Well, it’s my friggin’ birthday. I’m 37, folks. THIRTY. SEVEN. I’m not sure that I even could get away with saying that I’m in my mid-thirties anymore. Gross.

It feels strange. Like, have I moved past physical growth? Am I now at the point where everything just slowly rots? Will they try to stop me when I walk into TRU? Gah!

Those who have followed me for a while know that I typically hide my birthdays, and even when I don’t, I abhor celebrating them. So I guess it makes perfect sense that I spent pretty much all of today editing the latest Purple Stuff Podcast.

This week, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit are celebrating All Things 1986. (Well no, actually, we’re just celebrating eleven things from 1986.) There were some majorly awesome and geeky debuts that year, from Transformers: The Movie to My Pet Monster. Hopefully we’ll cover some of your favorites! (And before anyone yells at me for forgetting The Legend of Zelda, I felt that would be a cheat. The game did come out in ’86, but it didn’t hit the States until the following year. So there.)

Give us a listen by clicking the giant play button below!

You can also download this week’s episode directly by right-clicking here.

The Purple Stuff Podcast is also on iTunes, Stitcher and Podbean.

Thanks so much for listening, as always! Read More…

If you like Smurfs, Star Wars and swamp monsters, good news! Dino Drac’s February 2016 Funpack has all three!

If you haven’t been paying attention, I sell monthly Funpacks. Without them, there’d be no Dino Drac! (The modest ads you see on this site do not at all cover even the expenses associated with Dino Drac, let alone the time and effort spent on its content! So yeah, the Funpacks are definitely the site’s lifeblood.)

Subscriptions are $25 a month (that includes shipping), and for as long as you stay subscribed, you’ll continue to receive new boxes of fun junk, each and every month. You can cancel at any time without penalty. In trade for helping to keep the site afloat, you’ll get a box some some (arguably) awesome stuff!

Skip to the bottom of this post for additional subscription details and notes on how to order. Or keep reading, to see what’s in store for the February 2016 Funpack!

There are over a dozen items in this month’s Funpack, ranging from action figures to trading cards to bags of super delicious tortilla chips. Take a look! Read More…

For wrestling fans in the ‘80s, it didn’t get any better than Saturday Night’s Main Event.

Run as late night specials on NBC with no set schedule, the WWF famously took over Saturday Night Live’s time slot, which both legitimized the product and gave kids the excuse to treat midnight like morning.

Though the shows were usually recorded a month prior and always post-produced to death, I didn’t understand that as a child. To me, it was always live television. I’ve remained a fairweather fan of pro-wrestling ever since, but even decades later, nothing’s come close to matching the excitement of these specials.

I recently found some of my old wrestling videos, which were all taped off television, with the shitty custom labels to match. On one of them was the January 1989 edition of Saturday Night’s Main Event, complete with all of the original commercials.

Yes, a goldmine.

This edition of SNME came out when my interest in wrestling was at its absolute peak. Macho Man Randy Savage was the champ, and he and Miss Elizabeth were on top of the world. As a kid who wasn’t a fan of Hulk Hogan but would’ve taken bullets for Macho and Liz, seeing Savage with the belt while Hogan had to make do with just pointing at it was sooo utterly satisfying.

As was customary, the show started with a series of goofy promos, leading into an opening package that still gives me chills to this day. (I know most people prefer the even older opening — the one scored by Animotion’s Obsession — but this is the version I always think of when someone brings up SNME.) Read More…