You know it's bad when...

I don't really have much to write about right now, to be honest, but I wanted to make myself do it anyway. I can't think of a better reason to start blogging right now than the fact that we're experiencing some terrifying stuff, hiding from a virus in our homes while the world seems to be literally trying to destroy itself. 

So here it is. A return to the blog. This may not end up being what it ever was before, but I am not the same person I was when I was writing this blog before anyway. Be gentle. I'm just dipping in my toes here. It will take me some time to focus up and get some good ideas for actual posts. Until that happens, I thought I'd just share some fun pics from my Instagram account. 

I really just wanted to post some fun pictures today and be able to say: "There, I did it. I blogged again." So that maybe I will keep doing it and keep adding a bit of positivity to the world instead of being scared of it. Here are my two potato heads. They were both Goodwill finds. The one on the left LOOKS like he's super old, but he's actually a reproduction released somewhere in the early-to mid aughts. The guy on the left is practically BRAND NEW and I bought him mainly because I wanted one that looked more like the guy in the Pixar Toy Story films. They look ridiculously happy together and that's what I wanted. I don't ever really remember caring all that much about Potato Head toys when I was a kid, but they have so much nostalgia wrapped up in them anyway!

Here we have a couple of the NECA "Toony Terrors" action figures. These guys were NOT thrift finds. Sometimes I buy new if the item is exciting enough, and boy do I love these figures. They are colorful and goofy and menacing in all the right ways. I own Pinhead, Leatherface, Jason, and Freddy as well, but this one pic encapsulates everything I love about this line.

When Amazon finally put the Luke Cage/Claire Temple 2-pack on sale for 20 bucks, I snapped it up. Then I promptly bought Luke a tiny hooded sweatshirt to wear like he does on the show. He looks great up here with Matt and Jess. Jessica Jones was absolutely my favorite show out of these three series... but Daredevil and Luke could hold their own for sure. I've kind of made it my goal to stop collecting so many different scales and versions of characters... and to star focusing MOSTLY on 6 inch scale figures like the Marvel Legends and Star Wars Black Series figs. It makes it harder for me to track down the figures I like... but I think in the long run it will help make my shelves look nicer. 

There was a classic Fisher-Price wedding at my apartment! Two of my Fisher Price Husky Helpers have discovered that they are more than just co-workers or even friends. There was a huge Fisher-Price celebration with all kinds of Adventure People, and a few other Fisher-Price characters in attendance. What's funny is that I had to travel to a Maryland fleamarket to find one of these construction workers in order to unite him with the other that I found here in Maine. So it's a true story of love and triumph. 

Whelp. I think that's enough dipping my toes in for now. I'm shaking off dust and stretching muscles I haven't exercised in quite some time. So I'm striving more for repetition and habit building than quality right now. I hope you guys will be patient with me. 

But I'll be back sooner rather than later this time, with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until that time... Happy Hunting! 

Halloween Countdown Day 20: A Package from Laura of Boobobby Blog!

So let us reach again reach a tender, defenseless hand into the gaping maw of... The Goodwill Geek's Mailbag!!! This time around, I received a package from my friend Laura of the BooBobby Blog! She's a great blogger-buddy from way back and she always sends me the coolest stuff. Let's take a look at what she sent! 

It was a Halloween-themed package! Here's the whole pile of wonderful goodies included, but let's get a closer-looksee. Be not afeared... but march onward with me!

First up is this Dracula Burger King Kids' Club meal from 1997. He looks debonair and deadly no?

And he goes rather nicely with the other two monsters I have from the set. Now I just need Frankenstein's monster and I'll have the complete set of four! 

She included this awesome roller-coaster post card for "THE BEAST" that is perfect for Halloween too! She always includes a nice, hand-written note in all of her packages... a practice I NEED to get into the habit of myself!

This book is awesome! Georgie is one of those kids' book characters I've been aware of almost all my life. For some reason though this is the first one to make it into our Halloween reading collection. And its adorable! We received the package today, read the book to the kiddos at bedtime tonight, and now  here I am blogging about it about 45 minutes later. Such a great read! There are about 13 books that star this little ghost, as far as I can figure, and I will definitely be keeping my eyes peeled for more of them in the future!

Next up we have the AMAZING "Ghostly Sounds" vinyl record! This thing is gorgeous to behold! Love the fanged green guys on the back and front.

Then we have the equally if not EVEN COOLER "Sounds to Make You Shiver!" with its army of monsters flooding from a mouldering castle! These things are being hung up somewhere in the cave and displayed proudly! 

Laura also included these Fisher Price Adventure People, because she felt my "Becky the Diver" figure from the same line might be getting lonely. But she also cautioned me that these guys seemed a little sketchy... like a couple of seedy jerks at a Halloween party. (I'm NOT going to do it... but how easy would it be to head-swap blue-jumpsuited fireman guy with this guy:

And make an Adventure People Michael Myers with just a little paint? Like I said, I'm not doing it... but a guy can dream some Halloween dreams can't he? 

Finally, there was this adorable, slobbery guy. Barkley from the Sesame Street Mini Beans line! I can't even BEGIN to pretend this has a tie to the Halloween theme here... and that is exactly okay with me. Barkley just is. He doesn't have to be Halloween-y. He's pure, orange, fuzzy, manic LOVE!!! Aw Barkley. One of my fave Sesame Street Muppets.

Well kids, that's all I've got for tonight! I can't thank Laura enough and I can't stop reeling over her generosity. THANK YOU LAURA!!! I'll be back soon with more Grotesque Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Another Trip to the Dreamcatcher Antique Mall

So, I made yet another trip to the Dreamcatcher Antiques Mall recently, and I came out with a handful of fun items:

Here's a look at the entire haul, but let's break it down piece by piece, shall we? 

First up I have this 1989 Bumblebee Transformer. He was either a part of the Pretenders line of the Legends line of that ear, according to the Transformers Wiki. Bumblebee was actually one of my favorite characters on the show as a kid. The odd characters were always my favorites on any show... it was the soldier and warriors and tough guys that didn't really appeal to me at that age. 

Here he is in car mode. Apparently all I'm missing now is the gigantic gun turret that you usually find innocuously installed on the roof of most Volkswagen Beetles. (Man, does he NEED a good cleaning)

Meet Becky. Becky is a Fisher Price Adventure Person... and a total hottie. She is a scuba diver. I get really distracted when Becky's around. Becky is also the name of my Aunt. So... that got weird fast. I absolutely LOVE the Fisher Price Adventure People line. I only owned one as a kid because they were a little bit before my time (I had the X-Ray Man figure) but I really appreciate the design and simplicity of these little folk as an adult collector. 

Next up is what I thought at first was a Hotwheels Batmobile from the Tim Burton movie... but I was mistaken. This baby is solid rubber! It was released in 1992 to support the Batman Returns movie, and was produced by Applause... you know... the guys who made all those PVC figures with the thick, rubbery paint? They did everything from the California Raisins to Sesame Street to Disney's Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers (can you tell I'm looking around my cave trying to think of figurines Applause produced?) To me, this just makes this thing that much cooler! The wheels are on pins and do actually roll, so this isn't just a solid hunk of rubber. Bumblebee, Becky, and the Batmobile up there all cost me just one American Dollar as a GROUP!!! They were all in a .50 cent bin but the guy at the register just grunted and charged me buy 2 get 1 free. Boy what a momentous occasion in my life! 

The star of this shot is the TSR PVC Bugbear figure standing front and center. I just wanted to include Warduke and Strongheart because they are the only other TSR toys from the 80's I own. Strongheart I bought in a grab-bag at Goodwill a long while back... and Warduke was a very recent gift from my wife's cousin's husband, who actually won him from the Garage Sale of awesome. Anyway... the Bugbear's supposed to be the star of the show here, so let's focus on him. I'm still not totally clear if the action figures and the PVC monsters were all meant to be part of the same toy line... but now that I know of their existence... I may be tracking more of these down. He was three dollars on his own. 

And finally, I brought home this Vampire the Masquerade players guide... which I already own. But it was only five dollars, and I have an idea of where this might be headed, so I snapped it up. All of the items you see here cost me just a hair under 9 dollars. There were two other items that I'm not revealing because I bought them as a surprise gift for a friend, and those brought my total up to 15 dollars. 

That's all I have for today kids! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting. 

Another Trip to Dreamcatcher (From Last November Actually)

Do you ever lose pictures on your hard-drive and just completely forget about them? I do. I do a lot actually. And that is how I forgot to post about a trip I made to the Dream Catcher Antique Mall last November, and it's a real shame too. I found some AWESOME stuff on this trip. But instead of just letting it be a shame, I decided to go ahead and talk about it anyway! So let's hop into the wayback machine and check it out shall we? 

I don't remember the prices I paid for anything at this point... but I know I got a pretty good deal on these two Fisher Price Adventure People from the early 80's. These fellas are, from left to right, Clawtron and Brainoid. I can honestly tell you that I LOVE the Adventure People line, even the standard "civilian" type characters... but ESPECIALLY these trippy Star Wars knock-off characters.

I wanted to get a bit more of a close-up of Brainoid's... well... brain here. I discovered that he is incredibly hard to photograph clearly, and this was the best I could do. The brain sort of rattles around in the helmet if you shake it, but not completely, as it is attached to a loose peg that allows it to move without letting it go completely crazy. I am hard pressed to tell you about another action figure as old and as awesome as this one. I am completely in love with this guy! 

Similarly goofy and gorgeous is this green bendy alien character! His name is Hondu and he is from "The Other World" line of toys from Arco back in the early 80's. This picture of him is just terrible and believe it or not, this is after I tweaked the colors a bit to make him not-quite so luminescent. (You can see him a little better in the group shot at the end). I love Hondu and I really like The Other World Toyline. It never fails. Just when I think I know all about all the different, weird, out-there action figure lines of days past... something like this pops up and reminds me of my ignorance. 

This familiar looking fellow is a 1994 Alien Vs. Predator 2-pack figure. He originally came with a PRedator to face off against. Up to this point I had not had a nice iconic-looking basic Xenomorph to put on my shelves. I really like the look of this toy, from the sculpt and detail down to the pose. He's actually not super poseable, as him limbs are all angled to pretty much just let him stand in one position. You can see from the photo that he desperately needed a good cleaning as well. Overall he makes an awesome addition to my monster shelf.

And finally, I picked up a couple of great Little Golden Books! Big Bird's Red Book and Mrs. Brisby and the Magic Stone! I owned the Big Bird book as a kid, and I was thrilled to find a copy of it out and about! The illustrations took me back to my childhood so completely. And the Rats of NIMH book was a very weird and nice surprise. I would not have guessed that this film would have gotten the LGB treatment! I love surprises like this. I try not to trawl through the LGB collecting communities too much because I'm always delighted when I find something like this, (like an Inspector Gadget LGB, or a Darkwing Duck LGB, or a Donny and Marie Osmond LGB...) in the wild!

So here's the whole pile! If I were to hazard a guess back, I would say I probably spent between 10 to 13 dollars on the pile you see above. I remember being pretty pleased to bring them home for whatever I paid. 

That's all I have for tonight kids! Next time around I'll most likely be blogging about one of a couple of awesome packages I've received in the mail recently, so keep your peepers peeled for that! Then I'll be back soon after with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting! 

Goodwill Grab-Bags (and one Mecha)

I was actually tempted to draw this post out into a couple of posts, seeing the volume of stuff herein. But then I got thinking: I have items I found in two different grab-bags on the same day that sort of go together, and it would bug me if I didn't connect them together in a post. So you get a big toy post today including THREE count-them THREE grab-bags, and one loose toy. Congratulations!

Before I dig into the grab-bags I want to feature this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mecha that I found for 1.99. It's missing a few pieces, but is complete enough for this guy right here. This is from 2005, and is from the Turtles' second animated series toy-line. I'm not a HUGE collector of this line, but I have a few pieces here and there, and there was just absolutely no way I was walking away WITHOUT a giant TMNT-themed battlesuit. So here we are. This is where my life choices have led me. 

Here are the contents of the first grab-bag, 4 action figures for .99 cents. Not a bad deal considering I would have paid that much just for this guy:

Toy Biz Iceman! This one is actually from 1992, which would have been after the point I would still have been trying to collect the X-Men line. I basically got a bunch of the 1991 releases and then stopped. But this one's pretty snazzy. I'm a sucker for a well done translucent action figure, and this is a well done Iceman for sure. 

I definitely wasn't collecting action figures at all in 1994, when this Toybiz Silver Samurai was released, so I missed the boat. This one is unfortunately missing both his helmet and his sword. His legs are also a solid sculpt with the lower half of his body, making them non poseable and stiff... although seemingly random... his knees bend. Weird. So he can totally kick ass in a Limbo contest. Look out N'Astirh! (Only a select handful of you will get that joke without Google's help... Kudos to you... you know who you are.)

This next piece is interesting because I was completely unaware of the ExoSquad line in 1993. This is not the first ExoSquad toy I've found at Goodwill, but it is the only one currently in my collection. Apparently this suit belonged to a character named Typhonus. That's all I know. It's pretty rad looking though, and bringing home two mechanized battlesuits in one day is never a bad thing I guess. 

Finally I got this "Scavage" Predator action figure from the 1993 Kenner line. He has no accessories, but he's still pretty badass. I'm not a huge Predator action figures fan, so I already have a destination in mind for this guy. 

The second grab-bag was a collection of old junk. But the fact that this was old junk was significant enough to me that I brought it home. I don't remember exactly, but I think I actually paid 1.99 for this bag. But in the end, I felt it was definitely worth it. 

Here are some of the more exciting items in the bag. The kayak is a pack-in Adventure People accessory from the Daredevil Sport Van set. You can see some TMNT accessories here as well (Foot Soldier weapons for that Foot Soldier I don't have... -sob-), and these guys:

A couple of 80's-era Transformers! Even though I was never a big Transformer collector, I'm always happy to find these. The older the Transformers the better. What we have here is a Decepticon Quake figure from 1988, missing his two smaller "Targetmaster" robots, and Autobot Cosmos, the UFO Transformer.  

I also found Iceman's ice slide! So I sort of suspected that the contents of both of these grab-bags may have been from the same donor... or who knows... I have another theory at the end of the post. Either way, it pleased me to no end to see this guy and his ride reunited. 

Now... to you these may just be some random plastic pieces. You may even recognise them as G.I. Joe parts... but what you might not realize is that these are pieces to the old Mobile Command Center, which for me is an almost completely unattainable holy grail. I had the MCC as a kid, I remember getting it on Christmas morning in fact, and from that day forward, it served as the headquarters for all of my good guy characters, regardless of what franchise they were from. That thing was pure playset porn. Don't believe me? Go check it out for yourself over at YoJoe.com!!!

Some other random fun pieces here as well, the yellow things with the blue squares on them went to a StarCom playset, which was a bunch of mini-figure spacemen with magnets in their feet. The green tail belongs to a Golobulus figure if I am not mistaken, and the roundish black thing with the thing sticking out of the bottom is some sort of air-pump for a launching toy of some sort, I just can't remember what. The ring in the middle is from a Matchbox Ring Raiders set (mini jets like Micro Machines). The rest I don't really remember at all. 

Here's one more pile of junk out of that same grab-bag, none of which do I recognize. I think there might be a couple more Mobile Command pieces mixed in there, like the round grate thing and the tan gun turret, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Nice cape though. 

Finally, there was one last bag that had some Construx pieces in it, and a Capsela set of building toys that could be used to build motorized vehicles or "robots".  Weird thing is... I'm pretty sure I know where most of these toys came from. This last bag was the clincher. It COULD be a complete coincidence... but I knew a kid who owned this Capsela set, the Construx and StarCom sets, and had a TON of G.I. Joes when I lived in Bar Harbor ME. I wouldn't be willing to wager a TON of money on it, but I'd bet a fiver at least that his mother probably cleaned out a bunch of his old stuff and donated it. It's all just WAAAY too familiar to be a coincidence. I don't know how popular the Capsela sets were back in the day, but I think they were fairly expensive, and I didn't know a lot of kids who had them. I just... I remember these toys. It's kind of surreal. I don't think the 90's toys were probably his, like the X-Men toys or the TMNT mecha... but I think I actually now own some of another kids toys that I knew back in the day. That is a weird feeling. Why is that weirder than if it was a complete stranger? Dunno. Just is. 

Anway! That's it for tonight kiddos! I'll be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies in no time! So until then... Happy Hunting!

Another Trip to the School House Antiques Mall in Brewer, ME

So, I made another trek out to the School House Antiques Mall in Brewer, ME. Here's a shot I took of the outside. The next time I go, I need to get pictures of the interior, but I was in a hurry this time around, and simply did not have the time to get shots of the amazing toy areas they maintain upstairs. 

And I did not come home empty handed! Take a look at muh loot! Here it is:

Let us take an in-depth look at each item individually, shall we?

Look at this pair of dastardly dinner-swiping ne'er do wells! A Hamburglar glass from 1976 and a Captain Crook glass from 1977! Each of these cost me 2.50 apiece. They look great up on my shelf with my other McDonald's collectibles, especially the other glasses I own, including a Ronald I found at Goodwill, an Officer Big Mac I found at the Dream Catcher Antiques Mall in Ellsworth, and the Grimace glass sent to me by my good friend Brian (aka Trash Man) over at Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture. 

In 1988 Fisher Price put out a Happy Meal Playset. This was the box from that set. You can see there's representation of almost all the McDonald-Land characters on this thing. Hamburglar, the McNuggets, the talking burgers, Grimace, Fry-Guys (and gals) Ronald himself...

Captain Crook, Early Bird, the talking beverage and fry pack, and the Professor. Pretty much just Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac are missing (unless you count the Apple Pie Tree) and in fact, the inclusion of the Professor and Captain Crook have me scratching my head a bit... because they had been all but forgotten by 1988. Love this box though! It cost me 3.00 and it looks incredible on my shelf. 

This little stuffed Ronald McDonald from 1981 is in pretty great shape. He makes yet another lovely addition to my McDonald's shelf. He cost me a cool 2 bucks. 

This Fisher Price Adventure People figure was 3 dollars, but I didn't bat an eye, even consider he is lightly... chewed. I've become obsessed with these little fellows. I have a few more from the Sci-Fi space adventures line (a handful I haven't shared on here yet for some bizarre reason... need to correct that) and this one brings the total up to four (six if you count the regular earth-folk I also own). This guy was a real nightmare to photograph, so I apologize if his face is hard to see.   

And finally, a McDonalds Happy Meal Muppet Babies Miss Piggy figure. She's meant to ride on a little nursery vehicle, but it was nowhere to be found, so I'll just settle for her sitting. I have the three other Muppet Babies in this quartet, so even though she was 2 dollars on her own, I bit the bullet and bought her. 

Ths School House Antiques Mall is almost NEVER a disappointment to visit, and I already had my eye on a few other items I just might pick up the next time I head out there... so stay tuned! That's all I have for tonight kids, but I be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies soon enough! Until then, Happy Hunting!