Below: A sampling of the greatest McDonald’s collectibles currently on eBay.

Deciding on a mere six items was no easy task. When you hear “McDonald’s collectibles,” you probably just think of Happy Meal toys. Those are on eBay, of course, but they’re joined by everything from seven foot restaurant statues to tiny slips of promotional paper that had no right to survive for 30 years. Pretty much every McDonald’s “thing” in history is on eBay, right now.

…but these are six of my favorites:

Super Mario Bros. 3 Happy Meal Display!
Asking Price: $199.99

There aren’t many Happy Meal toys that go for more than a few dollars a pop, but the original restaurant displays can sell for small fortunes. In this particular case, it’s hard to argue with the price. If you’re an old school Nintendo nut, is there anything more ephemerally awesome than the original Super Mario Bros. 3 Happy Meal display?

The 1989 toy set is one of the most beloved in Happy Meal history, cracking most fans’ “Top 5” lists. Still, since all four toys can be procured in mint shape for around ten bucks, you’re mostly paying for the display, which beautifully recreates the Nintendo game as a three-dimensional “playset.” You could almost certainly find it for less than $200 with some digging, but this one won’t ever come cheap. Read More…

It’s time for the second edition of Five Retro TV Commercials, the series that I actually spent negative seconds coming up with a name for.

All five commercials in this round are from the mid ‘80s, when I was just the right age to see them 20000 times. Every frame you’re about to see is now permanently IN me. I still can’t go a week without quoting Jimmy from the Polly-O String Cheese ad.

Colossal Fossil Ice Pops! (1980s)

Finally! I knew I had this commercial buried somewhere, but it’s taken me over a decade to find it. My impression is that not very many people remember Good Humor’s Colossal Fossil pops, but holy shit did I love these things.

Each lemonade popsicle hid a gummy dinosaur, so eating one was like embarking on an archaeological dig, but better, because instead of bones you were excavating candy. I lifted the bulk of this paragraph from my 1st grade diary, pretty much verbatim. Can you tell?

Colossal Fossil ice pops taught me that gummy candies are way better frozen. No matter how weird that sounds, I swear, it’s true. Throw a bunch of inch-tall bears in the freezer sometime. Once you try them, you’ll wanna straight up pay me for the tip. Read More…

If you missed the shocking news, 10 Cloverfield Lane — which will apparently have something to do with the original Cloverfield — debuts this March. Oh. My. God.

The first film — in particular the marketing of it — captured me in a way that few things do, to the point where I regularly spent hours a day reading theories, devising theories, and scouring the internet for whatever scraps of info I could find. (And no doubt, there were a lot of us doing that.)

The only people who know 10 Cloverfield Lane’s true ties to Cloverfield obviously aren’t talking, but fans are already all over it, combing the trailer frame by frame for clues. It’s just like the old days!

If you’ve seen Cloverfield but never bothered with the pre-release mysteries, here’s a crash course about what went down:

The first trailer was attached to Transformers and hit theaters in July of 2007. At that point, the movie hadn’t even been officially titled, with “1-18-08” — the film’s release date — becoming its nickname.

This trailer was intentionally mysterious, and the initial theories were subsequently wild. (A line spoken in the trailer was frequently misheard to reference “a lion,” leading some to believe that this was going to be a live action Voltron movie, of all things.)

Still, considering the Godzilla-esque roar heard just prior to an enormous explosion, most people understood this to be some kind of “giant monster movie.” But that was literally all we knew. Read More…