Halloween Countdown Day 17: A Package From Brian "The Trash Man"

So my friend Brian, "The Trash Man" over at Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture and I often exchange mail. And it's almost a cheat to include his packages in this countdown because he almost always sends me something that could be construed as Halloween-y. But hey, it's my blog, so I cheat. And besides, there are some pretty overt, directly Halloween-y things in this package to share. 

Like for instance, these two. First up we have an INCREDIBLE McDonald's plate featuring the McDonaldland Gang having a Halloween hoedown! I actually have no idea if its a hoedown or a sock-hop but based on Birdy's and Grimace's costumes, it could go either way. Next, the jack-o-lantern tin on the right which is cool enough in its own right, but once opened was revealed to contain a veritable ARMY of mini-figure toys and other goodies. So lets look at those next. 

Still staying firmly in the theme of Halloween, we have these Monster in My Pocket figures. I had almost ALL of these (well, series 1 anyway) when they came out back in 1990. Nowadays my MiMP collection is getting respectable again, but is a shadowy echo of its former glory.

Next a squad of LEGO-style guys, ranging from LEGO and Mega-Bloks to KRE-O and whatever that little yellow space-guy in the front is from. First we have the INCREDIBLE Man-Bat figure which I LOVE!!! and Havok from mega-bloks. Havok is one of my favorite X-Men. I now own a LEGO Krang-bot from the new TMNT Nicktoon, and Dr. Mindbender from G.I. Joe KRE-O.

Next up are an assortment of toys from various different MUSCLE-related lines. The teal and orange guys are from the original Kinkeshi line that spawned MUSCLE Things here in the states. The Blue and red guys are hard plastic MUSCLE Thing toys, and the guy in the center is from the Ultimate MUSCLE line.

Mini-figures were really like my own personal crack as a kid. I collected the hell out of both of the pictured lines above. Battle Beasts and Army Ants!!! Between all the MUSCLE Things, MiMPs, Garbage Pail Kids Cheap Toys, and the ghosts and sidekicks from the Real Ghostbusters and TMNT lines, plus just other random mini-figures from other lines... I had an army of mini-figures! The Battle Beasts pictured above are "Danger Dog" and "Fleet-Footed Ante-Lope" The Army Ant is is called "Heave-Ho".

Tiny plastic robots, dinosaurs, and firefighters were also included! I placed the two I loved the most in the foreground. The Orange robot and the weird gray "dinosaur" with two ridges running down its back and a snout like the Luck Dragon from the Neverending Story.

More plastic goodies included these "cowboys and indians" figures (I know that's not P.C. but it feels weird calling them Cowboys and Native Americans) and a set of plastic pirates that I believe are probably cake toppers. The pirates have taken up residence on my Pirate/skeletons shelf, even though they are clearly not skeletons.

These two figures are from the Trash Bag Bunch line, which I missed out on, but would definitely like to track more down of nowadays. These guys remind me of Bebop from TMNT and Mutant Zero from the Initiative in a ridiculously vague way. 

Another pair of my near-favorite toys from the whole pack were these two. A Panthro eraser!!! I was (and still am) a huge lover of Thundercats. And Panthro was one of my favorite characters from that show as well as my favorite action figure from that line. The crocodile is from old Super Golden Crisp cereal commercials featuring Sugar Bear. I am also a huge fan of advertising mascots (and their nemeses) so this hungry guy is a perfect addition to my collection.

On the military side of things, The Trash Man included this mega-sized army man and a Cobra Commander action figure! C.C. ended up on my Joes shelf. He's the classic 80's villain and I love both the hooded and helmeted versions of the character.

So Brian and I share an enthusiasm for the Rock Lords. I had most of the toyline when I was a kid, a receiving Granite here made me rush to eBay to see how much it would cost me to fill out the rest of my collection. Turns out... kind of a lot. It's weird to think that a series of toys that had warriors transforming into lumps of rock can go for so much money these days... but if I love 'em, obviously a lot of other people out there probably do too. The fella on the right side there is Taco Terror, one of the Refrigerator Rejects from the Food Fighters line of toys from back in 1988. I've been seeing these things make a huge comeback lately due to nostalgia and the bizarrely awesome concepts and designs of the toys themselves. This was another line that I had a BUNCH of as a kid.

In the category of "items that made me gasp out loud when I removed them from the box" we have this Kermit mug. And not just ANY Kermit the Frog... but his Muppet News Reporter role from Sesame Street. Brian has had some amazing success sending me breakable items via the sometimes-questionable postal service. This is one of my absolute favorite versions of Kermit EVER. As this news reporter Kermit would go out and interview the characters from famous nursery rhymes and fairy tales. It was brilliant. The PEZ dispenser is from 1991 and makes a great addition to my current muppet PEZ collection.

It wouldn't be a package from Brian without some sweet wax-packs (Technically the Beetlejuice cards are not in a wax-pack, I know. Don't worry about it.) and this package did NOT disappoint! I opened the ALF pack to see who the Bouillabaisseball Card featured. The other two remain sealed.

There is probably a very quantifiable laundry-list of items that people have discovered that I love just from reading this blog. Very close to the top of this list is any kind of Choose Your Own Adventure books (or "gaming books" if you're hardcore). And Brian is always hooking me up with these things. The Third Planet From Altair is the 7th book in the CYOA series and Famous and Rich (I'm assuming Robin Leach has the copyright of "Rich and Famous"?) is the 4th book in the "Which Way Books" series. Both look like they will be fun to read.

One of the other most surprising items to come out of this package is this VHS tape featuring the Madballs. I don't talk about Madballs enough on this blog, because frankly I find them next to impossible to find around my area nowadays. Madballs were not the most durable toys when I was a kid, and none of mine survived my childhood whatsoever. I have exactly two Madballs in my vast collection at this point, Slobulus and Crackhead. I would rent the video tape you see above from a local rental place obsessively as a child, as well as its sister-tape Madballs: Gross Jokes. I think they were collectively to be the beginnings of some sort of Saturday morning cartoon that simply never took off.

It was interesting in that it took place in a dystopian world inhabited by ball-shaped organisms (and by interesting I mean "bizarre"). The world was ruled by the evil "Badballs" (all of the second-wave-released characters, led by Wolfbreath who was heart-breakingly one of my favorite Madballs, and VERY hard to watch acting evil) and there was a resistance building to escape the oppressive world led by the good Madballs (all of the first-wave-released characters led by Screamin' Meemie) who just wanted to have fun, which was illegal on their home planet of ORB. Ah the 80's.

If anything sums up a package received in the mail from The Trash Man better than the phrase: "From Trash to Treasure" better... I can't think of one. So the title of the first of three Little Golden Books that Brian included in the package is more than fitting. I am of course a rabid collector of Little Golden Books which is either endearing or creepy depending on who's reading this. In the pile is a book starring one of my favorite Disney Afternoon properties: Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers! The Big Cheese Caper. And a Woody the Woodpecker Takes a Trip which stars the main character and his obligatory child-versions of himself that are named Knothead and Splinter.

Also included in the package were some comic book treats! Marvel's STAR imprint was always good for some toy-licensing fun, and here we see Air-Raiders and Silver Hawks representing! Brian of course knows from this blog how much I love my Air-Raiders figure that I salvaged from childhood:

As demonstrated in this picture of Baxter Stockman KILLING him...

I never played with him properly, calling him "Vocal Chord" instead of the much more accurate and unwieldy: Tyrants of the Wind Soldier.

And the comic book includes this KICK-@$$ picture of "Vocal Chord" in all his glory! This sight gave me LITERAL goosebumps.

There's nothing not-awesome about these three issues as well. We have an Inferno tie-in that I actually don't own yet, a Marvel Holiday Special (LOVE the Holiday specials from back in the day!) and a Marvel Super-Heroes Super Heroes Summer Special with the tagline: When Balls Collide!!! That right there is worth the price of admission.

Brian also included this TPB of Rocketo which is a comic I have always been curious about, but too lazy to track down on my own. So now I can finally check it out! It looks amazing.

And when I had heard that he was getting rid of his Shadowpact trades due to the evil, Evil, EVIL minimalist game... I stuck my hand up in the air and said "mememememe!!!" because I liked the team back when they were introduced. These stories are of... mixed quality, and I can see why Brian had decided he no longer needed them in his collection. But I ASKED for them, remember. It was incredibly gracious of him to acquiesce. 

So there you have it kids! The contents of a package from Brian "The Trash Man" Farrell, of Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture fame! That's all I've got for tonight. I'll be back soon with more Gross Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

League of Extraordinary Bloggers - Young Love

It's League of Extraordinary Bloggers time again! What are we talking about this week?

"When I was a kid, my favorite _______ was _______."

Which to be honest, had me scratching my head. I know a lot of people in the League are going to list cartoons, comics, action figure lines, movies, candies, sodas, fast food chains, etc. I wanted to do something sort of unexpected. But I couldn't think of a darn thing.

Then I saw Chris Tupa's post over at Tupa's Treasures, about his favorite stuffed animal as a kid. And it instantly clicked for me. Sometimes when you're a kid, your favorite something is actually something so personal it couldn't possibly really click for anyone else. It's all about that weird kid-connection you make to things.

Thanks to Chris Tupa, I had my answer.

If you were to wander around the Geek Cave you'd notice most of my random vintage toys sort of end up clumped together in one spot. You'd also notice that in the midst of that vintage chaos, there's this:

It's a little plastic case that my original iPod came in. I use it to display six tiny figures, "Usual Suspects" style, separate from all the other toys. There's a LEGO man, a MUSCLE guy, a ghost, a Pee-Wee's Playhouse figure, a GPK, and a robot.  These six seemingly unrelated toys were my WHOLE WORLD from about 10 years of age or so until... well... probably until I was older than I should have been to still be playing with them. Let's just put it that way. 

In late 1988 (November/December) I discovered The New Mutants and the X-Men. That spiraled into an obsession with all things super-hero. The way I played with my toys began to change at that very same time. Instead of just living in their own worlds, characters from my different toy lines began teaming up and developing mutant powers. 

I loved mini-figures as a child almost as much as I loved action figures. It's part of why I love to collect them so much now. One day I remember having to pick out a handful of toys to bring with me on a car trip to my grandmother's house, and when I looked down at the handful of figures I had selected (seemingly at random) it was these six figures. On the car ride, I began developing powers for each of them, and how they worked together. I never had a name for their team (I sort of just felt like they were the X-Men... but not) but each one of them had a name, powers, and a personality to aid in the super-hero soap-opera antics that my young brain would emulate from the pages of my favorite comic books. 

Petey

The leader of the group was Petey. Full name Petey Graffiti from the Garbage Pail Kids Cheap Toys (With Crummy Candy) line:

Image belongs to Midnight Cinephile.
Click on picture to visit their page.

I loved those toys, and I had all of the original line, some in various different colors.  This is not the original Petey from my Childhood. In fact, he's not even the original Petey from the group. My original Petey was red. He got lost. So I replaced him with a flesh-colored Petey. That Petey was chewed and cut and mutilated to the point where he was thrown away. But flesh colored Petey is the one I remembered most from my childhood, so he was the one I wanted to track down. The one you see here was bought from an online dealer for something like six bucks. 

Petey was my group's Cyclops. He had the shades, and the optic blasts. That was his mutant power. Everyone still called him Petey. He was the leader of the group, and he was romantically involved with: 

Chicky

Chicky Baby from Pee-wee's playhouse. I didn't have very many female mini figures back then. I had a few of the aforementioned GPK toys, but not one of them was cool enough to catch Petey's eye. Chicky came in a 4-pack of Pee-wee toys, including the rest of the Puppet-land band, and Jambi, the genie head in a box.

The one you see here is also not my original. She had her little foot-stand chewed off as well as her hands (I had a horrible habit of chewing on my favorite toys until they were un-play-with-able) and got thrown away. In fact, this is not even a vintage toy. It's from a reproduction set that came out in either the late 90's or the very early 00's. 

Image belongs to Action Toys.
Click on the picture to visit their site.

Chicky was the team's Jean Grey. She had psychic powers and she often went all Phoenix-y on the group (I'm being dead serious here. Gods, how I wish I was kidding). She and Petey had a tumultuous romance (or as tumultuous as my experience with romance at 10 was, which pretty much meant what I had learned from the X-Men) and together they were the royal couple of my toys. They never had to have her put down Phoenix-style, but it was touch and go a few times.  

Vocal Chord

Quite possibly the weirdest (possibly second weirdest) member of the group was Vocal Chord. He is actually a "Tyrants of Wind Soldier" from the "Air Raiders" line:

Image Belongs to Virtual Toy Chest
Click on the Picture to visit their site.

I made up the name "Vocal Chord" back when I was a kid because I didn't know his real name. I am ashamed to admit he was one of two stolen toys I will feature in this post. In fact... I broke the first (and second...) figures of him that I stole, so this is the THIRD figure I stole from a friend's house. I feel sort of guilty, but in that "I did stupid stuff like this all the time when I was a kid" kind of way. He is however, the original. I have managed to hold onto this childhood contraband well into my adulthood.

Anyway V.C. (as his friends called him) was a robot with mutant powers. OH THE LENGTHS TO WHICH I WENT to justify his membership in my all mutant team. I think it turned out he was some sort of cyborg with mutant/human parts inside or something. His powers were sort of a cross between Doug Ramsey and Banshee. Anything to do with sound, language, and robot-stuff was his domain. He had a sonic scream, could translate alien languages, and was... well a robot so he could fly and shoot lasers and stuff too. Whenever he spoke it was in my best flat computer voice. My childhood approximation of Soundwave of the Decepticons.

Blob

Next up we have Blob. The figure you see here is in fact the tried and true one I had as a child as well. And I didn't steal him from anyone. He was originally the Gulper Ghost included with the basic Egon Spengler action figure from the first Real Ghostbusters line:

Image belongs to Comic Collector Live.
Click on the picture to visit their site.

He was sort of the Thing of the group. I know the Thing isn't an X-Man, but he was a tough guy with a gravelly voice (or at least, when I read F4 he had a gravelly voice in my head) and a heart of gold that was soft as gooey nougat... and that was Blob all the way.

Since he was not in fact a ghost at all, but instead a yellow mass of sentient gelatinous goo, he could shape-shift into form he wanted, EAT and digest anything (!) and fly. The reason he could fly was because Petey, Chicky, and a couple of the team-members you haven't met yet could comfortably sit in his mouth and he sort of looked like a little airplane. Thus went my 10-year old logic.

Prince

This guy was sort of inexplicable, to be honest. The figure you see here is not the original one I had. This is one I found somewhere along the way years later and kept because he reminded me of my original. I even scraped off the chest deco so he'd look more like the worn-down one I owned. The original one I had was from one of the Forestmen LEGO sets, similar to the one I found at Goodwill and featured here.

This picture is MINE dammit!

BUT he was... cough... ahem... another stolen toy. Yep. My childhood larceny knew no bounds. I stole the original Forestman LEGO guy from a friend who literally had a trash-can full of LEGO blocks and figures at his house. I know the quantity of LEGOs he did or did not own does not justify my crime... but it seemed pretty justified when I was a kid. That figure even had a Robin Hood hat, but I lost it. 

Anyway, Prince was named after... Prince. The singer. I had the cassingle of Bat-Dance from the Batman Soundtrack and listened to it incessantly. I have no idea what that had to do with a green LEGO man, but the name stuck. My little Prince was a confusing dude. I couldn't decide what his powers were, so he went through several different phases. For a while he literally could phase, like Shadowcat, through solid material. Then he was the team teleporter for a while. Then the fact that I could pull off his body parts sort of became a power in and of itself, where he could either turn parts of himself invisible, or shoot his hands, torso, or head at enemies for god-only-knows-why. He wasn't really powerful, but he had mad ninja fighting skills and he really was royalty, with an evil twin brother whom I'll introduce later. Prince is really in a duel with Vocal Chord for my weirdest toy in this group. 

Bulldozer

Bulldozer is a M.U.S.C.L.E. Thing. If you go by the American marketing, he was known as Terri-Bull. If you go by the original Japanese Kinnikuman story-line he's known as Buffaloman. Either way he was supposed to be a villain. 

Not my picture.
Click it to go to the MUSCLE Collector's Archive. 

But not once I got my hands on him! For some reason I was in love with the version of the guy in his letter-man's jacket. And I never called him Terr-Bull. I called him Bulldozer. I thought it was incredibly clever and badass. He was my team's Wolverine. He had adamantium bones, a healing factor, and went absolutely ape-s--t on villains. His horns were adamantium as well, and much like the Juggernaut, once he got moving he couldn't be stopped. He and Blob would argue constantly, but Bulldozer never had an romantic designs on Chicky (a la Wolverine + Jean Grey) behind Petey's back. 

And just like the X-Men or the Avengers, they had allies and back-up members who would swing in and help out once in a while. Some of these for my group included Firefly (An Army Ants "Knockdown" figure), Blur (A Battle Beast "Jaded Jaguar"), and Flyboy (An accessory packed with the Napoleon Bonafrog TMNT figure). Firefly had bomb-creating powers, much like Boom-Boom from the New Mutants. Blur was named after the Transformer, and he was a speedster. And Bug-Boy was a feral bug-mutant who talked in screams, grunts, and single words much like Animal of the Muppets. They all spent time on the team only to be phased out at some later point. All three of these guys are ones I actually owned as a kid. 

And there's no better measurement of a team of heroes than the villains they fight, right? Here's Wendigo from the Monster in my Pocket Line, a LEGO reproduction of Vince, Prince's evil twin, an evil wizard, "The General" another Army Ant, and Slither, another MUSCLE. The arguable leader was The General, but Vince had all the ambition and ire. The one you see above is a newer LEGO man put together to sort of look like how I imagined Vince looked (his face is a Draco Malfoy head from LEGO Harry Potter, and I believe his staff is actually a WoW Mega-Bloks weapon) when I was younger. The blue and red is all vintage. The other three figures you see are ones I salvaged from my childhood all the way.  

Here's the main group as a whole. They make a dashing team of six don't they? They used the Ecto-1 as they're base of operations in a junk yard made up of every toy vehicle I owned. Yes. They lived in a junkyard. They mainly spent their time fighting off much larger villains than themselves. Villains like Hordak and Granny Gross and Big Boss from C.O.P.S. To them (and me) size truly didn't matter, and the villains were never any match for them. I spent HOURS... no DAYS... okay YEARS in a fantasy land populated by my toys when I was a kid. And these six characters were the stars of the show. 

That's it for my Young Love! I hope you actually enjoyed reading all this. 

Let's see what the othe League Members love waaaaay back when: 

- Jathniel over at Space For Rent had a big green love. A big Green Machine love. 

- Rich from Fortune and Glory (Days) posts some awesome photos of his old Action Figure loves. We had some very similar tastes if I'm to judge the photo of his four surviving childhood action figures. 

- And as I already mentioned, Chris Tupa of Tupa's Treasures just destroys ALL of his street cred with his post... but it's AWESOME!!! One of my favorite posts so far!

- Grey over at Achievements in Gaming tells us his memories of his free-wheeling days as a biker.

- The Geeky Vixen shares the story of her Endor Leia. It'll mist your eyes. 

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