Another Package from the Trash Man!

So my bud Brian "The Trash Man" of Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture fame actually sent  me a package awhile back, and I thought maybe I'd finally get around to blogging about it before we all died of old age. Let's dive right into its contents without further ado shall we? 

First up was this Halloween wind-up of a skeleton. LOVE this guy. I actually have a bunch of wind-ups in this same style, and he fits the gang perfectly. He is now a permanent resident of the Geek cave, on my Halloween shelf.

Brian also knows I have a geeky love for Cloak & Dagger, one of the most underrated and under-appreciated power-couples of the Marvel Universe. Included in the package was this awesome tin featuring them on the front.

Hiding inside the tin however was an awesome surprise as well! I believe this was billed as a bookmark back in the day (I actually remember having one or two of these as a kid) but either way, ANY toy that represents the great Ronald McDonald is an awesome item to add to my McDonald-land Collection!

Brian knows me well, folks. Included in the package was this CYOA book for younger readers. The Bantam-Skylark books are larger and slimmer than your average paperback CYOA books. I collect them all regardless of size or intended age group, and this one goes very well with my collection.

I remember Paul Chadwick's "Concrete" being a pretty big deal as as a compelling indie comic to follow back in the 90's. I had unfortunately never actually read any of the series. As usual however, Brian is introducing me to new and awesome titles that I've never sought out on my own.

The book that kicked off my entire Creepmas celebration originated from this package of goodies as well! "The Twelve Frights of Christmas" will probably not get read during the actual Christmas season, to be honest. More than likely I'll read it in the dead of February or something... but this is a must-read for me to be sure. Any time you mix murder, mayhem, and merriment: I'm there.

One of the most interesting items in the package was this VHS case. It does NOT include a VHS copy of Dan O'Bannon's 1985 cult classic horror film, "The Return of the Living Dead" It does, on the other hand, contain SO MUCH MORE:

Turns out this is one of the Trash Man's patented VHS surprise packs!!! If you can't see everything icluded, worry not, for we will be taking a closer look below. Just FYI, Brian likes to trade and/or sell these to interested parties. You can contact him through his blog, his Instagram, and through the PPITC Facebook page, all of which I have previously linked to in this very post!

Let's start with the collector's cards. There were some awesome loose "Fright Flicks" cards from Topps included, with scenes from "Day of the Dead," "Fright Night," and "Aliens". There were some unopened packs of "Hook" and "DC Versus Marvel" collector's cards, and a couple of Topps wax packs, featuring "Dick Tracy" and (possibly one of my favorite items from this box)  a "Supergirl" wax pack!!!

Next we have some pogs and mini-stickers. Mr. Teeny! Tiny Toons! TMNT! Gideon, enemy of X-Force and immortal mutant External (except he's dead)!

There was a strong showing of "little plastic guys" too. a Marvel Handful of Heroes Green Goblin, one of those little rubber finger-puppet monsters THAT I LOVE, An Arco Ro-Gun Robot in red, and a little plastic orange dinosaur!!! Nowadays all four of these guys reside on my color coded ROYGBIV, dedicated-to-the-toys-at-the-bottom-of-the-toy-box curio shelf.

Can you find them all?

But that's not it for mini-figure madness in that VHS case! 

I think by far these are two of my absolute favorite items in the entire package from Brian however. We have a Mez-Itz version of the Demon to pal around with my Batman Brave and the Bold Action League version of the Demon... and a Battle Beasts Pew Trid Skunk. I love that the guy wears a gas mask to protect himself from his own stank. Battle Beasts are a big favorite of mine. Big. HUGE.  

Finally, as previously mentioned, Brian knows I'm a sucker for Cloak & Dagger, so an issue of that comic book should come as no surprise. But THIS issue there's ALSO an INFERNO rossover that features the New Mutants!!! So TRIPLE whammy. And he knows that I consider the Australian Outback era of the X-Men to be MY X-Men, so this issue featuring Longshot losing his S**T while Colossus, Havok, Storm, pre-Asian Psylocke, Rogue, and Wolvie all just chalk it up to "crazy ol' Longshot!" is a real treat. I've never read this one, and I don't already have it in my collection. Comic book GOLD folks (for me at least. Your mileage may vary). 

There was also a Super Grover figure in the mix, but for some reason I Can't fathom, I either forgot to photograph him or I've deleted the photo or something. but he's here in this photo, arms raised in a 'V' (and the dead lay in pools of maroon below...) with all the other loot.

CAN NOT THANK BRIAN ENOUGH FOR THIS GREAT PACKAGE. Really very kind and generous of him as usual. He always shows a real thoughtful streak when sending stuff to folks I've noticed. He pays attention and takes note of what people really are about. Thanks again Brian!

That's it for tonight guys! I'll be back soonish or laterish with another post about Geeky Goodwill Goodies (or more stuff I got in the mail from friends, or more stuff from the new bin of AWESOME... we'll see) 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! 

Mardens Finds!!! Plus GIVEAWAY!!!

I made a quick trip to the Ellsworth Mardens just the other day... 

I was kind of hoping I'd find some of the Masters of the Universe Classics figures I've been hearing about lately showing up at Big Lots. After all, I a few years back I found the only-released-in-Canada third wave of the GI Joe Combat Heroes there: 

And it's also where I found those Marvel Family and Justice Guild Justice League Unlimited Matty Collector exclusives that I mentioned back in May:

 

So I was actually thinking my chances were pretty good considering that track record. I don't have any Big Lots in my vicinity so I take what I can get. Mardens is a Maine-based chain of surplus and salvage stock stores... sort of a local clone of Big Lots, hence the weird exclusive toys that show up from time to time. 

Unfortunately I was out of luck. BUT I didn't leave empty handed. I made some really great finds that almost-but-not-quite had me as excited as if I had!

First up they had a pile of these Spiderwick books. I really like this series by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, but the books are a bit light, and I've been saying for years that they should have just collected all five volumes into one big book and call it good. Well lo and behold, they did just that! I picked myself up a copy for 2.99. There's a lot of great extras included in the back, including a series of other artists' renditions of characters and moments from the series! The stories themselves are good. It's DiTerlizzi's illustrations here that make the world of the book really feel earthy and amazing. The movie that came out in 2008 just didn't do it justice. I think if Henry Selick ever got ahold of this and did a stop-motion version inspired by DiTerlizzi's illustrations... it would be EPIC. Not literally the movie EPIC... which is also about fairies... but the traditional use of the word. 

I found a couple of these great, MEGO-esque McDonaldland  Characters from Huckleberry toys. These were produced in 2008 and I kind of LOVE THEM. They only had two out of the five figures available in the set. No Grimace... No Hamburglar... No Captain Crook... But they did have two! Ronald was the first one to catch my eye. To be honest, I'm not as huge of a fan of Ronald here with his rooted Barbie hair, as I am...

Mayor McCheese!!! I decided I would not be taking these guys out of their packaging as I really like the over-all effect of seeing them in there. Entombed. In plastic. Forever. I miss the old McDonald Gang... I wasn't around for the full-fledged trips to McDonaldLand with the Apple Pie Trees and the Burger Patch... but I remember Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac playground equipment! I especially loved Hamburglar and Grimace and Birdie the Early Bird... Sigh. Those were the days. Of course, I've already displayed my love for McDonald's themed Happy Meal toys on here before... and these two McDonaldLand characters look great on that shelf right alongside!

Anyway... I like Mayor McCheese here SO much that I picked up an extra one to give away! Yes! That's right! I'm doing my very first bona fide contest here on Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks! Mayor McCheese can be yours!!! All you have to do to enter to win is recount your favorite McDonald's memory in the comments below! It can be a commercial, a toy, an awesome visit to one of their restaurants... whatever you want. Just give me a memory and you're entered in the drawing. (And I'm sorry, but "I don't like McDonald's, so let me give you my favorite -insert other random food chain here- memory instead" won't cut it. If you don't like McDonald's wait for the next contest. What would you even want this for?) The cut-off is August 31st Midnight, Eastern time. THEN on September 1st I will draw someone who submitted a favorite McDonald's memory at random from the list (TRULY at random! I will NOT play favorites here, I promise) and notify them here on my blog that they have won their very own MAYOR MCCHEESE!!! It's that easy! OH! And I will mail this internationally if need be, so Hobgoblin of the Monster Cafe Saltillo (and any other readers I have outside the states)... feel free to enter this contest!

Well, I'll be back soon with more actual Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then Happy Hunting! And Good luck McDonald's Geeks!

Happiest McCollection? Happy Meal Toys.

I couldn't think of a SINGLE clever title for this post. But I've been meaning to post about my McDonald's Happy Meal toy collection for some time now, so this is the title you get. 

What's in the box? My soul. That's what.

I need to warn you up front that as a child of the 80's I LOVE the McDonald-Land crew. I don't care if they were a blatant rip-off of H.R. Puffinstuff or anything else for that matter. I was just as invested in the adventures of these characters as I was He-Man or the GI Joes. 

Shhh! I'm watching my stories...

As an adult I am always on the lookout for toys from these lines to add to my shelf. Unfortunately, very few of the toys I'll be featuring here in this post actually came to me from Goodwill or even just thriftily "in the wild".  

Mmmm. Look at the plume on that beautiful Birdie the Early Bird...

This post will also mainly be focusing on toys themed around McDonald's itself or the McDonald-Land crew, and disregarding other licensed properties. Many of them are online purchases of one sort or another. I will say that I bought the lion's share of these from Brian over at Cool and Collected when he was doing some cleaning out of his own toy collection. So I feel like I got a pretty awesome deal from him on these. 

Just gonna dive right in here with a bunch of group shots. Across the top in this one are figurines of Birdie the Early Bird, Grimace, Ronald McDonald himself, and Hamburglar from 1995 (around the beginning of my senior year of Highschool... which is irrelevant to my toy-collecting habits). These are the versions of the characters I am most familiar with. These four figurines were from part of a Halloween set where each character had a snap-on costume (hence the weird crucifixion positions). I don't ever care about owning the costumes because I actually just love having figurines of these guys as themselves. 

This is what they look like in costume.
Image from eBay

All of the quartet came from eBay, though I got a few extras from Brian that I turned into Christmas ornaments for my tree, and for some other online friends last Christmas. In the bottom row are a mish-mash of toys such as Fry-Guys and Chicken McNuggets with interchangeable costume pieces. I don't have a single complete set for any of them. All of these came from my purchase from Brian as well. I realized AFTER taking this photograph that the purple cowboy hat on that Fry-Guy is probably a Sesame Street toy, not a McDonalds one. So I took it off. In the bottom right hand corner is one of the McDonald's Tinosaurs: Spell the Nasty Grumpy, which I've featured before on here since he was from a Grab-Bag.

The two pictures above are of my third-series McDonald's Changeables. I found this entire set of these at Goodwill, and featured them in a post where I talked about that particular grab-bag. Of course, I already had most of them already because of my purchase from Brian, and because my brother-in-law had two of them he let me have from when he was a kid. These guys were released in 1990 and were a follow up to the robot Changeables from years prior (more on these later). 

Here we have an assortment of vehicles. The pull-back vehicles across the top are all from Goodwill, as is the long Hotwheels dragster (circa 1993) on the bottom. I posted about them here. The pull-backs are from 1984. I remember having some of these as a kid, but I can't clearly remember which ones. I know Birdie for a fact. I think I lost her under the stove at my Grandmother's house. I assume she's still under there... in the lonely dark... The others? It's all a haze. The yellow rocketship/jet-looking thing is apparently an exclusive toy you can only get at the McDonalds inside the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. It's one of those awesome rev-up toys where you don't pull it back but you push it ahead several times and just let it go crazy. You can see sparks through a window in the back as well. I got it and the smaller red race car next to it from my purchase from Brian as well. The race-car is from 1988 and is part of a series of pull-backs similar to the ones above, but slightly larger and with a different assortment of characters. 

Here are my robot McDonald's Changeables!!! I got three of these in the post I mentioned earlier with my Dinosaur Changeables. The other four are from Brian. The robot Changeables came out in two waves, one in 1988 and the other in 1989. I like ALL the Changeables in my collection, but I do prefer the robots to the dinosaurs. I find it ridiculously cool that there is a line of transforming robots that turns into fast-food menu items. Like the true struggle of good vs. evil was going to take place secretly in fast-food restaurants between tiny robots that had to blend in to keep the war secret. I wish these were done to scale with the actual foods though. THAT would be even cooler. 

For a short while I was obsessed with tracking down these child-like Ronald toys. I got almost this entire group of toys together in two lots on eBay. These were the toys being given out to the 3 and under kids for a while in the later 2000's (The ones I have are all marked either 2007 or '08). I don't know what it was that drew my attention to them really, just the oddness of a child version of Ronald McDonald? I think the one on the tricycle front and center is my favorite, with the cartwheeling and hula-hooping ones coming in close seconds. It's really hard for me to explain what it is I like about them though. Is it the colorfulness? The cuteness of the sculpts? The feeling of beatific innocence contrasted ironically with the of the corporate persona they represent (what)? My wife finds these unbearably creepy to look upon. Says they have the dead-eyed look of John Wayne Gacy as a preschooler. Maybe that's why I like them! 

Now for a different lot of character vehicles: Top row we have some Mac Tonight vehicles (If anyone has a Mac Tonight figurine, the one with the Harmonica under his arm for sale or trade... contact me!) That yellow jet-Ski was a favorite toy of mine as a child. I actually tore Mac completely off it so my other mini-figures could ride around on it. Then there's Hamburglar in a three-piece train that came from a set of inter-changeable vehicle sets in 1990. Grimace riding a bike (sans wheels) is also from 1990. Then we have a Happy-Meal-mobile with the whole gang crowded in there like a clown car... except Ronald can't take how crowded it is in there, so he's leaning out and waving from 1994. The two circus characters (a fry guy on an elephant, and Birdie on a horse) are from 1989. Birdie on a scooter is from 1992. ALL of these came to me in my purchase from Brian. 

Halloween! The three characters across the top are Iam Hungry, the Hamburglar, and a Chicken McNugget, all released in 1998. They are wearing Halloween disguises, and can be filled up with candy which would then pop out the holes in the front when the masks are lifted. I found these at Goodwill and blogged about them here. The three characters along the bottom are a combination of ones I found at Goodwill and also got from Brian. I blogged about the ones I found at Goodwill here. Their names are Milly Milk, Slugger Steak, and Otis Sandwich (?) from the Food Fundamentals line.

Now we're getting into the older stuff. There's the mono-chrome Grimace crop-duster from the 1986 airport Happy Meal series. I never had Grimace as a kid, but I distinctly remember owning (and breaking) the green hamburger helicopter one. I'm going to need to track that one down now. The popscicle maker in the middle is from 1980. I had at least one of them as a child, and my clearest memory is when we made milk popscicles with them. They were bland. The blue robot is actually a transforming Mighty Mac Robot Shuttle toy from 1986. If you look very closely you can see Grimace is piloting it. I think there are other transforming toys in the series, but darned if I can find pictures of any of them. The trains on the bottom left are from 1986 or 1987 and I can find almost no other information about them except there's another, orange train in the set. The comb on the far right is from 1990 and you can pull the pieces apart to reorganize the characters. I keep them as ROYGBIV as I possibly can because I'm obsessive that way. Every piece in this picture is from Brian. 

Lastly, we have some odds and ends... I wanted to get a picture of the Mac Attack Robot Shuttle in it's oddly bulky shuttle form. There's a set of four McDonalds LEGO bricks I found in a load of other LEGOs at Goodwill. The pictures on them are from the series of Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald cartoons they did back between 1998 to 2003. The Treasure Hunt Happy Pail is from 1986. The lid doubles as a sand-sifter. The Ronald on the right is a 2001 toddler toy put out by Fisher-Price, and comes apart as a stackable toy (see below). He reminds me of Mick Jagger, struttin' like he does, and he's the one piece in my entire collection that actually belonged to one of my kids, belonging to my daughter when she was young. The pictures below feature the other sides of the bucket, Ronald in pieces, some adhesive bandages from 2010 (Don't know WHERE they came from) and a McDonalds key-chain from I-don't-know-when-but-it-looks-old. The bucket and keychain are from the Brian lot. 

PHEW! That's all of it for now. As I mentioned I'm looking for a Mac Tonight figurine, and I would love to get my hands on a bunch more of the McNugget Buddies toys... but for the most part I'm pretty happy with what I currently have. 

Here's the whole collection on display as it currently stands. I'm not in love with how cluttered everything looks, but I make do. 

All right, well that is IT for me tonight guys. I'll be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies soon enough... so until then, Happy Hunting!