Toys

Hello! It’s Saturday night! Purple Stuff Podcast time! In tonight’s episode, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit discuss ten of our favorite (and not-so-favorite) childhood board games, from Fireball Island to Electronic Talking Battleship. You’ll notice that very few of our

Hello! Let’s discover treasure together! The 1990 JCPenney Christmas catalog didn’t pack quite the same punch as some of the other catalogs I’ve reviewed, but it’s still hundreds of pages of toys, peanut dispensers and cheap lingerie, and that’s more than enough for a review. For

Get a load of the wonderful toys found in the 1983 Consumers Distributing catalog -- everything from Star Wars to Masters of the Universe to G.I. Joe!

The 23rd edition of Five Random Action Figures celebrates the Halloween season with an onslaught of spooky toys! Included this time are Mumm-Ra, Judge Doom, Venom and more!

In 1997, Burger King ruled Halloween by giving out four absolutely PERFECT Universal Monsters action figures, including Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Let's wax nostalgic!

Killer Tomatoes, the Headless Horseman and Modulok lead the charge in this spooky-themed edition of Five Random Action Figures! Pay close attention to the fake moss I used for the photos, because that shit ain't cheap.

Finally, one of the best Halloween promotions of all time is memorialized on Dino Drac! The McDonald's Halloween Pails pretty much DEFINE Halloween for so many of us, and this article will hopefully explain why!

While searching eBay for goodies to cover during this year’s Countdown, I discovered several items that were perfect in every way… except price. I’ll take a dive on certain items, but I gotta stop short of paying 400 bucks for rubber sharks. Still, some of those items were just too

Whenever I wish I was ten years younger, I try to remind myself of all the great toys I would’ve missed out on. Sure, it’s irritating to have hit that age when people start suggesting invasive exams of my most unmentionable areas, but at least I got to play with Mad Scientist toys as a

I will always be loyal to McDonald’s, and that has little to do with the company’s food. God knows how many paper-wrapped cheeseburgers I tore through during adolescence, but what I really loved about the place was how it could turn nothing days into something days. This was especially

Can I be honest? When I heard about NECA’s SDCC exclusive “Jason & Pam” two-pack, I knew I was going to buy it, but I wasn’t exactly happy about buying it. When I had the set in my cart during the online sale, I could only click the appropriate buttons through gritted teeth. Fi

I’m a sucker for Funko’s ReAction series, which — for the three of you who don’t know — collects characters from movies and television and turns them into endearingly simplistic action figures. Since they’re so comparable to Kenner’s old Star Wars figures, I was born

The previous edition of Five Random Action Figures took us to Old Plastic Dude #100. If it’s correct to assume that my next milestone entry won’t come until #200, I have my work cut out for me. Better get started! Darkseid DC Comics Super Powers, 1985 Part of Kenner’s inspired DC Com

The McDonald's Changeables were the best Happy Meal toys ever! Burgers, fries and soda cups that transformed into robots and dinosaurs! Like Transformers, but somehow even better? See EVERY figure from all three sets!

Welcome to the twentieth edition of Five Random Action Figures, which marks a milestone that you’ll doubtlessly see mentioned on the front pages of tomorrow’s papers. Yes, by the end of this post, I’ll have photographed and reviewed one hundred action figures! These articles have nev

In this edition of Five Random Action Figures, I’m standing up for the little guy. Smaller figures just had so many plusses! Because they were sold in multipacks and were individually cheaper than “regular” action figures, it was easier to build armies, and very easy to convince ours

Hoooo boy. This was worth every ounce of sweat and every minute of the hours-long drive. It’s a Toy Show — essentially an outdoor flea market that dealt strictly in old toys — happened last Saturday in some part of Jersey that’s otherwise populated by nothing but cow

I wouldn’t normally do another edition of Five Random Action Figures so soon, but I’m creatively tapped. While my present mental faculties can handle five old toys, I’m not sure that they can handle anything more. So, off we go! Five Random Action Figures, Part 18! Cobra Commander!

It’s time for the latest edition of Five Random Action Figures, which takes the total number of figures featured over the course of this series to a cool 85. We’re almost up to a hundred! I’ll try to plan something special for that edition, and by “special” I hope I don’t mean

I found it, I found it. The most impossibly ‘80s thing of all impossibly ‘80s things. Ironically, for all I know, it might’ve come out in the ‘90s. This Sun Kids combo pack blends two things that perfectly bookend all of my other childhood memories: Cheap sunglasses with neon fram

Today I’m gonna show you the highlights from the 1984 Consumers Distributing catalog. Don’t run — it’s more interesting than it sounds! I’ve mentioned Consumers Distributing before, but to save you a click, here’s a primer: The odd stores were more like OTB centers, where i

I found an old Toys “R” Us gift card while cleaning, and was happy to discover that it still had 59 bucks left on it. I hope the card enjoyed those eight months under our microwave. This left me with three options. One, I could save it until the Christmas season, when I’m due to blo

Let’s take a look at five old McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes, and see how many tangentially related paragraphs they inspire. You may consider this a surrogate sequel to my article about old fast food bags. God, I write about a lot of garbage! Back to the Future Happy Meal! Year: 1991 Wow,

Today’s article is about Hasbro’s World Wrestling Federation action figures from the early ‘90s. These guys, I mean: I’m sad to admit that I wasn’t a big collector during their heyday, I guess owing to building suspicion that I was too old for “wrestling figures.” (I was in j

After an action-packed WrestleMania weekend that’s left me feeling like I’ve lost the right to ever eat or drink again, I return to normalcy with eight thousand words about ratty toys. Below: The sixteenth edition of Five Random Action Figures, starring one green guy, one white guy, on