought on the wind.
But that doesn't mean I'm totally DONE with Halloween yet. I went out on Payday Friday, October 28th, and had my last hurrah picking through the swiftly disappearing Halloween merch in the shelf space already being taken over by Christmas items (I looked through the Christmas stuff too, because hey, I love Christmas when the season is actually HERE... and I have to prepare for my Christmas countdown, all right?) I considered saving what I picked up for next Halloween, but decided that seemed crazy.
And just to make sure things went down AWESOMELY... my Payday Friday extended into Saturday, with a trip into Bangor and Brewer to hit those Goodwill stores as well. So this is a 3 store haul y'all. But that also means that I'm going to have to break the post up into a few different installments.
So let's stop standing around chatting about our feelings and get down to business, shall we?
First up here's this cute little Jack O' Lantern Jester who is now packed up with all my other Halloween decorations, but had a good 3 day run on the shelf before then. I love Jack O' Lanterns, and I love Jesters... so this really didn't have to fight too hard to jump into the basket. He was originally 1.99 but since all of the Halloween merchandise was half off, I got this little guy for 1.00.
So thanks to Daylight Savings time this morning I was up abnormally early for a Sunday morning. Actually both my almost-2-year-old and I were the first 2 up and my wife followed along shortly thanks to the clock change.
So we camped out on the couch and explored the myriad options of early morning cable viewing.
So, it's the penultimate post of my Halloween countdown, and I am just exhausted. Mentally, spiritually, physically, literally, figuratively, financially, socially, emotionally, and any other -ly... exhausted.
So things are going out with a bit more of a whimper than a bang. I'm featuring some horror DVDs that I've bought at Goodwill in the recent months. I paid 2.99 for each of them, and I am EXTREMELY satisfied with them. So sit back, pop some popcorn, and get ready to watch: a poorly written review by a barely coherent blogger about some second hand horror movies he bought at Goodwill. Good times.
So this weekend we carved our Jack O' Lanterns! We always tackle this as a family, and this year was no different.
Fall has come to the Goodwill Geek's house, and those poor, unsuspecting pumpkins were just hanging out on the porch, innocent to the horrors that awaited them.
I've been sitting on this post, and wanting to do it since I started the blog. How I managed to make myself wait for the Halloween Countdown, I'll never know. But here we go!
I have only ever made one purchase on the online Goodwill site. It is very similar to eBay in a lot of crummy ways, but the stuff on there feels like more of a treasure hunt because it's usually all posted in lots, and often the folks posting the lots have no idea what they've got their hands on. The shipping costs are ridiculous more often than not, but in this case I was willing to foot the bill as long as I could get the whole lot for a reasonable price. And... it turns out... I sort of did. I ended up spending just under 50 dollars for the following items: The image above should be a bit of a hint as to what this lot included. It was pretty great.
And I can think of few franchises from my childhood that would be more appropriate to feature in a Halloween themed post than: The Real Ghostbusters!
To continue my Halloween editions of everything I normally post here on the blog, I'm going to do an article on some graphic novels that I've picked up recently at Goodwill.
M by Jon J. Muth is an adaptation of Fritz Lang's movie. I haven't read this one yet, but it looks moody, atmospheric, and very well illustrated at a glance. I understand the story is about a serial murderer of children... and I've not seen the movie either... so it may be a while before I dig too deeply into this one. This is the only graphic novel on this list not actually bought at Goodwill. I got it at Mardens for .50 cents. A big, hardcover graphic novel based on a famous film... for .50 cents!
See 4 more that really ARE from Goodwill after the jump!
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