WARNING! This post will include THE FORCE AWAKENS spoilers. I’ll warn you again before the spoilers begin, but if you haven’t seen the movie and have plans to, PLEASE skip this post until you do. Do not read the comments on this post, either!

In terms of entertainment, Star Wars has always been my one true love. To this day, I can only truly unwind with Star Wars stuff, whether we’re talking about the movies, the gobs of books, the fan-penned wikis or whatever the hell else. I’m into a lot of stuff, but Star Wars is the one thing that always creates my true escape.

The truth is, I didn’t even need The Force Awakens to be good. I wanted it to be, of course, but I didn’t need it to be. As I learned with the prequels, even a bad Star Wars movie will become the start-point for so many good Star Wars things. People love to shit on those old senate scenes; I’m guessing they never read the beautiful dissection of senate hall in the Star Wars Complete Locations book. People love to complain about Jar Jar; I do too, but without Jar Jar we wouldn’t have gotten the world’s weirdest Pez dispenser.

Really, I just needed The Force Awakens to exist. That was literally it. Anything beyond existing was a bonus. I knew I’d be covered, either way.

Now that I’ve seen it, it looks like I needlessly aimed too low. Holy shit did I LOVE this movie. Me and Jay saw it last night, and it only took a few minutes for me to breathe that slight sigh of relief, knowing that even through an objective lens, what I was seeing was out-and-out good.

What others think of Star Wars shouldn’t be important to me, and by and large, it isn’t. But if you were a fan during those times when it was largely scorned — when “Star Wars” was bordering close to a dirty word — you know the side effects. Hell, Star Wars is my #1 geeky passion, and how often have I written about it on Dino Drac? Barely ever. Why? Well, I guess I didn’t want to risk feeling bad about something that’s made me so happy. I literally won’t risk feeling bad about Star Wars.

When the movie ended, I was exhausted. Emotionally spent. I fought back tears at least five times, and I’m not just saying that because it fits this article’s narrative: I had to make a serious effort not to lose it. It was like experiencing a dream while fully conscious, where the miraculousness couldn’t be taken for granted. It sounds heavy-handed, but it’s true.

It wasn’t just that it was a new Star Wars movie, or even that it was a new Star Wars movie that was actually good. The thing that got me was how The Force Awakens connected so closely to the movies I grew up with — how it sincerely felt like the movie that’d come after Return of the Jedi — and how many impossibly distant stars had to align to make that happen.

Was The Force Awakens perfect? No. Neither were the originals. Neither was any other movie. Is everyone going to like it? No again. Heck, I’ve talked to a few mega-fans who are not at all contrarians, and The Force Awakens failed to rock their worlds. So this is not me putting a movie on a pedestal because I’m ready to defend every aspect of it until my dying breath. I’m putting it there because of what it means to me: A safe space that will always be there to turn to when I need to get lost.

Down below are twenty scatterbrained thoughts, opinions and observations about The Force Awakens. If you’ve seen the movie, let’s compare notes in the comments!

WARNING: From this point on, I’m going DEEP into SPOILER TERRITORY. If you kept reading after my first warning, I avoided spoiling anything in the intro. Now, all bets are off. DO NOT CONTINUE READING IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED. Read More…

I love all of the toy store circulars that come with newspapers during the holiday season, even if the present definition limits that to Toys “R” Us and individual pity pages from Target and Walmart. You know what we’re missing? Kay-Bee Toys!

I’ve written about Kay-Bee (later KB) many times before, but here’s the short version: It was like you took a Toys “R” Us store, replaced its manager with the weird guy who runs the local consignment shop, and told him to make do with an eighth of the space.

Kay-Bee was the bomb, but sadly in a way that most of us never fully appreciated until it was too late to do more than whine on nostalgia blogs. Sad trombone… available in Aisle 3, which is really just the back half of Aisle 1, and try not to step on the Godzilla toys because they had to put them on the floor.

The scans shown above were part of a Kay-Bee circular from November of 1991. They were having a big five day sale, which was less a “holiday sale” and more of a “GOOD GOD we need to make room for this year’s Christmas junk sale.” The complete circular was around eight pages long and completely full of win. I’ve collected ten of my favorite items featured in it, down below! Read More…

Below: Five cereal boxes from Christmases past. They’re all from my personal collection. I’ll thank you in advance for reading this, as it helps to justify why I have a personal collection of Christmassy cereal boxes. As always, you’re my silent enablers. My tongueless Iagos. Go you.

Christmas Crunch! (1999)

I love that Quaker still makes Christmas Crunch, but hate that they haven’t updated the box design in umpteen years. It doesn’t help that the current box looks like a Target circular, stylish as hell but completely bereft of the simplistic charm that originally brought Christmas Crunch to the dance.

Heck, even this box — which came out more than a decade after Christmas Crunch’s debut — still knew how to work it. This is all I want from my Christmas Crunch boxes. Flat colors, art that looks like it was torn from Dollar Tree coloring books, and advertisements for Pokemon watches.

“Dear Santa, and this is gonna sound weird, but…” Read More…