Was there such a thing as Ecto Cooler Twinkies? Well, NO, but bear with me.

Old news: Ecto Cooler was the Slimer-fronted Hi-C flavor, made to capitalize on the popularity of The Real Ghostbusters. The flavor overachieved, and Slimer seemed to remain on those boxes even after his superstar status diminished.

Ecto Cooler would live on even without Slimer on the boxes, and the actual flavor formula would survive for even longer, under another name.

After ten years’ worth of assorted articles about this, I felt like I’d written all I could write about Ecto Cooler.

But then I saw THIS… Read More…

We spent New Year’s Eve in Atlantic City, with The Sexy Armpit’s Jay and his girlfriend Corinne. All I really remember is punching balloons and getting my ass handed to me at three card poker. And walking past some guy that I swore was Johnny Torrio from Boardwalk Empire, even if, in my heart, I knew he wasn’t.

The trip was a private misadventure amongst friends — not something I planned to write about. That all changed in the morning hours. Curing our hangovers with cherry Powerade, we attacked the boardwalk with just one thing in mind:

CRAP SHOPS.

The Atlantic City boardwalk is full of incredible crap shops. I’ve been providing proof of this for more than a dozen years. This time, though, we landed at the crap shop to end all crap shops. The ULTIMATE crap shop..

Or, more accurately… THE BEST 99 CENT STORE EVER.

I recognized it straight away. It was the same 99 cent store that I used to go to as a newly minted teenager, back when my parents practically lived at the Trump Taj Mahal. It hadn’t changed at all, and I cannot mean that more literally. The stuff that was inside this store… was the same stuff that was inside this store twenty fucking years ago.

At first, none of us realized that we were surrounded by treasure. We were finding good things, but nothing terribly outrageous. Fifteen minutes must have passed when Jay casually announced that they were selling Dennis the Menace pinball games from 1986. Moments later, I found a Kevin Nash air freshener from 1998.

From that point on, it was complete joyous lunacy. Our eyes were open and we were ready to see the truth. This place was COVERED with amazing shit. Everywhere we turned, there was a new reason to scream.

I think this photo sums it up: Read More…

May 27th, 1998.

I was an absolute mess!

It was my first year in college, and I was Big Time Tanking. The friends I was closest with in high school all went to different colleges, and I made exactly zero new ones at mine. The ones I had left were few and far between. My list of vices was long enough to require multiple pages. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I have journals from that year that are so filled with misery that they honestly read like parodies.

Even then, I’m sugarcoating things. If I was totally honest with you about this, I could never face you again. And, who knows, tomorrow I might want to review a new Doritos flavor.

But it’s important to give you some idea of who I was and where my head was at, because it’ll help you understand why I clung so dearly to this:

My old toy room.

May 27th, 1998.

I’ve been writing about old toys since April of 2000, and even from the start, it was more with a “remembered” passion than an existing one. By 2000, I wasn’t a collector — at least not by the definition we usually mean. Enthusiast, dabbler and cherry-picker, sure, but not a collector.

Back in 1998, I was definitely a collector. I’d been a collector for years by then, but you know how it is when you’re a careless kid and everything else goes to shit. You focus on your happy hobbies and pretend it’s okay to ignore everything else. In 1998, I was in DEEP.

I didn’t recognize it as an “escape” at the time, but I sure do in retrospect. And boy, I threw myself into it. I’d just gotten my first only-for-me computer, and I spent almost all of my free time wheeling and dealing on message boards and newsgroups. There was a pretty big group of toy traders online, back before eBay made things too easy, and back before the USPS priced us out of our hobby.

I was really good at it, too. Good and lucky. I can still remember dozens of my best deals, but two stand taller than the rest:

1) A seller had an immense collection of vintage Star Wars figures and vehicles. Something like 60 complete figures in near-mint condition, and over 25 different vehicles and playsets, all with their boxes. He charged me $2 for each figure, which was way cheap, but his prices on the vehicles and playsets were even more insane. I didn’t realize until later that he’d looked at the ancient price stickers and charged me half of their original retail cost. So I was buying shit like the Imperial Shuttle, complete-in-box with the instruction manual and everything, for 14 bucks.

2) About a week after I decided to collect G1 Transformers figures, a trader got in touch with me. He said he’d obtained tons of them, but didn’t have the patience to figure out who was who and what was what. He wanted a simple “package trade” deal. I put together a box that couldn’t have had more than a hundred bucks’ worth of stuff in it, pulling from various lines that he’d expressed interest in. I agreed to send before he did, and he was happy with the contents.

And then he sent MY boxes.

I’ll never forget that day. Six or seven absolutely enormous packages arrived all at once. Boxes that once housed things like TV sets and major appliances. I was nearly in tears after opening them. It was almost the entire collection of G1 Transformers, all complete, some still in boxes, and some still in SEALED boxes. Many in doubles. Many in triples. Even in 1998, the collection had to be worth over ten grand.

Most of my scores weren’t nearly as noteworthy. One figure here, one figure there. I’d send this, they’d send that. I’d get five or six packages a day, and send out just as many. I almost never bought things, and only sold enough to cover my constant shipping expenses. 90% of what I had was through trades.

Now let’s get back to that toy room… Read More…