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!

12 Days of Christmas Cassettes: 7 ...and Now a Word From Our Sponsors

Welcome to the Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks 12 Days of Christmas celebration extravaganza!!! (Don't send me messages telling me that the 12 days of Christmas actually BEGIN on Christmas and end on January 6th, with the Epiphany. I know. But I'm not celebrating that way... so let us quickly move along.)

Today I'm featuring a couple of cassettes that jumped out at me for a couple of different reasons, not necessarily because of who performed them, or songs included... but mainly because of who was responsible for creating them. 

These are two Christmas music compilations that were sponsored by folks that I would not normally associate with Christmas... at least not initially. 

First up we have "Christmas with Courvoisier Cognac" performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. What we have here people, is a Christmas tape sponsored by a booze company.

The folks at Courvoisier keep it simple and instrumental here, because they know that once people get nice and boozed up they don't want a lot of confusing Christmas lyrics going on in the background to harsh their buzz.

-Side A- 

1. Deck the Halls

2. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

3. Angels We Have Heard on High

4. Adoramus Te, Christe

5. Silent Night

6. Adeste Fidelis

-Side B- 

7. The First Noel

8. Gesu Bambino 

9. What Child Is This? 

10. God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen

11. Coventry Carol

12. Joy to the World

And finally, we have a cassette created by the folks at True Value hardware stores. 

I don't know... I guess I just thought it was funny that a chain of hardware stores put together a collection of Christmas songs. AND... this thing has "The Night Before Christmas" performed by WILLARD SCOTT!!!

This guy. 

Oh whoops! I meant:

This guy. Merry Christmas.

-Side A-

1. Willard Scott - "The Night Before Christmas"

2. Julie Andrews - Hark! The Herald Angles Sing

3. Bing Crosby - O Holy Night

4. Garth Brooks - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

5. The Lettermen - What Child is This

6. Wayne Newton - Silent Night

7. Air Supply - Winter Wonderland

-Side B-

8. Nat "King" Cole - The Christmas Song

9. The Beach Boys - Frosty the Snowman

10. Glen Campbell - I'll Be Home For Christmas

11. Dean Martin - White Christmas

12. Anne Murray - O Come All Ye Faithful 

13. Andy Williams - Joy to the World

14. Ella Fitzgerald - It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

There's some genuinely great music in the mix here, with classics from the likes of Andy Williams, The Beach Boys, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Julie Andrews. Garth Brooks makes a sort of anachronistic appearance, and let's not kid anybody about it... I bought this thing for Willard Scott. And because a hardware chain put it together. 

I'll be going right up through Christmas day itself posting, so be sure to join me back here tomorrow for more of the 12 Days of Christmas Cassettes celebration!!! Merry Christmas and Happy Hunting!

Halloween Countdown Day: Belfast Finds

A few weeks ago the family made what will probably be our last trip out to Belfast, ME for the year, as the trip is riskier with ice and snow on the ground, and there's less to do out there in the winter anyway. So naturally, I made sure to keep my eyes peeled for any Halloween (or other) goodies I might find! Let's take a look at what I found, shall we? 

First up is this handsome fellow. He's exactly the kind of old-school blow-mold plastic that I love finding Jack o' Lanterns in! He's about the size of a grapefruit, and what I think I love most about him are the funky diamond-shaped eyes with the orange button eyes in the middle.  

I decided to accessorize him with the witch's head I found in my earlier post from a few days ago. They make quite the pair, don't they? 

This book is much tinier than this picture would suggest. Full of Halloween mysteries allegedly lasting only 5 minutes. I haven't checked it out yet, and it may actually have to be put off for next year's Halloween read-pile. 

Another book that is DEFINITELY on next year's Halloween read pile is Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators in: The Secret of Phantom Lake which I recently featured in my post about spooky pulp-book covers. I desperately want to know what the secret is. I am assuming some jerk in a tree costume... but you never know. 

Next up The Twisted Witch & Other Spooky Riddles which I will be sharing with my boys this season. That cover by Victoria Chess (who also illustrates the interiors) is awesome. 

The Lima Bean Monster was a cute book with a moral about eating your vegetables. We will definitely be making this a part of the regular Halloween reading rotation every year. 

This one was pretty clever too. Jeepers Creepers: A Monstrous ABC is a list of bizarrely mundane names that follow the alphabet... but the owners od said names have freakish and monstrous physical descriptions. David Parkins's artwork is beautiful, colorful, and fun. 

This thing is just pure gold. We'll be exploring this one more in-depth in the future. It's a compendium of monsters, spooks, and other Creepy Creatures. 

Boo! Made You Jump! by Lauren Child is a "Charlie and Lola" book, which my boys like quite a bit. It's all about dares and scares.

Moving on from the Halloween books, let's take a look at a mildly-Halloween-themed Grab-Bag!

So leaving out the wooden pig, plastic cow, and AWESOME PVC Bugs Bunny playing a guitar... We have 3/5ths of the Scooby-Doo gang! These are Mystery Inc. members Fred, Velma, and Daphne in an obviously chunky and designed-for-smaller-hands style. I already have a set of Scooby-Doo action figures, but these are cute enough that I think I'll probably keep them anyway.

A second, less-Halloween-y grab bag had some pretty cool stuff inside as well.

Here are the complete contents, including some random toys, a bobble-head from the recent Mr. Peabody and Sherman film, and a trio of Happy Meal toys from Batman: The Brave and the Bold including Gorilla Gordd, Robin, and the Dark Knight himself. But by far... the true star of the bag (and the reason I bought it at all) is this guy:

The 7Up Cool Spot! This guy originated back in 1987 and is yet another member of my ever-growing army of advertising mascots. I was sooo excited to find this guy.

I had dreams and visions of bringing home armloads of old cassette tapes from the Belfast Goodwill. Instead, I cam home with only one. But the Animal House Soundtrack is a pretty good single cassette to bring home I guess.

This "FLIKS" book featuring "Saturday Night Fever" is another foto-novel style book, but with a twist: The bottom right corner is a flip-book in and of itself where we watch John Travolta dance at the Disco!!! This thing is pure sex printed on paper.

A little less salacious is this TSR Endless Quest book: Mountain of Mirrors which is the second book in the series. Love these things. Great old favorites from my childhood to be sure.

And speaking of childhood favorites, I also picked up these two Sesame Street-themed Whitman Tell-A-Tale books. One features cave-Sherlock Hemlock and cave-Ernie inventing paper because rocks were too heavy to write on in Ernie the Cave King and Sherlock the Smart Person in The Invention of Paper, The othe book, Ernie's Telephone Call is a bizarre book about feelings that features a giant purple gorilla that sneaks into Bert and Ernie's apartment unbeknownst to the duo, as Ernie talks on the phone about... get this... a giant purple gorilla.

A Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks post wouldn't feel complete without a Little Golden Book. This one features Mickey Mouse in his guise from Fantasia as The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

A few more Sesame Street books here, in When Grover Moved to Sesame Street, Lovable Furry Old Grover's Resting Places, Fix It Please, and The Sesame Street 1,2,3 Story-Book. Not much more to say about those except that I am an avid collector of all things old-school Sesame Street.

This book was an interesting item. It is a fictional book from 1980 illustrated with all of the different star-ships used for commercial purposes in 2200 AD. Apparently this is the fourth book in a series by Stewart Cowley. This looks like a really fun read if you're into space travel and hard science fiction.

Next is a wonderful book that I already own a copy of, but could NOT leave behind. This is the second copy of Garfield: His 9 Lives that I have picked up at Goodwill, except this one is paperback. There are enough creepy tales in this book to almost consider it an honorary Halloween book. Two different TV specials were spawned from this one book, one in the actual "Garfield's 9 Lives Special" which only shares about 5 of these nine tales with the book, and Babes and Bullets which is an adaptation of the hard-boiled detective story (top right square on this cover). Love how risky they were willing to get with this property in these 9 stories. As I mentioned, a couple of them are down right spooky.

Kermit and Cleopigtra is an Egyptian tale starring the Muppets. There is nothing that isn't 100% awesome about this concept. And the artwork is STUNNING.

A Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers graphic novel? Yes please. This thing has three different stories inside and stars one of the greatest Disney Afternoon properties ever created.

Finally, I found three Dungeons and Dragons-related books in the shelves at the Belfast Goodwill. First up is a collection of comic strips about a group of roleplayers called Knights if the Dinner Table: Tales From the Vault Vol. 2 I loved reading this comic strip in Dragon Magazine, and I can't wait to catch up with the gang. Next is a basic Dungeons and Dragons (non-Advanced) rulebook. I had this book as a teen. I never played the basic D&D game much as a lad, but this still brings me back down memory-lane. And then there is a copy of the AD&D Player's Option: Skills & Powers sourcebook, which is now the second Player's Option book I've managed to pick up from Goodwill! So overall, I was pretty pleased with all three of these finds!

As a matter of fact, I was pretty pleased with the entire haul! A nice pile of books, some Halloween goodies, a cassette, and a pair of grab-bags. This was a good trip to the Belfast Goodwill overall.

Well. That's all I've got for tonight kids! I'll be back with more Gruelling Goodwill Goodies soon enough! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Of Comics and Books and Comic... Books.... wait.

So I thought I'd finally use some of the thousands of pictures I have mouldering away on my hard-drive to actually show off some of the stuff I've been finding at Goodwill while I've been off having my mid-life crisis. I thought I'd get some of the books out of the way this time around, as they seem to be the majority of what I've been finding lately. 

First up, a couple of Darkwing Duck Books! The first one I was kind of disappointed to find featured Tuskernini as the villain, who I never really got behind as a D.D. villain in the first place. They always played him as a weird mix between The Penguin and Mysterio... but a walrus movie director supervillain just feels kind of sad. 

Next up we have this copy of Darkwing Duck: Just Us Justice Ducks which is an adaptation of the tv show. This is the story where the heroes that Darkwing has met throughout the series all come to help him defeat a team-up of his most dangerous foes. The adaptation is a little sloppy, and is definitely aimed at kids, not "all audiences". It feels rushed, and the panels are crowded together to fly through the story as quickly as possible. It's a shame too, because they could have done a great deal more with what they had for material. For instance, there are no splash pages that show the villains all together. The best we get is pretty much just this:

Always loved those episodes of D.D. because it gave the show the same shared universe feel of the comics it was parodying, and you got the goofy, anthropomorphic version of the Avengers or JLA, but Darkwing style. Gizmoduck from Duck Tales makes another guest appearance here, and we get returning heroes like Stegmutt the dinosaur, Neptuna the fish woman, and Morgana the sorceress. But of course, this kind of story is all about the villains. I really loved the villains in the roster of the Fearsome Five: the plant controlling Dr. Bushroot, the electrifying Megavolt, Darkwing's evil twin from the negative universe, Negaduck, the watery salesman Liquidator, and the Mad Jester of crime, Quackerjack! This was a neat find, but honestly if you're a Darkwing Duck fan, I recommend just sitting down with the DVDs and watching the two-parter instead of trying to track this graphic novel down. 

Next up we have this Choose Your Own Adventure book: Mystery of the Maya. I haven't had a chance to play through this one at all yet, but it looks like some good old-fashioned Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones style adventuring, except with kids. Long-time readers will remember that I am a CYOA NUTJOB and I collect just about any of them I find. 

I'm also a pretty big fan of Monsters Vs. Aliens (The movie and the Halloween Special, not the abysmal TV show on Nickelodeon). I am also a huge fan of the wonky old Weekly World News-style craziness that used to be available in the grocery store checkout lanes. So when I flipped through this book and found that they were telling the story in that format:

I had to pick it up. I honestly don't even know if this book would interest ANYONE other than me... the subject matter is a bit young for most kids who are capable of this sort of reading level... and it's too densely packed for an kind of bedtime-story read aloud... so I'm thinking they were marketing this book (and in most cases the movie) to me and me alone. 

It's funny how often Disney and Golden Books put out these "picture stories" of their properties, which were really just comic book adaptations. I'm a sucker for the Fox and the Hound, so when I saw this I had to pick it up. Here's a little sample of the interior:

Straight up graphic novel. 

A couple of MAD magazine comic cartoon compilations from the 70s and 80s. I was really excited to find these, as browsing through MAD magazine was another grocery store pastime from my youth.  

The Mr. Bill Show book! I always found the Mr. Bill segments on the old SNL episodes to be hilarious when I was a kid. They seemed like a really demented version of Gumbi, which was another love of mine back then. Flipping through this book is much the same as watching the shorts on SNL as Sluggo and Mr. Hands torture, maim, disfigure, dismember, and emotionally scar Mr. Bill in some new way on almost every page. 

This one even still has the free soundtrack record included! It's been removed from the perforation and was actually tucked into the middle of the book when I bought it.

Frequent visitors to this blog will also be able attest to the fact that I am a Sesame Street person as well. I collect just about anything pre-90's (and some stuff beyond that... but it has to be really special). I'm certain I either owned this book as a child or I obsessed over it in my school library because the illustrations are sooo familiar. This book really stands out for having a picture of the 2-Headed monster from the wait down: 

Freaky right?

Here is a pile of random comics I picked up, the most notable of the two being the Marvel Comics Presents issues. This comic often told seriously long-haul serialized stories, such as the Colossus story you see featured here, which was a 13-parter (!). There was also a Black Panther story that ran on for 25 instalments!!! I sort of made it a personal goal to collect the rest of the Colossus story at some point, so finding these two issues was pretty cool. The Adventures of the X-Men .99 cent issue is pretty awful, but it features the Man-Thing... so I wanted it. I found another issue of Excalibur I didn't yet have, a part of the excellent "Cross Time Caper" back when comic books were still able to tell their own stories and go crazy places and not have to kowtow to the upcoming Summer crossover event. And I never don't buy What-If? if I find it cheap. And neither should you... not... not buy it? I don't know how write. 

I am a HUGE fan of advertising mascots and campaigns, and the "Got Milk?" campaign with its milk mustaches is one of the most famous and ubiquitous ad ideas of the past few years. So when I found this book detailing the history of the Go Milk ads with a bunch of the ads collected together in one book? I was pretty excited. The book is broken up into categories, such as athletes, cartoon characters, and musicians who have all participated in the campaign. Really enjoy flipping through the book Below are shots of some of my favorites:

Spongebob, Mario, and Kermit have all worn milk mustaches.

Crimefighters in the night, Batman and Angel count themselves among the thankfully lactose-tolerant.

And guys who like greasepaint on their faces like their milk as well, as demonstrated by Ronald McDonald and the members of KISS.

Finally, the last book of this post is the one I was the most personally excited about. Because I used to read this book obsessively as a kid. Everything You Need to Know About Monsters and Still Be Able to Get to Sleep by Daniel Cohen. I used to check this book out from the library (in the town of Bar Harbor when I lived there for a couple of years as a kid) on an almost weekly basis. I loved monsters as a kid and I especially loved werewolves. I would check this and a couple of other books out and pore over the pages lovingly over and over again. What is ESPECIALLY exciting about this particular book is the fact that it is the copy that came from that library. So I found a book at Goodwill that was the exact same copy I used to check out and obsess over as a kid. I now own that book. And it is a book about monsters. I mean... look at that guy on the cover! That mean green guy! He actually looks kind of worried.

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight folks! I hope you found at least one of these books as interesting as I did. I'll be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!