Stuff I Found While I Was Looking Where I Don't Usually Look

Gotta say, now that I'm past October-December, it is nice to go back over all of the stuff I found in the past few months and finally get a chance to write about them. Today's post is a pile of Goodwill loot that I found because I took a dive into a few sections of the store that I don't usually bother with (aaaand some stuff in the sections where I usually do... because I won't NOT look where I usually do too). 

First up, I found some great vinyl records: 

First up we have this incredible Mickey Mouse Disco record. I love this idea of Disco being represented by a bunch of the Disney characters back in the 70's. This album was put out in 1979 so really Disco was pretty much done by this point... but still.

Seeing Horace and Clarabelle cutting a rug here beside Chip n' Dale and Donald and Daisy warms the cockles of my heart to be sure. I have not bothered to search it, but I am curious to see if the version of "Chim Chim Cher-ee" included on this album is some sort of Disco remix (in which case... weird) or is simply included in its original form (in which case.. weirder... right?).

Now let's jump ahead to 1982 and get into a little Mousercise!!! As we saw with the Disco phenomena, Disney gladly jumped aboard the Jazzercise wagon.  Again though, with a song selection called "Tweedledee and Tweedledum" I have to beg the question if the song is the original from Alice in Wonderland, or a "jazzed up!" version.

I find it hilarious that there appear to be a pair of Silly Symphony bugs Mousercising at the bottom of the picture on the back.

When I come across a Sesame Street Album, I can't pass it up. It's just not in my DNA. And this one looks so familiar that I would ALMOST swear I owned it as a kid. I know I had some Sesame Street Albums.

Then there was this even older Sesame Street record with an included book. On the cover there you can see Mr. Hooper, and Matt Robinson as Gordon!

The book inside is in HORRIBLE condition, but here's one of the better page, depicting the lyrics for the song "Green" and shows an interaction between Kermit and Grover. I MISS the days when Kermit was a Sesame Street Muppet as well as a Muppet Show Muppet.

Here is a later Sesame Street Album "Sing the hit songs of Sesame Street" which features yet another Gordon, Hal Miller this time, on the cover! All-total, four different actors have portrayed Gordon on Sesame Street.

Finally there was "Merry Christmas Sesame Street" which I definitely had as a kid. I distinctly remember being SO disturbed by the gold beads in Bert's mouth.

Here's the interior of the gatefold cover. LOVE this spread! The illustrations are so great, and Roosevelt Franklin makes not one, but TWO appearances!

I also found this Playmobil Pirates Take-Along Dungeon. There were no pirates inside, but that's okay because I really just wanted it for:

These guys! You may recognize them from the League of Extraordinary Bloggers Post I did about pirates back in 2013... If not, you should click that link and give it a read, I give the complete background of these awesome pirate dudes there.

As per usual, I found a few kids' books as well. Here we have a book based on the 80's cartoon adaptation of the Littles, "The Little Winner" and Darkwing Duck's "Clean Money". 

"Safe All Day With the Happies" is a horrific book of consequences. I LOVE THIS.

Here's a picture of a kid falling down the stairs after playing on them. "The Happies do not like broken arms!" HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! 

Love it. 

I usually give the DVD section a cursory glance and then move on. There's usually not much there except for old copies of the third disc from a boxed set of Friends season seven box set... or "The Period of Purple Crying" informational dvds (look it up for yourself... but I see A LOT of these at Goodwill) but I was shocked to discover some stuff I actually wanted to buy in this section this time around! First up I found DVD copies of "The Dream Team" and "Mallrats" which had me VERY ecstatic! I don't know if you remember Dream Team, but that movie was once upon a time one of my very favorites. It made me think that crazy people could team up like superheroes and achieve ANYTHING. Mallrats is a Kevin Smith classic, and I haven't seen it pretty much since it came out. But I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

But wait! There's more! TV movie "Gargoyles" which looks like stupid, schlocky TV-PG horror at its finest! I will probably throw this on as a part of some sort of Horror marathon when Fall gets here. I also found the complete Third season of "The Batman" which I never watched even once when it was on, and don't own the first two seasons of... but you gotta start somewhere right?

...Right?

And finally, "Garfield and Friends: Behind the Scenes" which is a nice way for me to pay homage to the cartoon series from when I was a kid without actually having to buy the entire series on DVD. I loves me some animated Garfield all right!

Well that's it kids! It really paid off for me to check the records and DVDs with a bit more enthusiasm than I usually reserve for those sections because I found some pretty neat stuff! That's all I have to show off for tonight, but I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies, so until then: Happy Hunting!

Books and a Grab-Bag (More Than) Two Bits!

Hey there guys and gals! Today I'm just doing a little one. Focusing on one grab-bag and some books I picked up a while ago. 

Here's the obligatory "pile pic" so let's get digging in shall we?

A couple of lovely Halloween-themed Little Golden Books... which you can never have too many of! Here we have Scooby-Doo! The Haunted Carnival and Walt Disney's Mickey and Friends Haunted Halloween! Yes, Scrappy makes an appearance in the Scooby-Doo book... But I've decided finally that I do NOT hate Scrappy-Doo the way most of the population seems to. I never had a real problem with Scrappy. I think it's funny how much of a punchline he's become these days, sure... but I don't think he deserves all of the ire he seems to inspire. I have no real strong feelings about Mickey and Friends to share with you at this time. Sorry.

This is quite possibly the most exciting itme I picked up at Goodwill on this particular trip. A "Hawaii Five-O" novel Top Secret! No idea if I will EVER read this book, but look at how GORGEOUS IT IS. Hawaiian Crime is better than ANY other crime. Because it's prettier.

Here are the contents of the grab-bag. Pretty junky as you can see, but I picked it up for .99 cents specifically for one item and one item alone. (Not the Spongebob, I already had that one...) There's a bunch of this junk you're not even going to get a closer look at... and I apologize in advance if that's really what you find disappointing about this post.

Nope, not this army of plastic bugs... though they are pretty sweet.

Nope. Not this AWESOME bubble watch with a dinosaur floating around in what is undoubtedly "dino-brine" as we watch a chuckling crowd of dinosaurs in the background certainly awaiting their extinction level event to erupt. (My fingers. They are wrinkly.)

Not... this stuff... either. (Although Star Wars slinky? I ain't complainin'!)

It was this cold-hearted bastard that I was after!!! Mr. Freeze from the LEGO Batman Happy Meal toy line! Doesn't he look just exquisite? I LOVE him! Totally worth the .99 cents just on his own, nevermind the other tchotchkes in the bag! Not bad for a little quicky post huh!?

That's really it kids! All I've got for now anyway! I'l be back soon enough with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies though! So until then, Happy Hunting!

Funny Books and Comic Books... Sort of.

Hey! Here's some stuff I think I actually bought sometime this year! There's an almost-but-not-quite-theme running through this post... with a couple of significant exceptions that greatly just f--k things up for me trying to write this. 

GEE THANKS A LOT, AWESOME STUFF I FOUND. 

Well here it all is. As you can see, there's some pretty fun stuff in this pile. Let's get started so we can get with the fun... right?

So, based on the stuff I found in this haul, the theme I thought I'd go with was "Funny Books and Comic Books" and for the most part, I succeed. This MAD Power book is one of those rare gems that I love to find: A MAD Magazine comics print collection. These are ALWAYS a sure take-home item for me.

The holy triumvirate of 80's newspaper funnies for me are "Calvin & Hobbes," "The Farside," and "Bloom County" (along with "Outland" and "Opus" which are just continuations of Bloom really). While I am a fun of Garfield, it's mostly his animated adventures that catch my attention. Although many a happy hour were spent as a child poring over my Aunt's VAST Garfield collection, which included EVERY Garfield stri ever collected in book form. 

What was I talking about? 

Oh yeah! Bloom County! This copy of Billy and the Boingers Bootleg still has the plastic record-sheet inside that came with every copy of this book. 

Here. Give it a listen. 

The last book in the pile that without a doubt, unquestionably follows the theme that I am more than a little bit unhealthily obsessed with tonight is this one. Work is Hell by Matt Groening of "The Simpsons" fame. Many do know, but just as many don't know that Groening did a series of funny books back in the 80's starring a bunny named Binky and his zany cohorts, Sheba, Bongo, Ackbar and Jeff. I find these strips fantastically amusing, so any opportunity I have to pick some up for cheap is... a good opportunity that I take right away. Huh. Not sure where I was going with that, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't where it actually ended up. Anyway... I like this book! 

All right... my theme starts to get a bit shaky here. With Choose Your Own Adventure book You Are Invisible we could TECHNICALLY argue that the kids in this young-reader book by Susan Saunders actually have COMIC BOOK superpowers... but I'm not really going to fight that hard to convince you, honestly. These younger-aimed CYOA's are actually a LOT of fun. 

I really love the film based on Everything is Illuminated by Safran Foer, but I've never read the book. Here I also want to point out that I have abandoned my theme entirely. But we'll get back to it. The movie of Illuminated came out in 2005 and starred Elijah Wood. It is wondrous, heartbreaking, ethereal and yet groundedly REAL at the same time. I hope the book is as good. I've been let down in some cases, so I hope this isn't one of those times.

Finally we have this "X-Men: Crisis in the Danger Room" board game, that had me picking my jaw up off the floor when I spotted it! Almost all of the pieces and tokens are present and accounted for, and the construction of the Danger Room play area is intact and fairly easy to construct.

The game includes pawns of Wolverine, Cyclops, Beast, and Gambit. I cry foul that Storm or even Rogue or Psylocke were not also included... but c'est la vie I guess. It would also have been nice to see Cyclops touching his visor, readying himself to fire his optic blasts... but I guess I'm just a stickler that way...

This is one epic build of a board game! The platforms and balance beam still go in nice and snug, and look great put together! I love that we get Professor X there in the control booth, overseeing the proceedings.

There's a couple of towers that are a part of the build too, and I'm including them here just because I can basically. I was SOOO excited to bring this home you guys! This is LOOKs like such a neat game! Maybe when my kids are a little bit older I'll even get to play it!

Well, that is ALL for tonight kids! I'll be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies in the near future! Until then, I suggest you enjoy some Happy Hunting!

A Couple of Grab-Bags, A Couple of Cassettes

Hey all! Today I'll be focusing mainly on some toys I found in a couple of Grab-Bags I found at Goodwill... and then talking about a couple of cassettes I found. 

And my feelings. 

So you have that to look forward to. 

But first... TOYS!

All right, here's the first grab-bag, with all of it's contents already freed. Let's pick through the relevant items, shall we?

Here's an Animaniacs Happy Meal toy from 1993 that features Slappy, The (now retired) Slap-Happy Squirrel and her nephew, Skippy. Not in love with the design of this particular run of toys, which had the weird, extending accordion tubes as a feature in every toy. I would much preferred to have found the Mindy and Buttons toy as they were a couple of my favorite characters from this show.

Here we have a Fozzie Bear as Squire Trelawney in Muppet Treasure Island. The toy says it's from 1995 but the movie came out in 1996 so I'm not sure what to believe. Either way, it's Fozzie, and it's from Muppet Treasure Island, which I'm not a huge fan of so on one hand... meh. On the other hand... Muppets!!! So that side wins out. I really love the octopus stuck to Fozzie's barrel's left side.

A wind up Thing 1 and Thing 2 toy? Back in 2003 when they put out the GODAWFUL Mike Meyers Cat in the Hat movie, they did a series of toys at Burger King. Luckily, the toys resemble the characters from the BOOK not the MOVIE. So they're all pretty awesome honestly. These are no different.

This is a Lowly Worm toy from Burger King back in 1995. I'm not a huge fan of Richard Scarry's Busy World or anything... but Lowly Worm is a children's book icon in my mind, and the image of a worm driving a car made of a half-eaten apple has always resonated with me.

This is the first Gadget from Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers McDonald's Happy Meal Toys I ever found. I found more of this exact toy (in better shape) later, but this is my first. Had a whole set of these as a kid, and LOVED Chip n' Dale's RRs!!!

Next up we have a Burger King Kid's Club "Bug Rider" toy, this one being Kid Vid riding a scorpion. These were put out in 1998, and the whole gang got in on the action. Sort of a BIZARRE concept, honestly, but hey those are some of the best, right?

Finally, there was this PVC figurine of the kid from "All Dogs Go to Heaven II". I never saw that movie.. but I found this kid's existence in toy form here to be somehow significant. Apparently there was a set of these released by Subway back in 1996. I think this kid is named David (Google confirms this for me) but I would have been a WHOLE LOT more excited to find Anne-Marie or Charlie or Carface... or just about any of the characters that show up in the original movie. Sigh.

Here are the contents of the second grab-bag. I'm not going to bore you to tears with all of the contents, instead...

I'll just focus on these ones. There's a Goof Troop toy that I passed on to a friend, a Birdie the Early Bird pull-back car from 1985, a Koopa Paratroopa toy from back in 1989, and the BEST TWO ITEMS: A McDonald's Employee Barbie from 2001, and an... old looking Big Bird Toy from I-don't-know-when (there are no markings). But I LOVE HIM IN HIS LITTLE SAILOR HAT.

All right... when I picked up these tapes, it was before the big Bill Cosby controversy had hit. I was genuinely exited about these comedy tapes starring Mr. Cosby. But now... I don't know how to feel. Have you guys found yourselves soured on things like the Cosby Show? Or Ghost Dad? Or Jell-O Pudding Pops? What do you think? Do we look past the artist and still love the art? Myself, I'm having a hard time doing that, and frankly, a BIG part of my childhood is withering in my heart because of it. C'est la vie I guess.

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

Golden Books and Plastic Dinosaurs!

Alright so it's another fine edition of "Look What I Picked Up Sometime Last Year Everybody!" This post is going to be about a trip where I brought home a pile of Little Golden Books, some cassettes, and most importantly, some bizarre old plastic dinosaurs! Be sure to check those out at the end of the post! So let's get to it shall we? 

Before I delve into the LGBs, I'll point out I brought a couple of kids' chapter books home as well. The book on the left, The Christmas Tree That Ate My Mother, you might recognize from my 2014 Creepmas countdown extravaganza... if you read that. If not... well, there' this book about a mother-eating Christmas tree. And since I've been trying to track down Ramona books, I was delighted to find this old copy of Ramona the Brave with a Joanne Scribner cover! 

All right! I happen to be koo-koo for Little Golden books! The older the better honestly, and I found some oldies-but-goodies this time around for sure. First we have Mad Hatter's Tea Party from Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland. This is an awesome little book that focuses on just this one part of the story. Next we have The Lone Ranger Little Golden Book. I think I was most excited to find this particular book as it is really the only piece of vintage (antique?) Lone Ranger merchandise I now own. 

I was a little less excited (but still please) by these older Golden Books that I also brought home... an adaptation of Cinderella (A "Little Golden Activity Book" that once included paperdolls), Count to Ten, and Hi Ho! Three in a Row which sounds more inappropriate than it actually is. Trust me.

Finally, I was excited to find this very old copy of Hanna Barbera's Cindy Bear featuring Yogi Bear, and a not-a-Little-Golden-Book-but-just-as-exciting Mickey Mouse Club book, Goofy: Movie Star. Which was put out around the same time as the rest. 

As usual, I also picked a couple of old cassettes to bring home as well. This time around I brought home Billy Idol's self-titled album and U2's album, "War". Billy Idol's song "Hot in the City" always makes me laugh, especially when paired up with its video... the feel of the song is so NOT bad-ass. It just feels really old-fashioned to me... like a shoo-wop song or something... but then the video has Billy in usual fashion, snarling, punching holes in walls, stripping off his clothes, etc. It's all just so incongruous with the feel of the song itself. It feels like a song by Huey Lewis or Billy Joel or someone.

The only songs off of "War" that I'm really familiar with are "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Years Day" and they're both pretty punchy, high-energy stomp-and-kick ind of songs... but they're probably waaay more political than I really want to dwell on.

Finally, there were these weird plastic dinosaurs! There were doubles of everyone, and two of the designs even look like really dinosaurs! I'm less interested in the brachiosaur or the dimetrodon however, and want to tell you how much I love "Opera singing but can't stand on my own" dinosaur, and "patient bulldog puppy with a spike-nose sitting" dinosaur. They are by far my favorite dinos in this pack.

So that's it! That's all I had on that particular trip. Some fun stuff by and large however! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!